Categories
Philosophy

Believe what you want but never think you are beyond fault or self-deception…

…in a world awash in noise as unintelligible complexity, many people are seeking for something, anything at all to believe in. The evidence that credibility is quite clearly less important than narrative continuity and simplicity highlights the extent to which belief has always been something of a leap of faith, untethered from facts and reality. […]

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Philosophy

Truth and Ambiguity

Truth is a mischievous beast. Everywhere asserted, almost nowhere justified and in those rare instances when it might have been said to have been proven or unambiguously defined, it requires we suspend ourselves on contraptions and hooks of such intricate complexity that it is quite easy to forget what we were initially discussing or seeking […]

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technology

Cybersecurity is an Infinite Game

Context: How quantum security generates randomness to shield IoT systems It strikes me as equal parts interesting and enigmatic that the implicit uncertainty of an abstraction (and extraction) of entropy as randomness upon which we must build our certainties of assurance in information security indicates a profoundly mischievous and rarely, if ever, acknowledged ontological fact. […]

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Philosophy

Irrational

It is perhaps because we know, unseen and unpalatable, that each and all of us is only ever bound to achieve what in the ultimate reckoning is transient and quite probably inconsequential that we double-down on the rule-shuffling, grammatical orthodoxies, methods and practices of an abstract tokenised rationality that in all truth hardly serves us […]

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Philosophy

Science

Science as a system of belief is no less prone to fallibility than any other but embraces this implicit doubt and uncertainty as a core strength. The procedural aggregation of a body of verifiable, ordered knowledge as scientific truth is the foundation of our Global civilisation. It is significant to acknowledge that the essential and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Are Strawberries Real?

Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]

Categories
Philosophy

Time is Running Out

Yes, time is running out – for all of us. For each and every one of us, we inexorably inch closer towards our own demise and existential obliteration. Cheerful? Hardly, but it is a truth rarely acknowledged beyond the feeding frenzy of catastrophically-selfish corporations and political parties at the trough of manifest human insecurity that […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Against a Mercenary Ideological Economics

Economics provides an ordered symmetry, compelling fantasy and mercenary ideological fallacy of reflexive psychological certainty and control that does not actually exist. Certainty is a conspicuous absence in the base axioms of mathematical logic, the probabilistic entropy of complex adaptive systems, or the volatile neurochemically-driven hormonal broth of chaotic human beings. The key error we […]

Categories
Psychology

Control is only really Fear wearing a Mask

No one is in control of life anywhere near so much as we might choose to believe. At some level we all know this but we also rarely choose to acknowledge it; it frightens us. Our endless fascination with pattern and order, with declarations of certainty and knowledge – these are at least in part […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Fallibilism, Incomplete Knowledge and a Science of the Unknown

Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and all ordered systems of knowledge or organisational practice. The indefinitely extensible essence (and raison d’etre) of all material, biological, cognitive, cultural and technological systems is irreducible; it is simultaneously strength and vulnerability in (and as) everything we build, cultivate and share. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Outer Limits of Knowledge

Misunderstanding the world in fundamental ways, as we generally do, we more often (and collectively) seek continuity and security in those things which are only very rarely able to provide them…

Categories
culture

Thoughts on Death and Metaphysics

Death must always remain an unreasonable enigma…