An endless stream of temporal effervescence, flashing past at the speed of light and being that our poor monkey brains were never made for understanding high-dimensional concepts beyond 3 or 4 critical components or objects of interest, we encrypt our world into symbolic abstractions and equations that for all their explanatory power always lose a […]
Tag: Complexity
Disinformation Technology
Where we speak of disinformation it is quite plausible that we do not reference any kind of antithesis to information or the logical, structured and relatively well-ordered patterning upon which cognition as much as civilisation depends. Rather, disinformation is a functional representation of the inconsistencies and discontinuities that are endemic, irreducible and omnipresent to (and […]
Reality
Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should […]
Irrational History
We are all quite conditioned to think in terms of history as a process that contains some irreducible rational thread; that while the events, entities and artefacts that constitute history might themselves be chaotic or even (and in many cases) entirely meaningless, that there is a logical truth of history no less than there is […]
Decentralisation
The conceptual abstraction of a central anchor or point of cognitive, cultural or communications system leverage is a fiction. Language and the underlying existential facts of individuated biological persistence furnish us with misleading intuitions regarding identity and all associated truths. A conceptual center is the abstraction upon and through which we reflexively self-validate various teleologies […]
Civilisation
We call it “civilisation” as though it were truly and in any measurably definable sense a civil or even gentle presence when all we really mean by this word is that amorphous mass and unknowing ocean of shambling humanity or maddening crowd we find ourselves at any particular time and place quite inadvertently inhabiting. It […]
Anarchy
It is something of a mystifying etymological alignment that a word that describes an absence of overarching governance and order has become synonymous with chaos, destruction and rioting. It might even be something of an irony that the periodic cycles and returns of large-scale social collapse as revolution or civil war are themselves inevitable consequences […]
How to alienate and enrage 99% of the world? Tell them that almost all of their contemporary cultural practices, beliefs, interests, hobbies and pastimes are shallow, superficial assertions of tribal identity that do little more than provide temporary comfort in an ultimately hostile, selfish and uncaring world. It is not that these cultural practices and […]
Manifest Impossibility
If probabilities are real, then possibility and impossibility are as real (as functions of probability) as is Hawaii or chicken soup. The unsettling consequences of quantum theory seem to be quite conveniently swept under the ontological (and epistemological) carpet but the fact remains that material reality is deeply infused by and in some mysteriously unintelligible […]
Bureaucratic Inertia
Organisations tend on the whole towards an inadvertent orientation for the reproduction of the policies and procedures (as axioms) that were originally cultivated to assist that organisation to perform its defining task, to address its asserted problem space. In this way, we observe the reproduction of procedural systems and behavioural, cognitive or otherwise normative grammars […]
I went on one of my habitually isolated late-pandemic afternoon walks today, just soaking up an ambient not-quite-optimistic Spring mood of renewal with which to soothe my sense of wistfully-idiomatic rebirth amid the decay of winter’s persistent, yet currently overgrown, detritus. Defocussing attention on any one experience or sensation, we open the doors of perception […]
Environmental Mismanagement
Context: Eradicating black rats on Palmyra Atoll uncovers eye-opening indirect effects A perspicacity and intelligence sufficient to the task of successfully and conscientiously managing our natural environment is quite positively anathema to administrative bureaucracies. There is in this a microcosm of a certain functional or instrumental narrowing of representation and behavioural engagement which institutional interdictions […]