Context: Bees learn to play golf and show off how clever they really are This, above, is yet another example of dynamical (organic) systems’ intrinsic problem-solving aptitude. I really think we have put the ontological cart before the horse in terms of how we characterise and represent intelligence. Slime moulds have demonstrated problem solving aptitude […]
Context: Math explains polarization, and it’s not just about politics The mathematics indicates aspects of causal necessity, perhaps, in dynamical systems but we might turn to a complementary psychological ontology of polarisation, Othering and system differentiation. A partisan point of view (or mind and associated political, ideological subjectivity) is always and already inversely anchored and […]
Context: The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit It is a curious property of the juggernaut of relentless technological metamorphosis that utility is generally measured in inverse proportionality to miniaturisation, regardless that a network of associated, integrated systems quite naturally proliferate and […]
Science seeks underlying patterns and abbreviated logical explanations (as equation, model and approximation or general framework) to describe and manipulate nature but this is always at an inadvertent and inverse cost of generating precisely the same quantity of unmanageable complexity and disorder as that control and value or utility it brings. There exists a general […]
Beauty fascinates me although it is not at a purely aesthetic level or in any visceral approximation to emotional experience and desire with which our culturally-mediated experience of self and subjectivity endows us. Consider that there have been a number of cross-cultural and ethnically-diverse academic studies that demonstrate that the faces which are considered to […]
Language lies to us about its ability to facilitate communication. Anything beyond the most trivial of instances of description and communication carries enormous degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic language, but ultimately – language itself benefits most. Human minds are bound by an acquired linguistic intuition […]
War is at least partially a function of the fact that in seeking to maintain sustainable continuity, all dynamical systems must effectively and persistently offset the inevitability of their own internal dissonance and thermodynamic or organisational entropy to an environment composed of other systems that are engaged in precisely the same exercise of existential self-interest. […]
Opposites are bound, entangled in ways our minds can never truly or unambiguously distinguish. This is why we make many of the mistakes we all do – again and again. The mind just exists and knows no true difference or polarity and failing to recognise our own essential wisdom, we all too easily fall into […]
There are no final, complete or self-contained answers. Language, for one, and as much as cognition itself, is not oriented towards closure. It is like a genetic code that acquires optimal, sustainable continuity through the counter-intuitive utility and value that incompleteness and uncertainty brings. Without the random mutation that logical or physical necessity creates, the […]
The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that it is prudent to be cautious when engaging the deepest mysteries because “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. When you do find (just such) a loose thread in the fabric of the world as an inexplicable enigma, an […]
Context: Working More Systemically Towards Sustainable Food Systems: A Co-Inquiry Process A critical issue at the heart of this issue is that we lack a comprehensive, resilient and adaptive systems ontology upon which to build the structural, organisational and sociotechnical or cognitive/intelligent and technological systems we actually require. It is one thing to identify a […]
Context: Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information Seems like a moment for an(other!) apposite philosophical Herman Melville quote but the (emergent) complexity of these things is as much a measure of their natural intelligence as it is of our enduring hesitance to acknowledge it. The next step on from identifying the existence […]
Daedelus Kite 