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Philosophy

Meaning, Belief, Enigma

Meaninglessness is really (and surely) just a matter of perspective and of degree, as is meaning. I am never so sure that we wrap our brains around science (or technology, let alone tribal belief) quite so much as it wraps its own internal logic and indefinitely-extensible necessity around us such that we embody the transmission […]

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Philosophy

On Writing

The greatest barrier to truly influential or eloquent prose style is that which occurs when a writer assumes (or aspires to) unique and separate – effectively isolated, discontinuous – individuation as inalienable symbolic possession of the creative art and act. Words as a living embodiment of complexity quite naturally express themselves both through (and as) […]

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Philosophy

Dark Star

It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]

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Philosophy

Nothing lasts forever…

…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]

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Philosophy

Nature, Humanity, Unification

Context: I am a big fan of Anton Petrov’s space and science YouTube channel. Today I was watching this video which inspired the spontaneous reflection recorded below. Many of the shared, Global and effectively holistic problems that we face as an industrialised technological civilisation are fundamentally and foundationally matters of successfully characterising and negotiating – […]

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Philosophy

We’re all Amateurs

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]

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Philosophy

The Game of Life

Ah, yes – games. We play them all the time. We juggle rank simplicities and bundles of rules or conventional orthodoxies as though there were some purpose or reason and meaning beyond our endless attempts to keep it all in the air and moving. But there is not. This is a game that plays itself […]

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Philosophy

A Strategy over Lunch

I found myself attempting to explain some subtle points of holistic systems strategic symmetry over lunch today, framed in the context of sporting teams. It seems very much not that my insights or reflections were incorrect so much as that the audience for them was inappropriate. Do you ever find that in explaining a complex […]

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Philosophy

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]

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Philosophy

Cosmological Autodidact

Context: Can the Universe Learn? It seems to be something of an inevitability, in some sense, that the mothership from whence all complex emergence arises is itself an instance and template case of autonomously self-propagating distributed learning systems ontology. The inadmissibility, in general, of such concepts is very much more a consequence of rank psychological […]

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Philosophy

The Mirror of Narrative Self-Inflection

Context: Aliens are a mirror to humanity Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Mary Shelley would all and also very likely recognise these narrative tropes of alien Other as being endemic behavioural and psychological reflections of humanity itself. More interesting, perhaps, than that we find ourselves serially encountering our own image and bundled native biases in fiction is […]

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Philosophy

The Nonexistence of Chairs

A chair, being neither true nor false and present as a fact or the concept that references one, is only ever the sum over all that it is not and in this sense represents an ontological absence to the presence that inversely defines it. The artefact as teleological narrative or cognitively reflexive endpoint is in […]