I am endlessly astounded by the way so many essentially unique and fundamentally different individuals lash themselves to hollow systems of belief, ideology and narcissistic self-gratification for nothing more than a deep and unrelenting tribal urge to copy other people, to self-validate and affirm identity through the distributed and prefabricated grammatical and behavioural prescriptions of […]
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Partisan Politics, continued…
An observation from Complex Systems Science: Regardless of those (internal or external) who might be seeking to generate more friction and to extract political or ideological value from it, the contemporary extremity of partisan adversarialism and dissonant turbulence that characterises the US political system has the characteristics of a dissipative system – that is, a […]
The question is surely as to a definition of meaning. As Russell remarked in “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions – ergo and by way of endemic circularity there is no anchor or Archimedes Point upon which to hang notions of a “most meaningful” life. All meaning is […]
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Thin Masks of Self-Deception
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
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Misunderstanding Selfies
I do wonder if we perhaps miss the forest for the trees, here. The primary function and operational practice of any cognitive or cultural communications system is that of encoding self-replication as sustainable continuity. Where we are all quite intimately bound to and fascinated by these technologically-mediated interpersonal spaces, in an implicit near-narcotic and narcissistic […]
For all our aspirations to escape the implicit biases and semantic turbulence of cognition, culture and the diverse linguistic or other semi-formal behavioural and conceptual encoding grammars we inhabit, there are very likely intrinsic symmetries in information and communications systems that orient them towards qualititatively dissonant outcomes. Biases are functional amplifications of difference and information […]
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Irony of Selfless Compassion
The bitter-sweet cost and irreducible irony of sincere compassion is that in any act of selfless love we will almost always ourselves lose that which we seek to set free.
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Endless Redefinition of Human Dignity
All meanings are by spoken or unspoken convention, by agreement and – being that every word or mind and context is foundationally dynamic – exist as saliences in distributed fields of communication. In the first few pages of “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell raises an irreducible spectre (or is it an angel?) of circularity […]
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Other forms of life in the Universe…
Context: A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say Fascinating article above, discussing the logical (i.e. hypothetical) presence of life and intelligence inside stars. We are of course blinded by our own intimate familiarity with a form of life that we ourselves take for granted as normative or necessary and […]
Context: Would you trust an AI Operative in the field? This (quote from the above article) is an assessment of limitations in current AI: “…tend to respond well to what they’ve been trained to detect, but responses can become erratic when confronted with unexpected circumstances…” is in fact, and perhaps not coincidentally, an operational and […]
SEDUCTION is a game of chess – a patterned strategy of conquest. Men fancy themselves asserting power as Kings but as mere arrogant pawns are all too soon spent upon a battlefield rushed into without thought, ruined by hidden rules rarely understood and – in hasty passions of unthinking desire – that are often ignored. […]
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Hollow Theology
Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]
Daedelus Kite 