The greatest physical pain a person can ever feel is quite probably bounded by suffering any one of a dozen or so uniquely unpleasant ailments but the greatest emotional pain is almost singularly attributable to the suffering of others. Emotional experience is the essence of compassion and peace of mind but it is a subjective […]
…some days, I’d like to just gather up all the tyrants, the warlords and the dictators and seal them in a glass sphere before launching it across the event horizon of a black hole. Beyond the staggering complexity and as yet non-existent infrastructure for such an arguably defensible act, it remains as a conceptually simple […]
Words are essentially meaningless components that recombine in meaningful ways. Meaning is a function of evolving referential networks. Global system self-referentiality sustains this soliton-like adaptive shockwave that language, culture and technology embodies. Meaning is anchored in meaninglessness, and other such recursive tales of entropy and time…
Context: Decoding Decision-Making: Insect Brains Are More Complex Than We Thought I find it curious to consider how agency, volition, deliberation and the cognitive “inhabitation” of a form of life are slowly, begrudgingly being conceded to our ecological colleagues as something other than inevitable endpoint of human exceptionalism. Interesting, as a consequence, perhaps, to reflect […]
The crisis of our time is not merely ecological, political, or economic—it is structural. The very conditions that destabilize planetary systems are the same ones that drive growth, value, and novelty. We are caught in a loop: a system that feeds on uncertainty to sustain itself. Efforts to generalize often mislead, but it is precisely […]
Context: Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement Of microtubules and metaphors… …we can not describe anything beyond our systems of description. This tells us something significant about the nature of these conscious systems and of what kinds of explanations might be possible. Entanglement suggests, to my mind, that the ways in which […]
Wittgenstein once opined that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” I am starting to wonder if cybernetics might not be a battle against the seduction of our minds by technology. The transmission medium and feedback mechanisms of language and technology become the primary methods of influence as […]
Successfully negotiating the resonant dissonance of any democracy is indeed deeply problematised by an obligation to successfully define, negotiate and evolve strategies with which to do so. I see the contemporary American problem as being on one hand unique and specific to a particular entanglement of histories, motivations, incentives and value (or belief) systems but […]
The suspension of disbelief is a concept that illustrates a kind of game we play against, with and as our selves. The twist in this tale is that we seek to mask (as though by self-hypnosis) the unreality of a world that only becomes real as a function of the extent to which we become […]
Technological metamorphosis tends by variously unacknowledged or linguistically and cognitively impermeable mechanisms to reproduce precisely the correct kind of uncertainty and communication or media system turbulence to assure the continuing tenure of those technologies and their logical descendants. It is reproduction, however, possessing an emergent variation sufficient to breed resilience as unscripted existential assurance.
Oh yes contingent dependency, and yet value and assurance are always, if inadvertently, in some way grounded in risk and insecurity. Contentious, perhaps, but we shouldn’t need too many examples to validate the intuition. Interesting how the solution seems to be framed in terms of “more technology” which hardly takes account of endemic or axiomatic […]
It strikes me as fascinating that the most significant things we ever experience in our lives are quite impossible to describe with language. Emotional life and other experiences occur at a level prior to language or ordered cognition. When we try to explain it, all we ever do is see our own descriptions reflected back […]
Daedelus Kite 