Categories
Philosophy

Technology of Human Unhappiness

Dating platforms and social technologies are built around the chase rather than the consummation of intimacy, emotional resonance, or the recognition of social worth. Research on dating app use has shown that the systems rarely deliver enduring outcomes, but rather incentivise continual pursuit, endless swiping, and repetition of cycles of hope and disappointment (Bonilla-Zorita, Griffiths […]

Categories
Philosophy

Everybody’s Talking at Me

Sometimes, when people look at me and speak, I don’t hear the words—I see the mouth moving and hear the noise, nothing more. It feels like those moments when a familiar word suddenly turns strange, hollowed of meaning, its surface exposed. I think this happens to all of us: every so often, language reveals itself […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technical Insecurity

The strange game of personal, digital (ie cybersecurity) hygiene is a mirror turned back on itself. Someone might believe that they are essentially protecting personal data, identity, security — but in truth what is being protected are the very contours of surveillance and extraction required by the (ie world, integrated) communications system. Every password, every […]

Categories
Peace Philosophy

Spiritual Transcendence

Spiritual transcendence cannot be reduced to correction or condescension. Those modes arise from insecurity, not from clarity. The very attempt to codify or delimit transcendence—as text, doctrine, or law—inevitably transforms into contestation and tribalism. Interpretations evolve, become weapons or scaffolds, and authority often rests less on essence than on the sediment of arguments layered across […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief Bingo: Gullibility Disco

You are being played. Not in the sense of your particular beliefs, nor in the details of what you hold to be true, but in the very act of belief itself. The machinery at work here operates on the substrate of meaning, on the automatic reflex that orients you towards conviction, significance, and sense-making. What […]

Categories
Philosophy

Intelligence: How, not What

Intelligence is too often mistaken for the sum of its parts, as if knowledge were a pile of isolated facts—points that can be counted, catalogued, and stacked. This is the mechanistic view: determinism reduced to inventory. What gets overlooked in that framing is the field—the structure of relations, the gradients of difference, the resonance through […]

Categories
Philosophy

Indeterminacy: Metastable Humanity

Belief systems—political, spiritual, cultural—do not cohere because they achieve certainty. They cohere because they cannot. The very fact that their claims are indeterminate and unprovable generates the turbulence that binds them together. What looks like a contest over truth is, in effect, the medium of systemic persistence. Institutions, rituals, and governing frameworks stabilise themselves by […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unhinged Banality and Myopic Jingoism

It is as fascinating as it is tragic. We may do well to question the eternal recurrence of unhinged banality and myopic jingoism as there are causal mechanisms in play. It is only incidentally about personalities: probability, entropy and adaptive statistical factors occupy the center of gravity. What percolates to ascendance tends to be those […]

Categories
Philosophy

Enigmatic Holism

Holism is a wonderful word because it resists the temptation to treat language as closed self-reflection. Meaning does not reside in solitary fragments but arises through the whole, parsed and divided against itself. The whole is never intact in presentation: it is displaced, deferred, broken into instances that bear the trace of what they are […]

Categories
Philosophy

Transcendental Homelessness of Reflective Introspection

Loneliness begins in language. Not just in what cannot be said, but in what is said and does not arrive. A sentence needs uptake to become real. When no one receives it, the words complete their neat arc and fall back like rain on sealed glass. The echo confirms existence yet withholds communion. The world […]

Categories
Philosophy

Suffering Fools

The trouble is that every path winds through a carnival of fools. Not because the world is malicious, but because the coordinates of sense are infinite, and what maps cleanly in one quadrant looks deranged in another. Language and habit do the dirty work—each person carrying their own system of signals, every encounter a clash […]

Categories
Philosophy

Sentient Experience, Conscience and Ethics

I accidentally bought a pack of chicken hearts, cooked half of them, and then found myself staring at the rest, wondering whether I should bury them instead of eating them. It was a strange moment, almost an epiphany—suddenly seeing that animals must have their own context, their own interior lives, and even if no one […]