The diminishing returns of a double negative. It is such a subtle linguistic game to play because, yes, the absence of absence constitutes a problem representing anything other than the accrual of benefit, but the nature of knowledge as indefinitely-extensible referential matrix indicates that new information and insights are always (similarly) a negation upon what […]
It’s a little unorthodox but I suspect we deeply misunderstand the nature of living systems, long before we ever aspire to protect them from the ravages of pollution and environmental degradation. The genetically regulated phylogeny of an organism, a species and a behavioural niche are each and all inverse encodings of the environmental context they […]
I wonder if these guys would have imagined that the horror they were living through would be repeated again on some European battlefield a little over a hundred years later. The methods and machines may have to some extent changed but the sheer insanity and grinding brutality remain quite the same. Soldiers (and civilians) suffering […]
I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]
The totalitarian mindset is uniquely fixated and dependent upon an essentially fictional abstraction of closure and control. The sheer impossibility of their aspirations allows them to remain in power because being oriented in this way towards an unattainable goal provides an endlessly self-validating narrative of struggle and purpose.
Pragmatic rationality should keep the dreamers from losing their way but, similarly, the dreamers are necessary to remind the rationalists that they have already lost theirs.
Context: Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions …and, indeed, vice versa but we would do as well to acknowledge that such adaptive autotelic information and energy-processing symmetries quite plausibly constitute something of a primary reality of which all complex instances, resonant analogies and artefacts of salient or perceived intelligence represent mere component […]
A fine example of the many ways that uniquely high intelligence is antithetical to the worlds we inhabit. Those forms of intellect and problem-solving that percolate to ascendance are generally those that directly (or indirectly) replicate the axioms, assumptions and self-validating value (as belief) systems that already exist. In this way, the world reproduces the […]
Complex systems have a way of reproducing themselves quite agnostic of the methods we use to influence or shape them. Where we assert causal ontologies we tend to do so under the scope and rubric of many prior assumptions. Data is a function of observations that tend to reproduce and self-validate the assumptions by which […]
Understanding that language is essentially quicksilver and almost impossible to control or unambiguously direct for communication and meaning is a difficult realisation to negotiate. A consequence of this problematic ambiguity is that the kinds of language and narratives or systems of belief that percolate to ascendance tend to be quite remedial and simplistic. This inevitably […]
Many of us might wonder why so many people (and indeed – nations) fall backwards upon a pyre of absurd belief and foolish cruelty. The larger portion of humanity that now inhabits a twilight world of near-perpetual, technologically-mediated connectivity and material dependency should, it seems, be perfectly content with the meaning and methods we now […]
The essence of the paranoiac is in every act and thought to reproduce, invoke and justify the circumstances that generate their paranoia. To indicate a specific instance may be to miss the point. Being a generalised bias of identity, individuation and subjectivity – it is a global property that appears in and as culture, communication […]
Daedelus Kite 