Conjecture: We are encoding culture but we are encrypting identity. It is not well-understood – partially because those procedural mechanisms and autonomously self-propagating waveforms (or functions) of patterned information that manifest as, in and through ourselves must also protect themselves and their own aspirational continuity. If it were immediately apparent how mental worlds and cultural […]
The temptation of anonymity (in an age of relentlessly depersonalising self-expression) is to not commit a record of one’s own living trajectory into the biosphere and information networks of our era. It is of course a fallacy and rank impossibility – there is no identity camouflage or stealth technology. Self-identity was always a matter of […]
On mechanism and holism: we often enough mistake the discrete, bounded artefacts with which we are presented as being the reality and substance of this world when it is the immaterial abstractions and a matrix of interdependence and representational cross-reference between them which is the true reality. This is where a “logic of life” manifests […]
“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]
This city… the morning sun rises as though summoned by the gently floating hot air balloons and here, the National Library of Australia is so wonderfully, poetically framed in representational space. This architecture – like some ancient Greek monument to a memory of the Gods and their dramas; but the only theatre here is that […]
In seeking truth and meaning I find that I must return again and again to the endless mysteries of emptiness, negation and nothingness. It is clear that any assumption of the existence of meaning (or meaningfulness) is of a different order of existence than is an equivalent assertion regarding truth. Notwithstanding that both of these […]
In the mirror of this world, we are not in every instance comfortable with that which reflects back at us because we know that, deep down and at some precognitive and primordial level, all of the good and all of the bad and everything in between is really just at some level a reflection of […]
The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]
I wonder what she is reading. It may be the eternal burden of a reflective mind to be unable to simply accept reality at face value, to question what lies beneath, to investigate what hidden meanings or purposes might exist or dwell below or behind the superficial appearances of things. At least she is not […]
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over […]
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”– John Maynard Keynes …and escaping the old ones is a monumental task when a bad idea, once entrenched, becomes the source of it’s own self-propagating rationale and serves as a limiting filter on the percolation of new cognitive methods and […]
A cognitive eugenics born of genetic testing (and selection) for intelligence is almost upon us. Except – intelligence is not only a matter of genetics. Environmental influences, opportunities, sociological feedback mechanisms, the creatively adaptive development of unique cognitive methods – these are all factors in human intelligence. Cognitive eugenics – let’s call it what it […]
Daedelus Kite 