Categories
Philosophy

Political Philosophy

“Political philosophy” is a fascinating oxymoron. At once, a dissimulation of the self-validating tautologies that it simultaneously asserts as transparent inevitability. For all its sophistication, philosophy might also and in essence resemble just such an indeterminate tesseract of complex self-referentiality as is so characteristic of political (among all other) systems of belief but it more […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Library

We are each and all libraries of experience and knowledge or wisdom to each other and it is in our endless fixation upon just a handful of these living texts that we come to dismiss all those other possibilities for learning and growth that surround us. In reducing our story to a simple as abbreviated […]

Categories
logic

The mischievous absence of mystery…

Sometimes the most mysterious and/or significant mystery may be that there is none, that nothing exists where he (or we) expect to find something. Notwithstanding that “nothing” and ontological absence is not, as a function of mischievous logic as much as of the semantic tesseract of language, as reductively simple as it appears to be […]

Categories
technology

Ceci n’est pas une automaton…

…entertaining but I suspect there is deep resonance here, if only we were able to sufficiently, efficiently, insightfully decompress it. The mechanisms and the technologies we make inhabit us every bit as much as we inhabit the world populated and inflated, made possible by them. How we do or do not respect those things is […]

Categories
life

Attractors

In the early evening of fading light last night I visited a local shopping complex to purchase some simple necessities. In the sky just above some apartments I saw some small birds flying, too few to flock but just enough to exist in that liminal zone of groups of 3 or 4. Single birds would […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Rank Psychological Absurdity of 21st Century European Imperialism

The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the drones of war…

Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Cloud of Unknowing

Studies in the area of swarms (murmurations, schooling fish, etc.) consistently suggest that not only is there a cognitive boost in company, but, beyond even the plausible case in which the embodied intelligence with which we are all so intimately familiar is itself only the most salient and visceral experience of a natural bias towards […]

Categories
Philosophy

Metaverse, Value, Meaning

The value of art or any other commodity is quite uncannily aligned to the acquired significance (as structural endpoints) of meaning in language, of nodes in networks and of neurons in brains. That is – value is a function of where and how an artefact (or word) sits relative to all other artefacts, of the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ontology, Hierarchy, System

Differentiation in ontology often asserts unnecessary-as-eminently-redundant-distinctions, however: Systemic hierarchies seem to come in two main flavours from which later differentiation and confusions emerge. There are designed hierarchies and there are un-designed hierarchies. The first is an assertion of order, planning and control on a spectrum from brute-forced top-down through to the most sophisticated and nuanced […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Strange Game of Self-Deception

The strange game of active measures is one in which the practise of deception invokes the erasure of facts in ways that can only ever offset, displace of delay their eventual broad acknowledgement and discovery by that long-suffering internal audience for whom misdirection and compliant fear under autocracy is normative to the point of cliché. […]

Categories
environment

Plastic Oceans

Context: In the Ocean, It’s Snowing Microplastics It is worth considering that the distributed material waste we can detect must only ever represent the most diminutive hyper-slice of a much vaster and more intricately complex dynamical system. It is a general problem of measurement as much as of the conceptual languages and normative grammars we […]