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Philosophy

Bootstrapping Cosmological Analogies

The most interesting analogy of all in the cosmological domain is that of a self-generating Universe. That is, the gestalt bootstraps itself into existence. It is more a function of the teleology endemic to language (and its corollary constrained cognitive conceptual vocabularies) that finds us limited by something much less than the range of all […]

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Philosophy

Time and Impatient Knowing

Being a chronic holist and aspiring raconteur of recursion, I note that the value of the vast and swelling tides of available books, magazines, articles, videos and mixed media montage is a function of the abstract as abbreviation and a (temporal) compression of synopsis as acceleration. This is, of course, a matter of time, of […]

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Philosophy

Believe what you want but never think you are beyond fault or self-deception…

…in a world awash in noise as unintelligible complexity, many people are seeking for something, anything at all to believe in. The evidence that credibility is quite clearly less important than narrative continuity and simplicity highlights the extent to which belief has always been something of a leap of faith, untethered from facts and reality. […]

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Philosophy

Transmission: Unwriting I

Language is a struggle against the very dissolution and metamorphosis that language itself depends upon for growth and change. The extent to which it is paradoxically unfit for purposes of communication and comprehension is a measure of its success in a primary objective of iterative self-replication through the transmission medium that we ourselves represent. For […]

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Philosophy

Philosophy of Time

Philosophical debates on time are rarely about time. They are primarily about the language with which we order our conceptual vocabularies, our reflexive sociotechnical and behavioural grammars, about what can or may be legally, rationally or intelligibly asserted. Competitive oscillation between established (proxy tribal or political) positions solves nothing and yet, counter-intuitively, it is precisely […]

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Philosophy

Philosophical Idioms of Simulation

An effervescing philosophical idiom of simulation hypotheses is really just Cartesian doubt wearing steampunk cosplay. Even then and in so very many ways the associated concepts of rationality stretch back to an Aristotelian logical turn that passes through many minds and places before a Boolean backflip into computational brevity as manifest cybernetic control and all […]

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Philosophy

Remembrance (Against the Tyrants)

So many have suffered so terribly in war. I wonder at times if the greatest act of compassionate remembrance might be to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure that such horrors are never revisited up anyone, anywhere, ever again. Even while those distant autocrats (alongside motley tinpot tyrants) everywhere beat the drums of […]

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Philosophy

Endless Crises of Political Failure

Interesting to note, perhaps, that many if not most (although not necessarily all) political, ideological and/or strategic designs have an inadvertent – arguably unconscious – bias towards generating precisely the kinds of errors that optimally reproduce and self-validate themselves. The ways in which this error-encoding occurs and the sophistication with which it is engaged is […]

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Philosophy

Unconscious Worlds

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether humans do.” B.F. Skinner Whether humans think or not seems to be a null question as so many clearly do not, finding themselves quite happily swept away upon whichever tide of passionate belief or causal provenance as first takes them. What interests me more is […]

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Philosophy

An Eternal Absence of Knowledge

If wisdom consists of knowing that you do not know, knowledge and all that ever creatively emanates from it can only ever be built upon such shifting sands. Technology is, for better and for worse, an extension of this principle. In every innovation, every inflected discontinuity of human ingenuity, and in every ratchet up the […]

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Philosophy

A Rudderless Vessel

Beyond a very limited range of skill or intuition, no one really knows what they are doing or how best to organise our world. Systems of belief asserting closure and certainty emerge as an inverse function of a growing doubt and uncertainty that they mask with spectacles of bravado or deception. Stupidity as simplistic systems […]

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Philosophy

Unsustainable Fashion

Context: The Myth of Sustainable Fashion …and not, as it turns out, an isolated instance of an industry and integrated economic culture being so profoundly shaped by and oriented towards cultivating obsolescence and waste that it could hardly continue to exist in any kind of recognisable form without it. In one regard, this is a […]