Context: Eradicating black rats on Palmyra Atoll uncovers eye-opening indirect effects A perspicacity and intelligence sufficient to the task of successfully and conscientiously managing our natural environment is quite positively anathema to administrative bureaucracies. There is in this a microcosm of a certain functional or instrumental narrowing of representation and behavioural engagement which institutional interdictions […]
In a world that is implicitly oriented towards the replication of its own processes, behaviours and conventions, all we ever do is look backwards, and even as we travel into unknown futures yet always and already blinded by the fallible visions of a shared imagination and memory that, like systems of belief, is so easily […]
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
No flower is perfect. The flowers of memory are always more beautiful because they only ever live in imagination. In truth – all knowledge is of the past and in this moving moment we are never anchored upon reality so much as on an embellished fantasy and fading memory of sensation and experience. Such is […]
Not all beauty has a cost. It is the things, people and places which do not have any associated, attributed monetary measurement of worth that are the most valuable. This is why we are all, in general, so unhappy – we place value in altogether the wrong things. We spend our lives chasing meaningless token […]
You really have to wonder if senescence and potential (or probable and plausibly inevitable) catastrophic collapse is as necessary in this context as is the endless production of entropy as a corollary of complexity. Any specific system (or system of systems) can only ever maintain sustainable continuity through the offset and displacement of its own internal […]
Art requires inauthenticity just like wealth requires poverty. The issue is that wealth and all associated power is of necessity a narrowly-focused exclusive, dissipative system that, like a tornado, maintains coherence and continuity through offsetting its own cost and entropy to an environment composed of poverty and disempowered, disenfranchised multitudes. Wealth foundationally depends upon the […]
The very fact that definitions are diverse and scattered across such a rugged ontological landscape of entities, artefacts and information (or institutional and behavioural or cognitive) processing systems and endlessly-extensible logical refinement suggests that, beyond general qualities or properties any one of us might render in any number of complementary ways, there is and can […]
Watching the information bonfire of the current US election processes is troubling, to say the least. Beyond external interference in the fidelity of democracy and the internal dissonance of a nation being in many ways torn apart by incessant adversarial posturing and partisan self-interest, there is in this situation an instance of some broader unresolved […]
The question might become as of the extent to which integrated biological systems express or manifest an altogether more subtle logic than purely brute-forced calculation. We have a tendency to isolate intelligence and problem solving in the processing unit but, beyond the implicit (or at least plausible) value in any identifiable circuits and cleverly-constructed cybernetic […]
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, quite famously, that “if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you” and it was meant as a warning, a caution following a statement that those who fight with monsters can themselves become monsters and this is in many ways a representation, among other things, of the manifest […]
There is an implicit and irreducible incompleteness in things. Those who feel experiences most acutely, with greater sensitivity and the profound depth of interior, psychological reflection are much less likely to simply sweep away a lingering sense of unease, less able to simply accept with complete belief or unproblematic gullibility the profoundly hollow or superficial […]
Daedelus Kite 