Thrown into a world for which none of us are or could ever be fully prepared, we are compelled to engage the interface levers, buttons and switches of culture and interpersonal complexity which always, always represent some potentially duplicitious and risky game of snakes and ladders. There are of course more snakes than ladders, though, […]
Everything begins as nothing and eventually returns there again. There is no real loss or sorrow, just the transience and self-inflected emptiness that pervades everything in life and to which we all must eventually return. A hollow, haunting experience of these facts can be overwhelming but it is worth remembering that if you are sensitive, […]
Belief is not anchored on facts any more than communication is grounded in truth. The primary function of any system of belief is the sustainably continuous tenure of that grammatical and idiomatic framework that the belief system embodies. The suggestion here is that systems of belief do not in effect belong to those who hold […]
Global problems require Global solutions but a unified approach to shared problems is nothing if not conspicuous by its absence. Key issues here are that ineffective solutions supporting and cultivating piecemeal or reductive and iterative engagement with such complex, distributed problems are the primary artefacts and policy idioms that tend to percolate to ascendancy through […]
Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
If probabilities are real, then possibility and impossibility are as real (as functions of probability) as is Hawaii or chicken soup. The unsettling consequences of quantum theory seem to be quite conveniently swept under the ontological (and epistemological) carpet but the fact remains that material reality is deeply infused by and in some mysteriously unintelligible […]
Context: Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang It makes you wonder how the laws of physics themselves commute the bottleneck from one Universe to another unless they are themselves semi-Platonic forms of logical necessity. Perhaps there is a reductive inevitability in the laws of physics as being the minimally complex form (i.e. as per […]
Organisations tend on the whole towards an inadvertent orientation for the reproduction of the policies and procedures (as axioms) that were originally cultivated to assist that organisation to perform its defining task, to address its asserted problem space. In this way, we observe the reproduction of procedural systems and behavioural, cognitive or otherwise normative grammars […]
The thing which scares people more than anything else is not the simplest or most obvious fact that is the existential self-negation of personal (or even civilisation) death so much as it is the deeper and more profound discovery that there is an irreducible absence of meaning. This is why people so vigorously attach themselves, […]
The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]
I wonder sometimes: am I the sum of my past, the simple aggregate bundle of sensations and experiences or memories and otherwise material or extended causes and effects I leave behind me (in time) like vapour trails? This Self I carry around as some interior burden or mirror of external expectations or normative cultural conventions […]
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
Daedelus Kite 