In seeking truth and meaning I find that I must return again and again to the endless mysteries of emptiness, negation and nothingness. It is clear that any assumption of the existence of meaning (or meaningfulness) is of a different order of existence than is an equivalent assertion regarding truth. Notwithstanding that both of these […]
Author: G
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Unsettling Reflections
In the mirror of this world, we are not in every instance comfortable with that which reflects back at us because we know that, deep down and at some precognitive and primordial level, all of the good and all of the bad and everything in between is really just at some level a reflection of […]
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]
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Reflective Subjectivity
I wonder what she is reading. It may be the eternal burden of a reflective mind to be unable to simply accept reality at face value, to question what lies beneath, to investigate what hidden meanings or purposes might exist or dwell below or behind the superficial appearances of things. At least she is not […]
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over […]
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”– John Maynard Keynes …and escaping the old ones is a monumental task when a bad idea, once entrenched, becomes the source of it’s own self-propagating rationale and serves as a limiting filter on the percolation of new cognitive methods and […]
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Cognitive Eugenics
A cognitive eugenics born of genetic testing (and selection) for intelligence is almost upon us. Except – intelligence is not only a matter of genetics. Environmental influences, opportunities, sociological feedback mechanisms, the creatively adaptive development of unique cognitive methods – these are all factors in human intelligence. Cognitive eugenics – let’s call it what it […]
I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic) […]
What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are […]
Some reflections occurred to me while listening to this Santa Fe Institute podcast today: Rajiv Sethi on Stereotypes, Crime, and The Pursuit of Justice, What of questions concerning the nature of social, psychological and cultural value systems when considered as a unified whole? While it is clear that the aggregate macrostate of any particular system […]
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, marble, life-size, 1647-1652. Bernini captures the dramatic moment an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of Divine love. It was Saint Augustine who suggested that miracles do not happen in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we understand of nature. In a similar vein, […]
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Beauty and Impossibility
Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration […]
