The natural world around us is creative, complex, chaotic, dynamic and fundamentally self-organising. Any response to the world which hopes to successfully manage human beings and our many little worlds into anything resembling a sane organisational structure requires us to whole-heartedly embrace this complexity and chaos. Repetition and rote-learned, blindly regurgitative behaviours lead largely to […]
Category: Psychology
I remember a print hung on a wall in my father’s house when I was a child. I puzzled and fretted and stared and wondered about this image and it’s impossible, unsettling reality. The print was of M.C. Escher’s 1953 lithograph “Relativity” and I was probably only 9 or 10 years old at the time. […]
Context: What is the shape of the Universe ? Cosmologists believe that they have successfully measured the curvature of the large scale structure of the Universe and that it has returned a result of zero. To understand curvature in this context – consider a triangle on a flat sheet of paper: its angles always add […]
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Hate Speech: Caveat Emptor
Context: Hate on the Rise After Trump’s Election. It is no surprise, really, that hate crime has surged. As a far-flung observer of these events it has always been apparent (because it has always been the case) that politicians who do not cautiously vet their own words and public statements can let loose all manner […]
We have now graduated past “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” and have entered a “post-truth” world where any witless assertion whatsoever might be interpreted as defensible fact. There can surely now be no turning back. There can be no “peak post-truth” or “post-post-truth”. We appear to be inextricably trapped in an infinite […]
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Ego Extinction in Zen
Sentience is clearly a magnificent experience, infinitely more to be preferred than the antagonistic conditions of unconsciousness or death, but for all its grandeur and richness it carries within itself a bitter seed: foreknowledge of personal death. The grave awareness of personal extinction is not even necessarily a purely human curse. We can do little […]
Daedelus Kite 