Why won’t people leave communities of poorly informed dissatisfaction? It is a curious and potentially intractable aspect of human psychology that the more untenable an ideological position, belief system or existential context, the harder it becomes to leave. Doubling down on a bad bet takes less energy than the potential effort required to extract one’s […]
To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]
The most consequential questions are not those that (only) provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts as entities and systems of communication are those that generate more of themselves, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies.
Context: COP26: Bezos pledges $2bn for restoring nature Yes, thanks Jeff, but it is likely going to cost several orders of magnitude more than that to even begin to effect substantive systemic change. It is something of an unresolvable existential irony that it is precisely the system(s) of value and wealth that we so viscerally […]
This, from the book above: (…)art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.” Staging Nothing: The Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s “The Raven”, Sean J. Kelly, in Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, Logos Verlag Berlin, 2019, p. 69 Replace “void” with “subjectivity” and you have a […]
Context: Facebook Changes Name, Announces AR Layer Over Physical Reality Utopian fantasy tends to follow a predictable arc as much in ideology as in technology. The cognitive consequences will be constitutively dissociative and alienating but then, all technology simultaneously empowers and inhibits. A recent study regarding the shrinking of brains some 3,000 years ago aligns […]
Detective Del Spooner : Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny : Can you? Movie: I, Robot, 2004. (After Asimov). A robot can write a symphony, it just can […]
In an era of complex systems, negotiating organisational complexity is front and center. Large, stratified hierarchies have traditionally relied upon the necessary – or at least (and arguably) inevitable – Manichaean historical certainties that both define and constrain growth, innovation and resilience in this context. In some ways, traditional bureaucracy represents a logico-symbolic aspiration for […]
The most consequential questions are not those that provide answers but that in so doing invoke many more questions, the most interesting and influential information or artefacts of communication are those that generate more information and artefacts, and the most successful technologies are those that generate more technologies as conceptual or logical ancestry.
Indeed. I do wonder if a little constructive self-deception is the necessary cognitive consequence and corollary of a symbolic language that is anything other than perfectly fit for the purpose of unambiguous communication. In this sense, are discoveries really accidental dialects? Feynman diagrams being an (abstract, representational) case in point.
Healthy psychological growth is quite likely a function of the degree to which a person, or indeed – a civilisation, can successfully negotiate the persistent presence of irreconcilable absence that difference and logical dissonance invokes. In this sense, (both) neurotic obsession and territorial expansionism represent an orientation towards the world that constitutes, in varying degrees, […]
Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]
Daedelus Kite 