Insecurity is implicit to – and irreducible in – technology. There is absolutely no way to guarantee complete and permanent closure of *any* communications system because the indefinitely-extensible logical and material basis of accelerating technological innovation is simultaneously the proliferation of increased probabilities of vulnerability and critical incidents. While there is something of a booming […]
Category: Philosophy
Love and other distant horizons…
It never ceases to haunt me that the only love I have ever been able to truly understand has been that in which all aspiration must forever fall short of its goal as though seeking to obtain some infinitely distant horizon that recedes further away with every self-directed step of instinct or reflex taken towards […]
Happiness is an Infinite Game
What is ambition, recognition? What do you desire? Will the things that make you happy now still make you happy in five, ten, fifteen years? We are of course here engaged in an infinite and open adversarial game, against an unknown and unseen opponent that is all of a reality – past, present and future […]
Poetry
Poetry is, of course, the original form of a language, any language, and in the simple articulation of a spoken word approximates to that ancient world in which every sound and every meaning was imbued with magic and mystery or the miraculous unknowing of an infant’s innocent mind as humanity itself that sees and hears […]
Fate
Fate is a word we use to cast the past (and future) as though it ever could have been anything other than sheer randomness and confusion; we assert an order upon memory or history such that we might reflexively self-define ourselves through it. Fate is another word for a hope of order, meaning or purpose […]
Future of Humanity
Context: The Future of Life Institute The endemic and omnipresent enlightened self-interest of human psychology is generally such that, while we may already and for the most part possess the technical and cognitive or linguistic and technological tools necessary to architect our own freedom and a shared, peaceful and sustainable future – we are so […]
Emotion
There is a unique and binding property of emotional life that is quite poorly captured by neuroscientific reductionism to organic chemistry, to pure blind mechanism. While it might be true that we can correlate emotional experience with chemical and electrical facts, it is also true that beyond quite limited chemical or behavioural influence, these facts […]
Mandala
It is only by the existence of darkness in our lives that light inversely acquires the value it comes to possess. I would never wish harm upon anyone but similarly I would never wish that their lives were entirely untroubled. Beyond the fact that the Universe is always and already predisposed by logic as much […]
What is sleep? We may as well ask ourselves “what is language?” Sleep is in general a measure of the absence of language, of incessant mental chatter and an accelerated internal narrative that our minds are quite naturally oriented towards. If we might assert that language is a technology as much as it is the […]
When your job is killing you…
The things we do to survive in life can lead to the inevitable shortening of our lives and through this almost completely defeat the purpose of doing them in the first place. We have all been there and the truth is, in a choice between just scraping by and low income versus sufficient income or […]
What does love feel like?
Dissimulated emotional authenticity… “Dissimulation” is a curious term for Nietzsche to use; something is lost in translation? It is all about concealment, obfuscation, to pretend not to have what one has and to pretend to have what one most certainly does not. Perhaps he was suggesting that there is an irreducible element of theatre in […]
Identity
Speaking of identity, we may as easily speak of language or any other indefinitely-extensible and recursively self-generating symbolic system of information definition, encoding, compression and self-propagation. Language is always and already that discontinuous difference and dissociative experience that simultaneously facilitates and creates us as Subjects in, through and as communication (or culture) while also implicitly […]