…and when we look back upon the arc and trajectory of our lives, what is it that we hope we might see? Memory is not any more reliable than is our hopes for an unambiguous future and while we might assert most probable causes (or consequences) from the evidence and experience immediately (or most recently) […]
Broken Symmetry
In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]
History: In the widening gyre…
This (image above) is how I feel watching history unfold around me. Our Global systems of governance, organisation and power are in essence defined (but hardly well-designed) to compel and incentivise the ascendancy of those ideas and individuals who do not – counter-intuitively – actually represent the best-interests of that world as a whole or […]
Fake News, revisited…
Fake news (as disinformation) is real, it is not new, it is used against all of us in every place and context or belief system and it is successful precisely because it exploits preexisting, foundational psychological symmetries and insecurities which have never been maturely or adequately analysed, assessed, addressed and neutralised. This is of the […]
The Elusive Beauty of Making Friends
Beauty is a consequence, a visceral inhabitation (sic.) of the semantic, the experience and uncertainty of a numinal, a transcendental that always hovers – bootstrapped – above the ever growing rational and quantitative cartography of blind, clockwork and digital (soon – quantum) self-replication. That experience lies just outside of a logic that can not quite […]
How curious that at precisely the (Anthropocene) moment in which the living biosphere and almost all of its diverse inhabitants find themselves threatened or constrained and diminished apace, we produce replicas and robotic golems that quite dramatically dissimulate that they do not in fact possess that life or indefinable (unprovable, logically) living fact that we […]
Context: The Calculus of Ought It is a curious world in which what can ever and only be proven from within the clockwork constraints of complex quantitative and logical tautologies might become the foundation and justification of and for ethical prescription. Of course, science is invaluable and proceeds from strength to strength by proof and […]
A Clockwork Heart?
The clockwork mechanisms of a heart… and what if that is all that this neuroanatomical and hormonal confusion of emotional experience actually is… just so much blind or mechanical rule-following and biochemical algorithms upon which we are not so much the conductors as the passengers, not necessary but contingent, not the main character of a […]
Cyber: The House Always Wins
Is cyber security a complex game? Of course, it (i.e cyber) is all a game – of probability, of information entropy, of indefinitely-extensible logical or material systems and of successfully negotiating the vast and hyper-inflating, self-gravitating referential spaces of technology, communication and psychological or socioeconomic and ideological motivations that provide momentum here. To attenuate an […]
Art as a Function of Ignorance
Could art (and its attendant adaptive contours of information artefacts or entities that we recognise as religion) ever have become what it was if representational technologies such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter existed at the time of Jesus’ life, or even the Renaissance? Is religion a function of unknowing and does faith necessarily require the […]
There is only one Problem
There is really only one problem. It is the problem of Everything, all at once. Every different problem we seem to experience, every difficulty from broken door handle to Global pandemic or from from optimal social organisation to climate change – there is only one thing that we need to understand to solve them all […]
Love Letter
We live in a world that trains us all to suspect that people want something from us, that we should always be careful and it is in many ways and unfortunately an existential necessity – we can not trust everyone because this is not and likely never will be the best of all possible worlds. […]