It is a simple truth. Fear drives most of our irrational decisions and our inability to admit it is in fact the greatest fallacy of all. Violence, war, hatred, discrimination, cruelty – it is all at base and in essence just fear under another name. People fear the truth of their own essential vulnerability more […]
There is a certain philosophical psychology of loneliness in which we might come to understand that every act of self-definition and individuation is always already the construction of that difference and distance by which we also inadvertently traumatise and emotionally isolate ourselves from each other. In orienting ourselves as “the type of person who would […]
Interpersonal relationships are in general rendered enigmatic and intractable by the fact(s) of our dual existence as both material and mental creatures. In many ways, the dissonance and dissociative friction that often emerges between people is really only a microcosm of that inverse symmetry and self-inflected relationship we have with (and within) ourselves. While there […]
What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
The extent to which we manifest or express individual self-determination in a virtualised, distributed public display of visual social-media identity-construction is simultaneously the measure of our imprisonment by that dragging anchor and inconstant vessel of Self. Self-definition is (a) freedom but it is simultaneously the persistent dragging anchor and burden of an external world, internalised […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
