Categories
Philosophy

The Big Empty: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Generative Logic of Absence

In a holistic system, every reference is internal. Nothing outside the system provides direction or meaning. Order emerges because each component must stabilise itself through relations that close back into the whole. The universe maintains coherence by reorganising its own activity; consciousness constructs a world by interpreting the patterns it generates. Both are self-contained structures […]

Categories
cybernetics

Peripatetic Barycenter

If a barycenter wobbles and pirouettes around a “most probable” path or central band of statistical measurement(s), and if observed/calculated planetary and solar dynamics are a function of this mercurial relativistic particularity as it wanders across & through the galactic plane with c. 30M year driving frequency, what are the resonant properties of this system? […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cosmological Evanescence

Context: How will the Universe end? Cosmological evanescence as measured against the eternal darkness and endlessly meaningless expanses of infinite duration without life, experience or purpose. I expect the podcast might both begin and end with the generative complexity and radiating dissipative properties of thermodynamic entropy but I wonder how such vast existential facts can […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

E.T. ?

In a Universe of potentially 2 trillion galaxies, by some models of cosmological inflation necessarily infinite in extent, we should be much less surprised that we have not found our own very specific and plausibly transient technologies staring back at us from this abyss. For perhaps no other reason than relative developmental and logical self-consistency, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Bootstrapping Cosmological Analogies

The most interesting analogy of all in the cosmological domain is that of a self-generating Universe. That is, the gestalt bootstraps itself into existence. It is more a function of the teleology endemic to language (and its corollary constrained cognitive conceptual vocabularies) that finds us limited by something much less than the range of all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pale Blue You: a Beautiful Brain

Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our […]

Categories
life

Life in Space?

Context: First evidence of cell membrane molecules in space I wonder if we might stretch the boundaries of biological diversity far beyond the limited subset of observed (terrestrial) organic self-replication to encompass the possibility of space-based life, sentience and intelligence. Given the sheer vastness of all possible configurations of matter and energy as dynamically-reflexive environmental […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Civilisation

Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]

Categories
Philosophy

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is perfection. We have all spent so very long and so much effort and wasted time seeking some Other and distant or somehow different completeness and possession of Self as refined, perfect and infallible that we almost entirely missed the point. That uncertainty and doubt which plagues us is really only and always just […]

Categories
Philosophy

Information contains matter.

We are all struggling with what are really little more than the contemporary stone axes and torches of technological hyper-extension of human intelligence to comprehend and leverage the implicit complexity ourselves and- inevitably- of the Cosmos from which we emerge and ofvwhich we are each microcosms. On an infinite arc and trajectory into complex systems […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Conscious Cosmos

Consciousness is, perhaps inevitably and as a function of psychological egoism, asserted as the ascendant peak of ordered information-processing significance but it is just as likely that our visceral experience of this complex, patterned experience and distributed computational system of matter and energy is only one, diminutive hyper-plane slice across a vast and plausibly unmeasurable […]

Categories
Philosophy

Lost between worlds…

I have spent most of my life somewhat lost between two worlds. On the one side, a world of social existence, historical contingency and the endlessly accelerating rat race of attempting to conform to a changing rule-set and framework of normative assumptions that changes much faster than anyone can ever safely (or sanely) adapt. On […]