In a world so obsessed with the endless froth and bubble of appearances and superficiality, it is most common for points of developmental interest to find themselves almost entirely obscured and rendered insignificant by all the pointless, meaningless noise of our shared cultural and digital lives. I recently obtained a logical insight into the nature […]
Politics is really nothing more than ethics writ large. Any sense in which political science, ideology or (the all-too-often psychologically dissociative dark arts of) ethical rhetoric are axiomatic or mechanistic systems is a misdirection to what they might actually be or become. We find ourselves, more than a Century after relativistic geometry demonstrated that not […]
The art of the concept (as Philosophy) is one which, perhaps, largely sits outside the grammatical and behavioural constraints of non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. complex) organisational or corporate systems, and for all that it remains as plausibly unintelligible to those systems as it simultaneously embodies inestimable value for them. It is in many ways not that […]
Uncertainty is an indirect measure of the sum-over-all combinatorial possibilities of any definable (or intelligible) systems state space. The combinatorial possibilities of any non-trivially sophisticated – i.e. complex – state space are larger than any definition (or empirically-derived knowledge) of that same complex entity. Complete descriptions are impossible for the same essential reason that mathematical […]
…and in trying, aspiring, in reaching out and making a purpose – or a difference – where there is (demonstrably) none we find ourselves reweaving a semantic tapestry from the bare mechanism and engineered fact of brute (-forced) realism. (Shannon excluded meaning from Information Theory because the complexity is exponential, not because it wasn’t there […]
The return of the Wicked Problem. The problem of antibiotic resistance characterises a key symmetry of “wickedness” in any problem-space. That is, the activities, responses, interdictions and behaviours that might solve the problem are also those inadvertently exacerbate it. It is an endemic property of complex systems to seek optimal patterns of self-propagation. What at […]
“What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” – Virginia Woolf […]
The article Tackling wicked problems : A public policy perspective provides a comprehensive acknowledgment of the complexity of many of the “wicked” problems that large organisations (not just governments) face in negotiating the facts of reality as they are (i.e. being pragmatic), not as we might prefer them to be (i.e. ideological assertions). “The handling […]
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
Context: Nobody Knows Anything About China It is of the nature of a science or an art of existential introspection (not to mention institutional knowledge) to seek the least-incorrect and lowest-energy, succinct model of an Object or Entity. The curiously mischievous enigma of such a psychologically-reflexive aspiration towards ordered pattern as #truth or fact – […]
One thing which really struck me when reading Aurelius’ Meditations was his degree of humility, considering the power he wielded as Emperor. It is unclear whether this was merely a rhetorical tool from a powerful thinker sensitive to the reception and interpretation of his words or if it was the authentic and humble gratitude of […]
Daedelus Kite 