Categories
politics

The Strange Gravity of Compassion

The Dalai Lama’s audiobook, recently recognised with a Grammy, is not framed as a political intervention. It is a work of reflection, oriented toward compassion, ethical responsibility, and the cultivation of inner steadiness. Yet the figure of the Dalai Lama does not circulate in a neutral field. His public presence remains entangled with a long […]

Categories
Philosophy systems

A Systems Philosophy of Holism

The world is an analog continuum. It does not arrive segmented, categorised, or discretised. What comes in pieces is the machinery we use to act within it: language, logic, metrics, models, and the formal decision structures that allow complex systems to function at scale. These are not errors; they are instruments. They make coordination possible, […]

Categories
Peace

Love over Gold

Love over gold: the principle that human connection and community should take precedence over wealth, profit, or material advantage.

Categories
information

Cancer as a Computational Attractor: Information, Self-Organisation, and the Open World

An apparent and recurring tendency in how cancer is framed is to treat it as a failure of biological order rather than as a reorganisation within it. The work of the physicist Paul Davies helps correct this by treating living systems as information-processing organisations with multiple stable regimes. Cancer, on this view, is not noise, […]

Categories
cybernetics

AI Companions

AI companionship is a downstream expression of a much older dependency: the tendency to mistake symbolic coherence for certainty, and patterned response for agency. Language evolved pari passu, along with neurochemistry, but the structure it expresses is not confined to language, technology, or even cognition. It reflects a deeper dynamic by which systems persist through […]

Categories
culture

The Gospel of Greed

There is a grim existential irony in how those most convinced of possessing an absolute moral truth, acting within a field shaped by fear, reflex, and desire, come to cultivate greed, cruelty, and exclusion in the name of that certainty, mistaking the felt coherence of dominance for righteousness, and remaining largely unaware that what they […]

Categories
environment

After

Heatwaves injure by differential, not by degree, through the lag between what a system is tuned to sustain and what it is suddenly made to carry. After a couple of days over 40 °C the city is quiet this morning, and not only because it is Sunday. Everything is settling back toward itself. Movement slows […]

Categories
Philosophy

Big Problems Don’t Fit in Small Boxes

Many of the critically defining problems of our time resist piecemeal treatment. Understanding consciousness, curing cancer, alleviating poverty, managing environmental sustainability, mitigating climate change without triggering new failures, securing digital infrastructure, managing geopolitical instability, slowing social decay, and containing the adverse effects of runaway technological growth are not separate challenges but tightly coupled dynamical processes. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Great Filter: Greed, Entropy, and the Continuity of Civilisation

Humanity is moving through a narrow and dangerous passage. Environmental damage, political instability, rapid technological change, and economic pressure are all rising at once. Energy use is climbing, ecosystems are under strain, information systems are flooded with polarising noise, and institutions are struggling to keep pace. A major driver of this acceleration is corporate greed […]

Categories
language

Short-Circuit

Meaning arises and endures only because experience and symbolic encoding remain out of phase, and when technology collapses that difference into immediacy and semiotic isomorphism, thought and behaviour collapse into preordained reflex, short-circuiting cognitive voltage into volatility, simplicity, and coercive transmissibility, turning language into a direct instrument of behavioural modulation.

Categories
education

Institutional Event Horizon

By the time you understand how academia actually works, you are already trapped inside it. That is the trick. Entry is sold as freedom of thought, critique, and discovery. What you encounter instead is a dense lattice of reputation management, contractual silence, risk avoidance, and procedural obedience. Say the wrong thing, name the wrong problem, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Atlas, Debugged

I no longer believe the world can be healed by better arguments, smarter policies, cleaner data, or more sophisticated machines. These things mostly just turn the volume up on whatever is already broken. The deeper condition is non-closure: the simple fact that complex systems do not stabilise by resolving tension, but by holding it in […]