You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
I am endlessly astounded by the way so many essentially unique and fundamentally different individuals lash themselves to hollow systems of belief, ideology and narcissistic self-gratification for nothing more than a deep and unrelenting tribal urge to copy other people, to self-validate and affirm identity through the distributed and prefabricated grammatical and behavioural prescriptions of […]
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]
Could art (and its attendant adaptive contours of information artefacts or entities that we recognise as religion) ever have become what it was if representational technologies such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter existed at the time of Jesus’ life, or even the Renaissance? Is religion a function of unknowing and does faith necessarily require the […]
Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]
Technology is always and already the cognitive hyper-extension of our minds and the many ways in which we may choose (or be chosen) to see ourselves through the diverse manifestations of this technology constitute the complex forms of introspective life that we (perhaps inadvertently) inhabit. The material extension and concrete presence of technology masks it’s […]
In a world so obsessed with the endless froth and bubble of appearances and superficiality, it is most common for points of developmental interest to find themselves almost entirely obscured and rendered insignificant by all the pointless, meaningless noise of our shared cultural and digital lives. I recently obtained a logical insight into the nature […]
Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that […]
As it ever has been with this human being: finding an order, a pattern a convention or conceptual trope we tend on the whole – and with very little convincing required to overcome what minimal (and liminal) barriers to our gullibility that might exist – to mistake the order we find as being meaningful, objective, […]
What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]
Daedelus Kite 