Philosophical debates on time are rarely about time. They are primarily about the language with which we order our conceptual vocabularies, our reflexive sociotechnical and behavioural grammars, about what can or may be legally, rationally or intelligibly asserted. Competitive oscillation between established (proxy tribal or political) positions solves nothing and yet, counter-intuitively, it is precisely […]
An effervescing philosophical idiom of simulation hypotheses is really just Cartesian doubt wearing steampunk cosplay. Even then and in so very many ways the associated concepts of rationality stretch back to an Aristotelian logical turn that passes through many minds and places before a Boolean backflip into computational brevity as manifest cybernetic control and all […]
So many have suffered so terribly in war. I wonder at times if the greatest act of compassionate remembrance might be to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure that such horrors are never revisited up anyone, anywhere, ever again. Even while those distant autocrats (alongside motley tinpot tyrants) everywhere beat the drums of […]
Interesting to note, perhaps, that many if not most (although not necessarily all) political, ideological and/or strategic designs have an inadvertent – arguably unconscious – bias towards generating precisely the kinds of errors that optimally reproduce and self-validate themselves. The ways in which this error-encoding occurs and the sophistication with which it is engaged is […]
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether humans do.” B.F. Skinner Whether humans think or not seems to be a null question as so many clearly do not, finding themselves quite happily swept away upon whichever tide of passionate belief or causal provenance as first takes them. What interests me more is […]
An ineradicable problem in the context of engaging disinformation is that, of all possible paths we might as a fledgling technological civilisation have taken through the vast forest of combinatorial possibility, we have arrived in and at a world in which partisan difference and deceptive, adversarial contests have become the methods by and through which […]
If wisdom consists of knowing that you do not know, knowledge and all that ever creatively emanates from it can only ever be built upon such shifting sands. Technology is, for better and for worse, an extension of this principle. In every innovation, every inflected discontinuity of human ingenuity, and in every ratchet up the […]
Beyond a very limited range of skill or intuition, no one really knows what they are doing or how best to organise our world. Systems of belief asserting closure and certainty emerge as an inverse function of a growing doubt and uncertainty that they mask with spectacles of bravado or deception. Stupidity as simplistic systems […]
All civilisation is built upon the toss of a coin.
Context: The Myth of Sustainable Fashion …and not, as it turns out, an isolated instance of an industry and integrated economic culture being so profoundly shaped by and oriented towards cultivating obsolescence and waste that it could hardly continue to exist in any kind of recognisable form without it. In one regard, this is a […]
Dictators of course arrive wearing many diverse kinds of masks and singing all manner of simplistic songs of self-interested nationalism. For those of you out there who find themselves living under such a regime, it must be a really strange experience. It is true that we all tend to desensitise to hardship or suffering after […]
Recent research suggests that the underlying symmetry in neural patterns of geometric world mapping in the mammalian brain are toroidal. “(…) the Mosers discovered the activity structure of single grid cells. What they found was a hexagonal grid pattern that functions as the brain’s metric and coordinate system for space. Today they have uncovered the […]
Daedelus Kite 