No one is in control of life anywhere near so much as we might choose to believe. At some level we all know this but we also rarely choose to acknowledge it; it frightens us. Our endless fascination with pattern and order, with declarations of certainty and knowledge - these are at least in part…
Bad Luck Bamboo and the Magical Indifference of Nature
I got myself some lucky bamboo a few weeks ago, just before the scattered tapestry of our world began rapidly unravelling under the weight of a viral pandemic. It makes me wonder about luck - not because I really believe in anything fundamentally magical or, at least, "lucky" but because superstition and unfounded belief are…
Institutional Bullying as Behavioural Reflex
Questions could be asked of whether institutional contexts inadvertently invoke bullying, cognitive dissonance and tribal dominance behaviours. Like arguing on social media, people are unconsciously driven in this direction, psychologically and behaviourally "shaped" by their context.
Censorship, Entropy and Mephistopheles
As a general observation on censorship, redaction and purposeful obfuscation: Information Theory indicates the extent to which strings of symbols bear useful or valuable information and this is measured by the probabilistic entropy and literal surprise of that salience. An enigma of redaction is that, while the extraction of prominent or revealing features of narrative…
The Disconcerting Essence of Personal Non-Existence
There is absolutely and irrevocably nothing more likely to raise the hackles and turn a good conversation bad than to willingly or unwittingly call into question another person's core belief system. Beyond this, and far outside (or is that inside?) the problematic orbits of political ideology, cultural convention and personal interpretations of the rich smorgasbord…
The Implicit Value and Logical Depth of Cognitive Diversity
Cognitive diversity represents that useful, recombinatory information entropy from which insight and innovation assert and reproduce or replicate themselves. A subtle, adaptive balance between self-propagating continuity and incessant metamorphosis is the source of as many evolutionary wonders as it is of the abstract information origami of psychological, cultural and technological enigmas with which we are…
Unsettling Reflections
In the mirror of this world, we are not in every instance comfortable with that which reflects back at us because we know that, deep down and at some precognitive and primordial level, all of the good and all of the bad and everything in between is really just at some level a reflection of…
The Complex Spaces of Psychological (and Cultural) Self-Deception
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over…
The Psychological Vacuum of Games
I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the…
Emotionally Random
I wonder at times if all of our emotional lives are little more than random fluctuations and transient, effervescent flickering candle flames in the chaos of our minds and of this, our shared world. Somewhere between the volatile, if probabilistically determinate, entropy of physiological or cognitive reflex and those diverse rationales and causes we retrospectively…
Aspirational Creativity and Self-Improvement
There is no best, there is only better and it is a consequence of core psychological fallacies that we even assert or adhere to concepts and narratives of artistic, literary, ideological, political or existential completion and closure. It is always possible to creatively extend any system (or creative act of self-definition) by intuition and recursive…
Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and…
