Categories
culture Philosophy

The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing

In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Plausible Necessity of Political Incompetence

Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it’s diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed – positively […]

Categories
culture

UN Climate Action Summit

I was watching a live broadcast of a speech from the UN Climate Action Summit this morning. It was a great speech – very well written, articulate, intelligent, well-timed and well-delivered. For the particular political personality involved, this is undoubtedly a tour de force and, perhaps, a career-pinnacle of statesmanship and Global leadership. There is, […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Worst-Case Climate Scenario is Occurring

Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Extinction

The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we […]

Categories
culture

Logical Games: Golf is not (just) Golf

One of the most unrelentingly tedious dimensions of human social existence is that of a polite and receptive silence in the presence of utterly uninteresting conversations or narrative recollections. Listening to an enthusiastic account of a round of golf, for instance – and acknowledging the diversity of personal interests, hobbies and sporting professions which exist […]

Categories
environment politics

Climate Strike: Which Economy?

I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]

Categories
Organisation

Organisational Inertia

Entrenched resistance to mature and well-informed organisational metamorphosis and (useful) new ideas is simultaneously: a concise characterisation of (the) fear of novelty, difference and change; the essential pattern and shape of (pretty much every historical instance of) organisational, political and ideological pathology; a reflection of core psychological symmetries and reflexive boundaries through which self- (or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

That which we love, kills us.

That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody – it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophy of Creative Writing: Say What You Mean

There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The March of the Immaterial Abstractions

The form and flow of this life and logical information space we inhabit is as much a matter of what we are not as what we are; we are manifestations and expressions of that life beyond us as much as that within.  There exists a particular narrow focus of abstract pattern or cognitive extension that […]

Categories
creativity

Aspirational Creativity and Self-Improvement

There is no best, there is only better and it is a consequence of core psychological fallacies that we even assert or adhere to concepts and narratives of artistic, literary, ideological, political or existential completion and closure. It is always possible to creatively extend any system (or creative act of self-definition) by intuition and recursive […]