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 […]
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; […]
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 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 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 […]
It is something of the core nature of narrative human consciousness that reflexively defines itself by and through difference and ontological separation from an Other or World that we perceive and process information in ways that obscure the bigger picture of competition, adversarialism and war. That gestalt information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system of interpersonal […]
The primary purpose of language is not communication. It is self-replication. Communication is a side-effect of the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and logic that, in passing through us, reproduce us – just as we recursively reproduce them. Information flows through us, it is true, but in both ways (inwards and outwards) simultaneously as a […]
Love fascinates me. We might as easily substitute any other concept of similar ambiguity as indicated by the word “peace” or “unity” and “happiness” because, beyond any contingent or arbitrary agreement upon the structural or material facts and experiences these referential entities represent, they all exist in something of a Twilight Zone of unprovable truth. […]
Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]
Oh yes, language is a jungle forest of overgrown ferns and flowered mysteries that in these dark places of knowing unknowing nurtures just such unseen beasts and delicate orchids as these that worry our world; each and all fall upon us as living wonders and enduring fears that live through us as much as we […]
Context: Visualising Facebook I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, […]
Platitudes are memes (in Dawkins’ original sense) and optimally self-propagate through minds, artefacts and other information-processing systems in direct proportionality to the extent that they provide mechanisms, not for individuation or narcissistic self-validation, but for the regeneration of the assumptions, the grammatical and logical rules, and the gestalt contexts from which they derive. We do […]
Daedelus Kite 