Meaninglessness is really (and surely) just a matter of perspective and of degree, as is meaning. I am never so sure that we wrap our brains around science (or technology, let alone tribal belief) quite so much as it wraps its own internal logic and indefinitely-extensible necessity around us such that we embody the transmission […]
The greatest barrier to truly influential or eloquent prose style is that which occurs when a writer assumes (or aspires to) unique and separate – effectively isolated, discontinuous – individuation as inalienable symbolic possession of the creative art and act. Words as a living embodiment of complexity quite naturally express themselves both through (and as) […]
It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]
…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]
We keep looking for whoever is steering the system. The more unsettling possibility is that nobody is.
Context: I am a big fan of Anton Petrov’s space and science YouTube channel. Today I was watching this video which inspired the spontaneous reflection recorded below. Many of the shared, Global and effectively holistic problems that we face as an industrialised technological civilisation are fundamentally and foundationally matters of successfully characterising and negotiating – […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
Ah, yes – games. We play them all the time. We juggle rank simplicities and bundles of rules or conventional orthodoxies as though there were some purpose or reason and meaning beyond our endless attempts to keep it all in the air and moving. But there is not. This is a game that plays itself […]
I found myself attempting to explain some subtle points of holistic systems strategic symmetry over lunch today, framed in the context of sporting teams. It seems very much not that my insights or reflections were incorrect so much as that the audience for them was inappropriate. Do you ever find that in explaining a complex […]
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]
Context: Facebook to take action against users repeatedly sharing misinformation To be quite frank, this (and all interdictions like it) merely treat symptoms, regardless of sincerity, conscientiousness or any plausible resemblance to aspirational efficacy. One of the key problems we face in the problem of disinformation is that of foundationally misconstruing the nature of the […]
Context: Can the Universe Learn? It seems to be something of an inevitability, in some sense, that the mothership from whence all complex emergence arises is itself an instance and template case of autonomously self-propagating distributed learning systems ontology. The inadmissibility, in general, of such concepts is very much more a consequence of rank psychological […]
