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 […]
Can the future be extrapolated from the past in such a linear manner as to suggest that the (many and tragic) wars of attrition that once were, will be again? The question is not so much as to what shape or duration future conflict might take as of what role conflict (and other such forms […]
Context: Real Meat That Vegetarians Can Eat If the reason for not eating meat is purely ethical, then consuming simulated meat bears no moral consequence whatsoever to a person committed to a position that all plausibly sentient life is sacred, that all manifestations of embodied experience and awareness are a difference of degree, not of […]
What we as often fail to acknowledge is that not only are these kinds of sub-surface energies, entities and artefacts of cognition and consciousness percolating up at all times and requiring control, suppression and endless maintenance to allow us to be able to even function or participate in a social context – there is also […]
Context: A Language AI Is Accurately Predicting Covid-19 ‘Escape’ Mutations A fascinating method of discovery. An inference here is that the underlying information and energy-processing characteristics or adaptive, dynamical symmetries of viral RNA and linguistic structure possess a common logical antecedent. We might, indeed, perform such ontological archaeology through or as the indefinitely-extensible “languages” of […]
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory”. – Haruki Murakami. A talking cat – clearly an absurdity but in many ways no less absurd than that any of the mad parade of human civilisation and the shared confusion and beauty of this […]
More important, I feel, than any particular aphorism or penetrating psychological and historical insight from Nietzsche is that he teaches us how to think. Much the same might be said of Bach; the patterns and complex symmetries of logical abstraction he defined and refined do not (only) instruct us in the use of any particular […]
Context: Listening for Extraterrestrial Blah Blah I doubt whether human beings are even a quarter of a percent as smart as we think we are. The indefinitely-extensible properties of logic and mathematics suggest that languages and intelligence on the higher end of the (Kardashev) scale are quite plausibly far too sophisticated for us to interpret […]
There was a time when I used to stare into sunsets and ask the sun what it was. I would raise my eyes to the starry skies and silently whisper to myself that such vaulted majesty just can not be real. I spent years learning, accumulating knowledge and deep intuitions about the stars, the galaxies, […]
Context: Experts Sign Open Letter Slamming Europe’s Proposal to Recognise Robots as Legal Persons Robots might be a bit of a stretch for asserting personhood although it does remain somewhat indistinct as to where and when awareness, experience or sentience arise in recognisably “living” things. We may (following, at a distance, something I once read […]
Daedelus Kite 