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 […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 