Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that […]
Category: culture
Change is as easy as A, B, C
As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]
How Pop Culture Works
A (personal) theory on the persistence of popular cultural flotsam: • Culture as an autonomously self-propagating information-processing system has evolved to encode (i.e. store) itself in multiple, parallel ways – for redundancy and continuity. • The value of such superficially-itinerant, largely vacuous, trashy culture is in the various ways that it stores partial, incomplete images […]
Things fall apart…
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Context: The climate change clues hidden in art history The endemic representational ambiguity of art is an inevitable source of doubt in regards to veracity in a context of deriving Climate facts through the artefacts of Art History. A useful comparison of contemporary artistic reflections of environment and climate must always – and perhaps necessarily […]
Context: Solving the space junk problem In any conceptual domain (such as future configurations of Near Earth Orbit) where there are many degrees of lliteral-spatial, commercial, strategic or technological freedom beyond the most overt saliences of interest – the over-population mentioned in the abstract – we will probably find that ambiguities and unknowns will be […]
Twitter Tests Trump’s Tall Tales
Context: Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims The dissonant entropy of salient adversarialism finds optimal self-replication through staccato bursts of semi-coherent linguistic superficiality and Twitter is a weapon of choice. If the primary medium of transmission could even plausibly be extinguished, an entire operating model and communications strategy (such […]
Cyber: Hidden Patterns
Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]
In What Ways is Science Like Religion?
A key reflection might be: in what ways does the contemporary experience of science, of technology and of an empirical, evidence-based world view actually (and perhaps inadvertently) fulfill many of the traditional functions of religion? In what ways, in short, does science as a paradigm of thought perform the same essential tribal binding and reflexive […]
Coronavirus Inquiry Stand-off
Context: Coronavirus inquiry tensions leave WA farmers fearing more China tariffs after barley hit Nothing quite invokes trust as does authentic accountability and undifferentiated transparency. Questions as to the Global or regional presence or absence of such transparency are as fractious as they are important. The international society of states (such as it is) currently finds itself […]
Pandemic Murals
Context: Coronavirus murals: inside the world of pandemic-inspired street art Interesting to consider the ways in which popular culture embodies a communication medium for an inadvertent yet optimally-concise and autonomously self-propagating information pattern of ourselves, our minds and the hyper-extended cognition of (an ancient, symbolic language of) technological self-representation. The article could have done with a few more […]