Ageing is our embodied experience of entropy. In itself, it is neither good nor bad – it just is. The countless ways that things decay or almost wilfully disassemble – they tend on average to be costly and unpleasant experiences but there is a flip side to the story. This darker anomaly and compound mystery […]
I wonder about what we lose when we die. While the cultural transmission medium and distributed super-organism of embodied human being is as dependent upon transient existence and experience as it is upon the literal apoptosis of imminent dissolution, none of this renders mortality in any sense intelligible from within the mixed salad of words […]
No light, no heavenly choir and certainly no sense of omnipresent Divine love but a few months ago I came pretty close to dying. Not close enough to death to experience anything on or from the “other side” but it was quite frightening. If nothing else, nearly dying has reinforced to me how precious this […]
This year I had the opportunity to pursue an aspiration I have had for a very long time. Life of course had other ideas and rolled a very large boulder through my world. I survived and find myself still pursuing my dream, just more slowly and with the considerable trepidation that comes from having just […]
An impassioned defence of anti-materialist ontology as addressed to the indeterminacy of provable, definable or unchanging values and the meaning of (a) life. The enigma infusing materialism must forever remain that of the partiality and incompleteness of any aspiration to construct (and reduce) knowledge in regards to the demonstrable facts with which the world presents […]
Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]
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 […]
Context: The surprising role death plays in the stability of ecosystems There’s a sense in which viable biological systems persist as a function of their ability to offset entropy as dissipative disorder to their environments. When these viable systems are themselves the combinatorial gestalt that an ecosystem represents, there is no externality or reservoir into […]
The generative role of death and decay reaches far beyond the simple yet significant facts of nutrient cycles into narrative and memory. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which our cultures, languages and selves are wrapped around this irreducibly hollow fact of mortality and transience. Pick a culture, a time, a place and […]
The strangest thing about being a person and having an identity is that none of those concepts and labels or phrases and idioms we build our selves around actually belong to us. To be a person, an individual, an identifiable difference as distinct from all the background colour and noise of whichever time and place […]
Context: After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists What a difficult experience this must be. To know that life has ended and as though the dimming glow of a candle wick, to quickly fade into darkness. I wonder if this is a moment of release and cathartic decompression or a few troubled seconds […]
Context: Oceans are facing a mass extinction event comparable to the ‘Great Dying’ The oceans are dying and yes, friends, this is the kind of vast and unremitting catastrophe that, unlike global wars invoked by the pathological ideological autocratic states that are just not clever enough to understand how stupid and self-persecutory their actions are, […]
Daedelus Kite 