I was recently reading some of David Hume‘s opinions on the values of keeping philosophical explanations as brief and to the point as possible. He criticises overly convoluted and unnecessarily esoteric language as demonstrating poor mastery of the topic being communicated. Hume believes it possible to explain essential truths and philosophical revelations without resorting to […]
The natural world around us is creative, complex, chaotic, dynamic and fundamentally self-organising. Any response to the world which hopes to successfully manage human beings and our many little worlds into anything resembling a sane organisational structure requires us to whole-heartedly embrace this complexity and chaos. Repetition and rote-learned, blindly regurgitative behaviours lead largely to […]
The documentary “Transcendent Man” is an interesting reflection on Ray Kurzweil and his intriguing instantiation of a technological evangelism which envisions a Rapture-like technological singularity in which humanity will attain pseudo-omniscience and near-immortal longevity. The documentary itself is well balanced and also portrays a number of intellectual antagonists to Kurzweil’s utopian prophesies of a Genetic, […]
This is no great revelation: we are positively drowning in information. Awash in billions of words and sounds, squawks and squeaks, bits and bytes of marketing, ideas, symbols and ideology: we can all hear the information pandemonium in which we are embedded but we are switched (or switching) off to it. We can all hear […]
I remember a print hung on a wall in my father’s house when I was a child. I puzzled and fretted and stared and wondered about this image and it’s impossible, unsettling reality. The print was of M.C. Escher’s 1953 lithograph “Relativity” and I was probably only 9 or 10 years old at the time. […]
Is the experience of time merely a biological curiosity or psychological artefact, a happy accident of life as an aggregate of structural coincidences at a particular nexus and scale of physics and chemistry ?
Context: What is the shape of the Universe ? Cosmologists believe that they have successfully measured the curvature of the large scale structure of the Universe and that it has returned a result of zero. To understand curvature in this context – consider a triangle on a flat sheet of paper: its angles always add […]
It occurs to me that the endemic iniquity of the global financial and economic system is not an outcome or a consequence of its function and activity. The positively obscene yawning chasm between the rich and poor is an essential precondition and sustaining feature of global economic mechanisms. Truly equitable wealth redistribution, social justice and […]
Context: Hate on the Rise After Trump’s Election. It is no surprise, really, that hate crime has surged. As a far-flung observer of these events it has always been apparent (because it has always been the case) that politicians who do not cautiously vet their own words and public statements can let loose all manner […]
We have now graduated past “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” and have entered a “post-truth” world where any witless assertion whatsoever might be interpreted as defensible fact. There can surely now be no turning back. There can be no “peak post-truth” or “post-post-truth”. We appear to be inextricably trapped in an infinite […]
It’s interesting to consider the collective, aggregated mass-density of all of our associated technological paraphernalia, our Technosphere. The aggregated totality of all our buildings, vehicles, dwellings, cities, the flotsam and jetsam of commerce and industry, our possessions and everything we throw away: it all has an estimated mass of 30 trillion tons. More information after […]
A very Cuban or otherwise South-American domain. It was summertime in the long stretch of Art Deco and sand-covered concrete, between the secure private condominiums and the cheap or garishly upmarket neon-lit beachside hotels and restaurants which gradually fade in a Westerly direction to apartments and strange villas housing mysterious perversions, under the sluggish feet […]
Daedelus Kite 