I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]
There is a certain poetry in the notion that our understanding of time itself possesses a developmental arc and trajectory. It is something of a meta-temporal reflection that might go the way of much other involuntarily metastatic metaphysical inconsequentialities except for this – the unfolding (as organic) growth of our collaborative cognitive, linguistic and cultural […]
The role of language in cultural and political systems of belief is such that geographic tropes are anchors that provide internal narrative self-validation to such systems and their inhabitants. It doesn’t mean their assertions of territorial impropriety are valid, merely that such adversarial gambits are the perennially ascendant low-hanging fruit of belligerent nationalist pathologies everywhere […]
There is a paradox of control. The most sophisticated models and methods of shaping regulatory guidance approximate to a complete absence of guidance. Guidance and control is less directed, morec. Taking ecosystems as an example, the distributed self-regulatory function of such a monumentally complex system is an emergent property exhibiting a conspicuous absence of centralised […]
Context: The surprising role death plays in the stability of ecosystems There’s a sense in which viable biological systems persist as a function of their ability to offset entropy as dissipative disorder to their environments. When these viable systems are themselves the combinatorial gestalt that an ecosystem represents, there is no externality or reservoir into […]
The generative role of death and decay reaches far beyond the simple yet significant facts of nutrient cycles into narrative and memory. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which our cultures, languages and selves are wrapped around this irreducibly hollow fact of mortality and transience. Pick a culture, a time, a place and […]
This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
Context: If We Make Contact With Aliens The Biggest Danger Will Be Our Politicians, Say Scientists Yes. It is quite true that the communication systems endemic to our species have had a catastrophic tendency to percolate precisely the wrong kinds of self-interested personalities into positions of power. While it is not always the case that […]
What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]
Have you ever noticed how even the most deliberate thought collapses at the boundary where concept attempts to become utterance? The effervescent liminality between inner image and external word sediments itself between lived cognition and its skeletal representation. Thought arrives whole, textured, multi-dimensional. Language receives it late, fragmented, already reduced. In the act of speaking […]
The strangest thing about being a person and having an identity is that none of those concepts and labels or phrases and idioms we build our selves around actually belong to us. To be a person, an individual, an identifiable difference as distinct from all the background colour and noise of whichever time and place […]
I’m pretty sure that all we ever do is generate fragmentary dialects of pre-existing languages, codes, behavioual patterns and conceptual relationships or symmetries. These are ordered structures and complex (adaptive) systems of information and reference that maximally self-propagate and replicate themselves through us as their primary transmission medium, just as they are also our binding […]
Daedelus Kite 