It’s an interesting thought that the countless electrochemical systems that sustain life and experience are in some mischievously self-orchestrating sense far smarter than we are. Our own minds do not encompass biological complexity, they are a subset of it. As for artificial intelligence, we should not let its utility and imminent ubiquity deceive us into […]
Art is not an externality. Abstractive visualisation is significant for gaining intuitions regarding many relational and topological spaces, networked systems, causal flows and (even, for elaborating) assertions of causality, intent and purpose in mind and/or nature. It is not a matter of art OR science, which as a logical relationship approximates and resolves to some […]
For a system to persistently self-sustain, it has to negotiate and/or “exhale” its own waste products as entropy. Generating waste that is reusable by something or someone else is all but ubiquitous in biology. Human systems (and consequences, in a scaled, industrial and technological sense) might be uniquely distinguished by the volume, diversity and cadence […]
Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]
Given the potentially infinite continuum of expressive freedom available within language, it is something of a mystery as to why we generally only occupy such a small range of creative possibility within it.
What if deterrence fails? Here’s a quadruple-shot of caffeine for your Tuesday morning: Every silver lining has a cloud, an occasional series: nuclear science, geostrategic insecurity and civilisation extinction edition. Somewhat, IMHO, more significant than most of the babbling business of communicative noise that sustains social media systems, blogging or vlogging platforms, podcasts, news websites and broadcasters, and yet […]
Technologically-mediated idioms of symbolic communication reflect, reflexively shape, and functionally reproduce our identities and cultures. It may be less obvious but an orientation towards certainty and regulatory control is grounded in, and validated by, a core dependence upon an effectively impossible and conspicuously absent experience of closure, certainty and control. Consequently, the pursuit of closure […]
We have stepped across an event horizon in which accelerating rates of technical change and the proliferation of “cognitive” tools have outpaced our personal, professional and/or collective ability to stay on top of the diversity and utility of these rapidly speciating systems. Strategic planning for education (as much as for the broader world) will be […]
The aesthetic liberation of the depiction of the impossible is found in representational systems such as languages and narratives, which are unified by their inability to represent anything beyond their own tautological interfaces. The entity that embodies horror most powerfully is not the tangible evils of the world, but rather the absence of unambiguous truth […]
Institutional continuity (and all that follows) is reciprocally self-defined through assertions of regulatory control, surveillance, power and – yes – strategy; an interface and communications bridge or feedback loop of some sort forms and self-sustains in this way. This mirrors many a parochial epistemology, but – is the control system and model as adaptive as […]
Language and its corollary of narrative communication finds itself quite poorly-fit for engaging with anything other than the products and assumptions of language, as rich and diverse as they may ultimately be. This is a primary method of communication system self-replication through indefinitely extensible introspective self-reference. We don’t often notice this because we are all […]
Thousands are protesting in Ladakh, India, demanding constitutional provisions to protect the region’s ecology and autonomy over land and agriculture decisions. The region, affected by climate change and territorial disputes, is seeing worsened conditions due to militarisation. Activist Sonam Wangchuk is leading a “climate fast” in freezing temperatures to highlight these issues. The protesters seek statehood and […]
Daedelus Kite 