Context: This AI Robot Just Nabbed the Lead Role in a Sci-Fi Movie Dissimulated truths (here, as robotic self-representation) are perhaps always more compelling (if disconcerting) than unproblematically verifiable or “real” ones. Where a truth (or representation) is introduced as an overtly plausible fake, it is the slippery slope and unravelling, accelerating diffusion of value […]
Our own natural cognitive or creative emotional flow and adaptive self-expression can be catastrophically inhibited by a hyper-awareness of what we think that other people might think of us. That is the enigma of social media platforms – in particular Instagram – for which a distributed cultural and individuated channel of self-representational identity construction can […]
The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]
There is a certain philosophical psychology of loneliness in which we might come to understand that every act of self-definition and individuation is always already the construction of that difference and distance by which we also inadvertently traumatise and emotionally isolate ourselves from each other. In orienting ourselves as “the type of person who would […]
Interpersonal relationships are in general rendered enigmatic and intractable by the fact(s) of our dual existence as both material and mental creatures. In many ways, the dissonance and dissociative friction that often emerges between people is really only a microcosm of that inverse symmetry and self-inflected relationship we have with (and within) ourselves. While there […]
In a world so obsessed with the endless froth and bubble of appearances and superficiality, it is most common for points of developmental interest to find themselves almost entirely obscured and rendered insignificant by all the pointless, meaningless noise of our shared cultural and digital lives. I recently obtained a logical insight into the nature […]
Politics is really nothing more than ethics writ large. Any sense in which political science, ideology or (the all-too-often psychologically dissociative dark arts of) ethical rhetoric are axiomatic or mechanistic systems is a misdirection to what they might actually be or become. We find ourselves, more than a Century after relativistic geometry demonstrated that not […]
Context: Embracing Complexity On thinking in terms of complex systems. The concept of emergence is introduced (at the article referenced above) by an example of self-organisation in ant colonies. Emergence is the point where complex systems acquire a unique dimensional property. This property is succinctly captured by the common trope of “the whole being more […]
I can’t help but wonder if one day, and in the same way that trench warfare might now strike us as such incomprehensible futility and carnage, future generations will look back upon this moment and all of our own fast-spiralling technological arcs and grammars of adversarialism as not being a difference in kind so much […]
What makes a beautiful story is often not so much that part of the narrative that is obvious and visible to the eye – like the tip of an iceberg – but rather all those depths that remain unseen, unknown and unsaid. Sometimes the back-story is even more powerful than the story itself and raises […]
This is an age-old competition between efficiency and resilience, aesthetics and utility. While efficiency and resilience are clearly placed here, aesthetics (as perception or experience) and utility (as effect-multiplication or intentional consequence) oscillate across arbitrary boundaries and definitions. There is an unacknowledged dimension to this binary model; that is, not so much that any reductive […]
An interesting observation is: if you consider the overall system of antithetical ideologies and jockeying competitive (self-)interests in play here, the self-defining competition between Democracy and “Other” kinds of political system seems to be a necessary component in the sustainable continuity of Democracy itself. The gestalt of the Global information-processing system lumbers and lurches along […]
