Categories
culture

Starry, Starry Night: an Artist’s Burden

The artist’s burden as unbounded, unrecognised arc and trajectory is really a microcosm of the resistance to change and insight (as individuality, creativity, compassion) that we all face in life. An irony of this is that, not only is an artist’s message so rarely understood or acknowledged during their own lifetimes, but this obscurity is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Metaverse, Value, Meaning

The value of art or any other commodity is quite uncannily aligned to the acquired significance (as structural endpoints) of meaning in language, of nodes in networks and of neurons in brains. That is – value is a function of where and how an artefact (or word) sits relative to all other artefacts, of the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Metaverse Mortgages: The Absurdity of (Virtual) Value

Oh yes, mortgages are now a thing in the Metaverse. There is something really interesting here, from a speculative philosophical and psychotherapeutic perspective. Some people are quite willing and enthusiastic to jump on the bandwagon of perceived or projected value in and as virtual artefacts, entities and systems. This is plausibly because at a reflexive […]

Categories
technology

Metaverse Fashion

Context: What to wear in the Metaverse? Why should we even need bodies? The momentum (and compulsion) towards abstraction is and has always been towards the progressive refinement and umbilical detachment of a fully virtualised bundle-of-experiences as self. In as much as this self is still grounded in material information processes and thermodynamic-as-energy costs, what […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Idioms of Simulation

An effervescing philosophical idiom of simulation hypotheses is really just Cartesian doubt wearing steampunk cosplay. Even then and in so very many ways the associated concepts of rationality stretch back to an Aristotelian logical turn that passes through many minds and places before a Boolean backflip into computational brevity as manifest cybernetic control and all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unexplaining Things

Attempting to comprehensively explain the many and diverse ways in which information autonomously self-propagates as and through cognition, communication and culture is a subtle process. More often than not, such aspirations towards linguistic, mathematical (or other) conceptual closure devolve into meaningless noise that is only saved from complete irrelevance by that pattern-obsessed brains and sociotechnical […]

Categories
information

Copies of Copies of Copies

It is quite difficult to directly perceive at times but everything we do, everything we see and think, all of our behaviours and beliefs or patterns of reflex and unscripted living joy (or sorrow) – it is all just a flowing form and effervescing pattern of self-replication. What is really clever about it all, and […]

Categories
Philosophy

There are other forms of life…

The truth, or at least a truth, is that the systems that we recognise as life or living are only really a sub-set of a much larger and distributed range or spectrum of entities and artefacts. Where we assert significance to the overtly and materially self-contained aspects of any particular living system, this is as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Hidden Geometry of Life in the Cosmos

Beautiful… and the fact that these spiral symmetries are ubiquitous as (a) most energy-efficient method of maintaining adaptive structural complexity is magnificent. There are abstract, logical corollaries of this. Interesting how life possesses similarities to abstract geometric patterns like this – adaptive systems that (soliton-like) autonomously self-propagate by the sustainably continuous information and energy-processing gradient […]

Categories
culture

Technological Abstraction and Semantic Chaos

Reductive abstractions in explanatory systems serve very well to ground those systems in self-validating (if demonstrably incomplete) logic, and possess considerable power and compelling reasons to believe them. Observe the thread of Turing‘s abstraction arrive in the (perhaps inevitable) artefacts, entities and exceptional utility of cloud computing – the simulated computing machines of various kinds: […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

History is Only what is Left after Everything else is Forgotten

It is interesting to note that history, as a symbolic abstraction, must perhaps (and necessarily) constitute the aggregate sum of all aspirationally least-incorrect assumptions, mnemonics, cartographies and narrative conveniences.  The path through any forest can be as popular, arbitrary or random as you would prefer to choose and while we might consider it as an […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Information, Knowledge and Entropy

Information increases constantly – as a corollary and parallel (energy-processing) thread to the form and flow of natural, physical phenomena and thermodynamic diffusion.  We might even call that part of the world that avails itself of observation and description – and which is for that reason usefully or operationally defined or described and deployed – […]