We rarely perceive that each action, experience and event is always in some way a microcosm, deeply entangled with (and symptomatic of) a much broader and more complex world. In each notionally separate event, entity or artefact we might seek to discover a Global truth hidden, encrypted, but still standing there in plain sight.
Online Communication: Talking Underwater
All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information…
The Machines, the Mirrors and the Emptiness of Self
The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface…
Selfish Blind-Spot
What to say when the central factor obscuring self-knowledge and all aspirations towards peace, unity, equitable prosperity and a long-term, sustainable global civilisation is standing right there in plain sight? The psychological blind-spot in our collective vision is our Self.
Multidimensional Heuristics
Multidimensional heuristics are those forms of analysis that, rather than attempting a cumulative or brute force aggregation and hard interpretation of data, seek recursive logical insight through intuitive reconfiguration and subtractive recombination of existing patterns. It is true that our minds and acquired or entrained cognitive methods, as much as the procedural artefacts and coded…
UFOs: physics, logic, possibility
Some solutions to complex mysteries may not be obvious, but they still possess potential existence as artefacts of future discovery. The "Laws of Physics" as we know them may be just one (relatively) self-consistent cross-section, constellation or "slice" through the state-space of all possible optimally-concise descriptions and mathematical (or logical) entities. We should not be…
Disentangling Bureauracy
It is fascinating to consider that an anachronistic hierarchy produces precisely the organisational inertia and systemic entropy that it itself is best oriented to negotiate (and through this to endlessly reproduce its own self-validating necessity). It is quite likely that the path of least effort and autonomously self-organising (i.e. low energy-state, minimal algorithmic complexity) systems…
One Planet: a Smoke Signal in this Warming World
Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the…
Climate Change: “Is this really how it all ends ?”
Every night now - for weeks - as afternoon gently slides into evening, a vast tide of murky opacity descends on my city. Not perhaps uncommon for winter in those parts of the world that feature just the right kind of terrain and climate to expect a great wave of mist as darkness falls. But…
Digital Transformation and Cultural Bottlenecks
Organisations are information and energy-processing systems. Information and energy-processing systems are autonomously oriented (via physics, logic, mathematics) towards low energy states. This orientation or endemic systems -bias towards low energy states bridges inanimate and living systems but may be considered to have obtained a special status in living systems.The differentiator of life in this context…
The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a "more peaceful world" is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information…
Miracles, Magic and Advanced Technological Civilisations
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, marble, life-size, 1647-1652. Bernini captures the dramatic moment an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of Divine love. It was Saint Augustine who suggested that miracles do not happen in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we understand of nature. In a similar vein,…
