My experience, beyond an effervescing percolation of the very many sociotechnical instances with which both we and our reflexively teleological heuristics of symbolic communication (in and as language) aspire to epistemological closure, is that there is no simplest state or unified descriptive method available to us. Yes, we can iteratively refine taxonomies and (what become) […]
Finding myself waist-deep in a complex University degree at the moment and it is hard to get past constantly feeling inadequate and stupid. Ticking the boxes and walking backwards juggling flaming chainsaws through the cheese grater of institutional expectations while also working to support myself, I am utterly uncomfortable and quite disconsolate about my ability […]
To repeat: The only reason we need smart weapons is because we are too stupid to stop fighting wars.
It is only because we are quite astonishingly and catastrophically unable to end wars that we find ourselves in so very many ways and for so very many different reasons still fighting them. We have refined our sharpest technological insights as a function of conflict and the intertribal dissonance that our species specialises in. What […]
The diminishing returns of a double negative. It is such a subtle linguistic game to play because, yes, the absence of absence constitutes a problem representing anything other than the accrual of benefit, but the nature of knowledge as indefinitely-extensible referential matrix indicates that new information and insights are always (similarly) a negation upon what […]
It’s a little unorthodox but I suspect we deeply misunderstand the nature of living systems, long before we ever aspire to protect them from the ravages of pollution and environmental degradation. The genetically regulated phylogeny of an organism, a species and a behavioural niche are each and all inverse encodings of the environmental context they […]
I wonder if these guys would have imagined that the horror they were living through would be repeated again on some European battlefield a little over a hundred years later. The methods and machines may have to some extent changed but the sheer insanity and grinding brutality remain quite the same. Soldiers (and civilians) suffering […]
I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]
The totalitarian mindset is uniquely fixated and dependent upon an essentially fictional abstraction of closure and control. The sheer impossibility of their aspirations allows them to remain in power because being oriented in this way towards an unattainable goal provides an endlessly self-validating narrative of struggle and purpose.
Pragmatic rationality should keep the dreamers from losing their way but, similarly, the dreamers are necessary to remind the rationalists that they have already lost theirs.
Context: Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions …and, indeed, vice versa but we would do as well to acknowledge that such adaptive autotelic information and energy-processing symmetries quite plausibly constitute something of a primary reality of which all complex instances, resonant analogies and artefacts of salient or perceived intelligence represent mere component […]
A fine example of the many ways that uniquely high intelligence is antithetical to the worlds we inhabit. Those forms of intellect and problem-solving that percolate to ascendance are generally those that directly (or indirectly) replicate the axioms, assumptions and self-validating value (as belief) systems that already exist. In this way, the world reproduces the […]
