The politicians are very similar, in general, to the philosophers; they seek value and utility through finding new ways to divide, to separate, to objectify and to create both distance and difference in the world. This endless definition and referential inflation is of course nothing more than an introduction of more information, more complexity and […]
This world of inflated, tangled emptiness is the world we have together made and together we will watch as it actively disassembles itself. The mysterious and unknowable vacuum beyond knowledge is essentially the same logical entity as is the foundational void within it. Epistemological certainty and self-identity or self-knowledge are limited by the same essential […]
You do not exist. Not, at least beyond that very limited aggregate of abstractions, words, images, ideas and narrative (or cultural) conventions within which you find yourself embedded and as a transient expression of. It is a little-known fact that from within any non-trivially sophisticated system of ordered symbols, logic and (inevitably, also) psychology and […]
Why does homelessness occur and why is it so difficult to find and apply lasting solutions? In a nutshell: Entropy. This is not a rhetorical affectation but as an authentic explanatory and causal explanation. Many socioeconomic problems are complex but within a relatively limited problem “dimensionality” – consider crowd control or public transport. They are […]
I just read an interesting (partial) article/concept/book on life, the universe and everything from biologist Robert Lanza: “Biocentrism: A New Theory of the Universe“. I am not entirely convinced that the author is not just substituting one mystery and suite of questions with another. For instance – the role of the conscious observer in “creating” […]
It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed “everywhere”. It is not that what we are is anything radically […]
Michelangelo’s Divinity reaches back from an artfully-obfuscated human cranium and brain to create Adam. It is indeed at the level of (such) Universals – in which questioners become objects of their own self-introspection that we observe an endless referential circularity and recursion without end. Foundational work in logic and mathematics suggests that all aspiration to […]
The “Laws of Physics” as we know them may be just one (relatively) self-consistent cross-section, constellation or “slice” through the state-space of all possible optimally-concise descriptions and mathematical (or logical) entities. We should not be so surprised to discover that there is more than one way to cut this cake, nor that other entities (or […]
“Bonini’s paradox is the name given to the problem that emerges when a model of a phenomenon is just as hard to understand as the phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.” University of Alberta’s Dictionary of Cognitive Science A critical point of reason here, and one for which we may all be fairly poorly furnished, […]
Some truths are only known by inversion, by negation and through a proof by contradiction. Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially complex algorithms, that is – the impossibility of analysis to arrive at certainty concerning whether a given computer program will terminate or continue forever, was just such a proof. Kurt Gödel’s proof […]
Observe how the image in the mirror of all of our aspirational self-definitions is the machine, logic, the structured and ordered grammar of a game, a recurring pattern and design or, most overtly in our globally interdependent information and communications networks: an algorithmic sequence. The fantasy of truth, of certainty (beyond that which can be […]
You are not your self, your own possession and private labyrinth of interior significance and reflective surfaces. Neither are you in any sense, shape or form “owned” or prescriptively and unambiguously defined by any external realm or anchor of reflexive cultural necessity. You, and I, and the whole world are not the endpoints or causal […]
Daedelus Kite 