Context: Experts Sign Open Letter Slamming Europe’s Proposal to Recognise Robots as Legal Persons Robots might be a bit of a stretch for asserting personhood although it does remain somewhat indistinct as to where and when awareness, experience or sentience arise in recognisably “living” things. We may (following, at a distance, something I once read […]
Tag: compassion
AI: Dispatches from a metal mind
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
Freedom
You can neither give nor take freedom from someone else in any profound, enduring or ultimate and Universal sense – they always and already possess it and no matter how much you rationalise or embellish it with words and reasons or project ethical, ideological and behavioural grammars upon it or as it, the underlying fact […]
Love
Love fascinates me. We might as easily substitute any other concept of similar ambiguity as indicated by the word “peace” or “unity” and “happiness” because, beyond any contingent or arbitrary agreement upon the structural or material facts and experiences these referential entities represent, they all exist in something of a Twilight Zone of unprovable truth. […]
Letters to Eternity
I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]
Compassion, Suffering, Emptiness
We suffer for others and in so many ways but we always do so alone. There is nothing quite so distressing as to live in fear. It is a relentless slow burn of doubt that eats away at us inside and in its haunting persistence and metallic tang generates burdens, not necessarily of fact, but […]
Irony of Selfless Compassion
The bitter-sweet cost and irreducible irony of sincere compassion is that in any act of selfless love we will almost always ourselves lose that which we seek to set free.
Love Letter
We live in a world that trains us all to suspect that people want something from us, that we should always be careful and it is in many ways and unfortunately an existential necessity – we can not trust everyone because this is not and likely never will be the best of all possible worlds. […]
Kind Heart, Cruel World…
It takes more strength to be kind that it ever takes to be cruel but this world positively incentivises and encourages adversarial competition, cruelty and aggression. I seem to have inadvertently found myself on the wrong planet…
On Kindness, Social Media and Self-identity
Our own natural cognitive or creative emotional flow and adaptive self-expression can be catastrophically inhibited by a hyper-awareness of what we think that other people might think of us. That is the enigma of social media platforms – in particular Instagram – for which a distributed cultural and individuated channel of self-representational identity construction can […]
The conspicuous absence of Global Unity and Peace is a function of the subtle logical fact that a whole system can only ever manifest as an inverse, recursive absence within itself and this, like Love and any other enigmatic mystery of human experience you care to mention, is an unprovable theorem of logic.
The Test of Good Government
The true measure of value and of political, organisational and ideological sincerity is the extent of persistent selfless sacrifice and unselfish compassion.