Our shared global environmental responsibility is implicit. Notice, however, that the extent to which care for environment constitutively and foundationally is care for self is occluded by a particular – one might say spectacular – naivete born of best-guess and generally blind approximation to existential self-interest. A technologically-mediated civilisation-scale individuated, interpersonal and collective subjectivity breaks […]
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Heat Dome
Context: The Guardian view on the heat dome – burning through the models These events are truly worrying. What we often do not see, and perhaps by the very nature of cognition and the language(s) through which we reason and communicate, is that there is a unified, globally-integrated system of autocatalytic feedback at work here. […]
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Fixing a Broken World
If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]
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The Unexpected
We are perhaps all on an arc and trajectory of discovery upon which that which was though to be an exception only ever reveals itself as the rule by and through which the normative reality of our own world and all its diverse complexity, information, matter and energy begins to feel a little like an […]
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A Conscious Cosmos
Consciousness is, perhaps inevitably and as a function of psychological egoism, asserted as the ascendant peak of ordered information-processing significance but it is just as likely that our visceral experience of this complex, patterned experience and distributed computational system of matter and energy is only one, diminutive hyper-plane slice across a vast and plausibly unmeasurable […]
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Comforting Repetition
Listening to radio news this morning, pondering the endless cycle of repetition-with-variation that constitutes the sporting events, politics, media fluff and assorted other sequential, temporal tokens of entertainment and news through which so many people measure and assert their collective tribal individuation and participatory self-determination, their subjective Self. It is all really so much emotional […]
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Beautiful Faces and Bad Decisions
Having breakfast today and, grateful for a brief respite from wearing surgical masks in the current pandemic context, someone truly eye-catching walked in to order coffee. Young, petite, pretty with clear skin and sparkling eyes that were as yet undulled by the disillusionment of time and age. She was quite naturally beautiful and everyone there […]
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Extinction
Context: Early humans were sheltered from worst effects of volcanic supereruption Human culture is in effect a shared memory and transient security blanket that rarely sees (or reflexively, defensively – chooses to see) very far past the half-mirrored, labyrinthine self-reflection that a dream-like consensus reality and the hyper-extended cognition of technology must always and ultimately […]
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Someone, somewhere…
It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]
Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]
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Stories that write themselves…
It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
We never think that we know what love is anywhere near so much as when it feels like it has abandoned us and that, that is the mystery: we must lose what we love to realise just how truly and deeply we loved it.
Daedelus Kite 