Belief systems—political, spiritual, cultural—are not merely catalogues of doctrine or symbolic taxonomies but function as frictional zones where indeterminate claims meet, clash, and persist. The turbulence generated by unprovable assertions—whether about metaphysical truth, national destiny, or social justice—creates a binding tension. This tension provides the continuity through which institutions, rituals, and governance structures stabilize themselves, […]
The trouble is that every path winds through a carnival of fools. Not because the world is malicious, but because the coordinates of sense are infinite, and what maps cleanly in one quadrant looks deranged in another. Language and habit do the dirty work—each person carrying their own system of signals, every encounter a clash […]
Even quantum physicists cannot agree on what “quantum” means, and this is not a trivial quirk but the ground itself on which the science stands. Competing interpretations—from Copenhagen collapse to Many-Worlds, pilot-wave theories, and newer relational models—circle the same mathematical successes with divergent ontological claims. The mathematics works with uncanny precision, yet the conceptual foundation […]
Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]
Understanding that language is essentially quicksilver and almost impossible to control or unambiguously direct for communication and meaning is a difficult realisation to negotiate. A consequence of this problematic ambiguity is that the kinds of language and narratives or systems of belief that percolate to ascendance tend to be quite remedial and simplistic. This inevitably […]
Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]
I have been deep down a rabbit hole of argument analysis just recently. There is a natural orientation as bias in many people towards choosing points of view and systems of belief based upon their structural aesthetics, not upon their substance. The arguments made for and against any particular political point or the tenets of […]
Beyond a very limited range of skill or intuition, no one really knows what they are doing or how best to organise our world. Systems of belief asserting closure and certainty emerge as an inverse function of a growing doubt and uncertainty that they mask with spectacles of bravado or deception. Stupidity as simplistic systems […]
There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]
Political systems, as much as the ideologies which endlessly resonate through them, are very much not as controlled or indicative of individual or collective self-determination as people might choose to believe. There is certainly choice, just as there is responsibility, but the overall complex dynamical system as information and energy-processing field that these artefacts embody […]
Because entropy. There are always and as a consequence of combinatorial necessity more disordered states available than ordered ones and as a consequence debate eventually travels through them into dissonance and disagreement but this, curiously, is also the source for more philosophy. It is a common (recursive) idiom and is endemic of and to logic, […]
There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]
Daedelus Kite 