Categories
Philosophy

Lost in Translation

One’s relationship with others feels, to me, to be a subset of one’s relationship with one’s self; and vice versa. Regardless that that’s one hell of a lot of ones, Kierkegaard made the point that this introspective opening up of structure precisely is the self, the mind, our experience and the world. I only saw […]

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Philosophy

Selfless Identity

Identity is not a fixed entity but represents a shifting construct and constellation of relationally-networked facts, orbiting in some sense around an inherent emptiness—an enigmatic absence that defines rather than diminishes. In this space, identity and meaning emerge as relational, shaped by the dynamic interplay between self and other. Language, too, becomes part of this […]

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Philosophy

Love’s necessary absence

Love is less about filling a void and more about embracing the absence—the mystery that compels our curiosity and draws us closer. When we meet someone and resonate, it’s as if we acknowledge and dance around this emptiness together, creating meaning through shared experiences. Our mutual incompleteness is not a flaw but a space where […]

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Philosophy

Cosmological Oblivion

…of course, falling through what may itself have been emergent logical, statistical and/or combinatorial self-regulation into the potential/stored energy of configuration states that generate and sustain complexity may have in some sense been the Universe’s necessary, if fatal, error. Sure, it’s kind of cool to be able to exist, experience and adaptively reflect back upon […]

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Philosophy

Consolation

The consolation of philosophy lies in that language allows us to adaptively reinterpret a commonly (as historically) inequitable and unnecessarily adversarial world as hopeful, meaningful and just. A (related) tragedy of communicative dissonance and conflict seems to be that it is precisely the most competitively frictive and absurdly futile of narratives that tend to percolate […]

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Philosophy

Absurdity

A thing being as equally and oppositely defined by that which it is not as much as by what it provably is (or consensually appears to be), the absence of its opposite is the simultaneous presence of its psychological, cultural and technologically-mediated self. Facilitated by conveniences of Gestalt illusion, familiar enough to student artists but […]

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Philosophy

Crowdstrike

We have been building a global communications network and irreversible technological dependency on foundationally insecure technologies. It’s not wilfully stupid or cynically opportunistic entrepreneurialism, the logic itself is working as much against as for us. A big shout-out to sleep-deprived system support and cybersecurity teams everywhere. Not a good day to be working on an […]

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cybernetics history Philosophy

Aggressive Insecurity

Humanity has, at scale and en masse, a profoundly insecure dependency on aggressive self-determination. This is the great unaddressed issue of our historical moment, perhaps of history more generally, and may indeed be an undecidable problem. We may not be able to unambiguously determine causal factors or clarify many of the things we really could […]

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Philosophy

Signal to noise?

Signal to noise?  The primary signal is noise. Most of the partisan #insecurity and frictive #political tribalism we are currently experiencing represents convergence towards the regenerative bonding and binding turbulence of high probability, low-energy system macrostates. (Gossip? Tabloid news? Best Practice? Doctrine? Belief? Ideology? Ethics? The underlying dynamics are considerably less flattering or reassuring than […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mind the Gap

Theory of Mind represents the ingestion, curated entrainment and epistemological event horizon of an essentially inarticulable metaphysical Otherness. Much is made of commercial opportunity and/or existential threat represented by artificial intelligence. I’m not sure we should be so concerned about the potential arrival of unregulated superintelligence, if indeed this does ever occur. We will remain […]

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Philosophy

Communicative Simplicity

Communication becomes less ambiguous and more streamlined or efficient when content aligns with dominant (as ascendant) probability distributions. This invokes communicative simplicity as a reciprocal deficit of comprehension. In this way, assurance of significance is plagued by the plausible inevitability of a proliferation of largely meaningless content.

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Philosophy

Seeding Entropy

Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]