Taxonomies, the branching logic of binary algorithms and decision-trees that – as though by the stealth of cultural (and commercial) entrainment and that generally unwitting human self-obsession which rarely notices that the rising tide and hyper-inflating menu of choice has become anything but an augmentation of freedom – have flooded us with logical paths and […]
Category: culture
This is a fascinating domain of analysis: artificial intelligence, cyber security and cyber crime are locked in a spiralling arc of mutual interdependence and reflexive self-definition, an evolving symmetry of mutual causation. The accelerating hyper-inflation of this logical space is complex, dynamic and non-linear. Asserting core self-organisational principles or symmetries of the self-evident Complex Adaptive […]
Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has – including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems – the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed – probable within and as […]
There exists an endemic and intransigent adherence to the self-evident necessity of linear or causal teleology and reductive explicability in human experience that misleads us as to the underlying organisational or logical principles of our shared reality. The many and diverse games we play are, for instance, evidence of core principles of systemic (and systematic) […]
I have been seeking a sophistication and beauty of intelligence in life, in humanity and – by an inevitability of existential or logical extension – in myself which may just never have existed. Can we ever truly make our own meanings, our own worlds and our own destinies or are we forever bound to be […]
It might just be me but I feel an utter irony and sense of futility that the acceleration of our cultural, cognitive and communications systems has passed a threshold (or is it an event horizon) beyond which only compressed triviliaties and inconsequential noise is able to percolate up to popular awareness. Diminishing apertures of opportunity […]
A fascinating feature of contemporary organisational systems, and at all scales of magnitude, is the various ways in which they subscribe to a simplistic mechanical and linear model of ontology and operation. It is as though, while everyone and everywhere is more than happy to commercially and politically exploit the Post-Newtonian and Post-Industrial Revolution technologies […]
Quicksilver Concepts
I appear to spend an inordinate amount of time peripatetically wandering around pondering wistful wisdoms, diverse philosophical insights and complex intuitions. Capturing or projecting mental insight and creative visualisation into written (or spoken) words is an exercise which loses a great deal in translation from the quicksilver or pure thought to the grammatical and semantic […]
The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing
In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]
UN Climate Action Summit
I was watching a live broadcast of a speech from the UN Climate Action Summit this morning. It was a great speech – very well written, articulate, intelligent, well-timed and well-delivered. For the particular political personality involved, this is undoubtedly a tour de force and, perhaps, a career-pinnacle of statesmanship and Global leadership. There is, […]
Logical Games: Golf is not (just) Golf
One of the most unrelentingly tedious dimensions of human social existence is that of a polite and receptive silence in the presence of utterly uninteresting conversations or narrative recollections. Listening to an enthusiastic account of a round of golf, for instance – and acknowledging the diversity of personal interests, hobbies and sporting professions which exist […]
Climate Strike: Which Economy?
I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]