Categories
Philosophy

Conflict as Communication

It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]

Categories
Philosophy

Resistance

There is a monumental level of incompetence and corruption in the Russian systems of command. I have no political interest and no partisan alignment. This is about humanity. It is an unjust war that is being fought for little more reason than that the insidiously oppressive totalitarian regime is entirely unable to comprehend that if […]

Categories
politics

Political Chaos

Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Extreme Nationalism and Territorial Imperialism a Probabilistic Inevitability?

The role of language in cultural and political systems of belief is such that geographic tropes are anchors that provide internal narrative self-validation to such systems and their inhabitants. It doesn’t mean their assertions of territorial impropriety are valid, merely that such adversarial gambits are the perennially ascendant low-hanging fruit of belligerent nationalist pathologies everywhere […]

Categories
information

Breathe In: Lungs, Language, Civilisation

There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]

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Philosophy

Exopolitical Enigmas of Human Language

Context: If We Make Contact With Aliens The Biggest Danger Will Be Our Politicians, Say Scientists Yes. It is quite true that the communication systems endemic to our species have had a catastrophic tendency to percolate precisely the wrong kinds of self-interested personalities into positions of power. While it is not always the case that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Organisational Orbitals of Language

It is as a consequence of the extent to which linear logic and causal intuitions have been successful (as technology) that we tend to assert similarly deterministic prescriptions regarding the relationships between artefacts, entities and systems in the world. Yes, there are often simple abstractions that map with relative fidelity upon the facts of our […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Storm clouds over Taipei, the psychology of Xi

Much stranger than that such belligerent fury and reckless risk-taking exists is that it persists and returns (with uncanny frequency) in cyclic political episodes and internecine escapades to haunt humanity in the ways it quite clearly does. There is a recurring theme of totalitarian ideological dependency upon the trope and narrative fabrication of having suffered […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

An Era of Monumental Geostrategic Blunders

Meanwhile, and as China rapidly prepares to commit geoeconomic suicide, not even they have realised that it is the essential structure of a psychosis to cultivate such an effectively infantile relationship with the world in which the dependency upon confrontation and conquest forms the ideological core of their political narrative of self-identity. Even should they […]

Categories
culture

Smart Weapons, Dumb Wars (slight return)

To repeat: The only reason we need smart weapons is because we are too stupid to stop fighting wars.

Categories
Philosophy

Masking Chaos in Strategy

The relationship between entropy and sustainable continuity in any undertaking resonates with John Boyd’s OODA loop. Indeed, the ability to “get inside” an adversary’s decision loops is quite directly related to the degree and extent of combinatorial entropy they face: information in (as structure, knowledge, order, certainty) is more or less symmetrically equivalent to entropy […]

Categories
Philosophy

Does Language Generate Conflict?

Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. […]