Categories
Philosophy

Mortality

It’s curious that the cognitive systems and languages through which we aspire to illustrate these existential intricacies of mortality are themselves so viscerally and intimately dependent upon teleological endpoints as anchors of meaning that when they attempt to embrace the meaningless vacuum and grand tautology at their core, they always fail. Is this failure of […]

Categories
life

Lonely Sunday Breakfast Thoughts

More moments of poignant melancholy loneliness over Sunday morning breakfast; alone with a nice hot coffee, my withered notebook and some reflective words and thoughts. Of course, we’re never really alone. There is always that internal narrative of monologue and observation that accompanies us as a silent partner and confidante, as friend and – often […]

Categories
Psychology

Trauma Bites Twice

Trauma bites twice. The first time is when we suffer what others or the world through them inflicts upon us. The second time is when we suffer what we force ourselves to endure because, having been so shaped and bruised by the unthinkingly callous cruelty and endemic darkness and ignorance of a life we never […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Self-identity is a Cultural Genome

Those small fragments of recombinatory information through which we understand and define ourselves and each other are nothing more or less than a patterned instance of the local, national and global cultures we inhabit and that, equally, inhabit us. In this way we are no different than the diverse and essentially narcissistic artefacts, entities and […]

Categories
culture

The Professionals

Witness the arrival, if perhaps nothing new, of insular communities of professionals that are each and all existentially oriented towards the replication and self-validation that tribal membership provides. The self-replicating and self-validating patterns and symmetries as games of practice and behavioural grammar become both the symbol of membership to a specific group and the self-conscious […]

Categories
Philosophy

Chemical Computation

Context: How chemical reactions compute The endemic computation of information dynamics in (and as) chemical reactions suggests that matter, energy and material relationships or interdependencies are already an implicit form of computation as complex logical information-processing. The interesting thing, from a philosophical perspective, is just what it is that damps or limits and abstracts a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Personal non-existence ain’t so bad…

Context: Epiphenomenalism: one of the most disturbing ideas in philosophy Consider, also, the unpalatable likelihood that all of our attachments to self-identity and the various, vicarious and endlessly complicated confusion and chaos that difference and conceptual or ideological distance brings: it’s all the internal surface of an autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing system that optimally […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Cultural Replication is Error-Prone

Context: What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution Copying errors represent a broken logical symmetry of system self-containment that provides momentum to effective information-processing and encoding self-propagation. Just as errors in DNA encoding invoke as many useful changes as redundant ones, cultural systems possess and manifest implicit and distributed, endemic information-encoding discontinuities. The underlying logic is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Why does humanity keep fighting wars?

It is because they are gullible, insecure and easily deceived. The expansionist empire-building of any nation is only ever an inverse function of the doubt and fragile uncertainty upon which they have been built. The proof of this is not difficult to determine – notice that every adversarial and belligerent gesture only ever serves to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Information contains matter.

We are all struggling with what are really little more than the contemporary stone axes and torches of technological hyper-extension of human intelligence to comprehend and leverage the implicit complexity ourselves and- inevitably- of the Cosmos from which we emerge and ofvwhich we are each microcosms. On an infinite arc and trajectory into complex systems […]

Categories
life

Losing Traction

Facing reality has always been my most unpalatable responsibility and were it not a necessary burden to attempt to bear to merely survive and play all these hollow games of meaningless repetition that this world incurs, I would have stopped trying many years ago. But survive we must and if in so doing this means […]

Categories
Philosophy

All my hollow sorrows haunt me.

I am as though that myth that as soon as you stop believing in me, I cease to exist. The beliefs we hold are very much like this but it is (also) we who stop existing when they vanish. For this reason, but perhaps not only for this reason, we all find ourselves committing to […]