You can neither give nor take freedom from someone else in any profound, enduring or ultimate and Universal sense – they always and already possess it and no matter how much you rationalise or embellish it with words and reasons or project ethical, ideological and behavioural grammars upon it or as it, the underlying fact […]
Category: Philosophy
Rejection Reflection
Rejection is an empty room. Is the hollow hell of fear we feel the clear and present absence as much and in or of ourselves as that of any Other? We each and all in turn eventually reject that Other self and in dusty, mirrored isolation turn once more towards our own essential emptiness and […]
Growing Up
How true it is: even as responsibilities (and their flip-side of worry) proliferate, as we take on so many more burdens and find that we must internalise the normative expectations and behavioural or cognitive and technologically-mediated vocabularies of a world that itself hardly knows any better than does an infant when first learning to walk, […]
Instagrammatical Narcissism
Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Dead Heat: Climate
Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]
Uncertain Selves
It is not so much a simple matter of solipsism as it is of considered logical analysis that there is and can never be an “outside” of any system, from that system’s individuated point of view. For this reason, everything is self. Curiously – the metaphysical unknown of a world beyond ourselves is ontologically and […]
Infinite Improbability
If you took an absolutely titanic-sized bag of randomly unsorted letters and numbers and proceeded to draw them out, one by one, laying them in long threads of letters – what is the chance that you would accidentally assemble the collected works of Shakespeare, perhaps Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Orwell’s 1984 or the Tibetan Book of […]
The Dream Police
Context: ‘This is not science fiction,’ say scientists pushing for ‘neuro-rights’ Dystopian authoritarian visions notwithstanding, there is a strong philosophical argument to be made that consciousness, sentience or intelligence only possesses the value (and, indeed, the substantive reality) it does because there are aspects of self and indeed of complex systems self-organisation that are not […]
Introspection
Some truths of inner self dawn upon us all a little later than they should. It was just a couple of years ago now that I found myself sitting in a meeting of technical professionals discussing some lofty software vision or planned improvement for the forever leaking bucket of logical or administrative and bureaucratic extensibility; […]
Seduced by Language
We are seduced by a language that endlessly recreates itself through us. These are all languages; all of these online platforms, communities and commercial engagements superficially appear to only be that through which we enunciate, articulate, align ourselves to ideological or emotive positions and communicate as an existential necessity but it is precisely in our […]
Money
Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be. We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it. Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature […]
Self-identity is a complex fiction.
Self-identity is little more than a complex fiction. Attempt to suspend your disbelief or any moral affront you might at first experience when engaging such a thought as that the foundation upon which you build a world of meaning and purpose is utterly and ultimately insubstantial. In fact, the vigorous spectrum of discomfort and aggression […]