Categories
Psychology

Censorship, Entropy and Mephistopheles

As a general observation on censorship, redaction and purposeful obfuscation: Information Theory indicates the extent to which strings of symbols bear useful or valuable information and this is measured by the probabilistic entropy and literal surprise of that salience. An enigma of redaction is that, while the extraction of prominent or revealing features of narrative […]

Categories
politics

Democracy, unmasked…

…and this, this is the yawning abyss at the heart of Democracy; that is, it is a system so exquisitely poor at selecting individuals of sufficient aptitude, intelligence and enduring moral character to perform the roles into which they might find themselves unwittingly flung.

Categories
Philosophy

Zen, Climate and Love: Disassembling a Fallacy of Difference

Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Creativity, Nature and Our Global Disconnect

What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Arms Race in Space: Governance of Technology or Technology of Governance?

I fear that the introduction of rules, prescriptive boundaries and frameworks will not inhibit the militarisation of this context so much as positively incentivise it, the culture and history of adversarial psychology being what it is.  A line must certainly be drawn in the sand, but it seems that most of these (kinds of) prohibitions […]

Categories
technology

Artificial Intelligence and a Fallacy of Complete Knowledge

An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time – perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) – when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of […]

Categories
culture

Information Entropy and Psychological Desensitisation in Culture and Art

When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference.  It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Fractal Fire and Microcosm

We rarely perceive that each action, experience and event is always in some way a microcosm, deeply entangled with (and symptomatic of) a much broader and more complex world.  In each notionally separate event, entity or artefact we might seek to discover a Global truth hidden, encrypted, but still standing there in plain sight.

Categories
Philosophy

The Simple Joys of (an) Everyday Emptiness

How strange it is that we should all spend our lives in pursuit of some idealised goal of perfect self-abstraction, of well-defined subjectivity and psychological closure when everything we learn on this journey of life informs us that this is in fact impossible. We learn by entrainment and enculturation that we should abhor and shum […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cyber: Technology, Information, Identity and Conflict

…as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us […]

Categories
Philosophy

Predators, Machines and Co-evolution

For many years now, I have been fascinated by the mischievous, mysterious relationship between material systems (like living organisms) and the astoundingly complex information abstractions, systems and relationships within which they quite literally swim. I have mentioned parasitic wasps before – in a related context – but encountered an interesting article today which got me […]

Categories
Philosophy

Defining Intelligence

The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]