I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]
Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]
There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]
On the topic of untenable belief systems, unsubstantiated conspiracies, intransigent disinformation and ideological absurdity – I was watching a lecture from Gresham College today in which psychosis was posited as the default mental state. If the default state of human mental life is in fact some kind of dissociative discontinuity and stochastic chaos, this might […]
I have been deep down a rabbit hole of argument analysis just recently. There is a natural orientation as bias in many people towards choosing points of view and systems of belief based upon their structural aesthetics, not upon their substance. The arguments made for and against any particular political point or the tenets of […]
“Political philosophy” is a fascinating oxymoron. At once, a dissimulation of the self-validating tautologies that it simultaneously asserts as transparent inevitability. For all its sophistication, philosophy might also and in essence resemble just such an indeterminate tesseract of complex self-referentiality as is so characteristic of political (among all other) systems of belief but it more […]
The strange game of active measures is one in which the practise of deception invokes the erasure of facts in ways that can only ever offset, displace of delay their eventual broad acknowledgement and discovery by that long-suffering internal audience for whom misdirection and compliant fear under autocracy is normative to the point of cliché. […]
If an autocratic system depends so intimately upon the obfuscation and misrepresentation of facts it can only be imagined that a considerable effort is also and currently going into cultivating retrospective, alternative histories as supporting narratives and aspirationally self-validating reference frames for each and all of these acts of aggression. It is unlikely that the […]
Context: Banksy shredded artwork Love is in the Bin sells for artist’s record, which is 20 times more than its pre-shredded price The most consequential information artefacts, entities and systems are those which generate, as conceptual heredity, further artefacts, entities and systems – open and unbounded without closure. What we see in Banksy’s stunt is […]
It is worth noting that the pathological certainty with which tyrants assert their possession of singular truth and privileged certainty is really no less than the driving dissonance from which all human history endlessly retreats. This turbulent misanthropy compels us forward and endlessly regenerates precisely those forms of psychological and cultural insecurity which produce tyrants […]
We trade substance, experience and a visceral, lived sense of meaning for a hollow representation of these same things and in finding ourselves dissatisfied and haunted over the transactional deficit of a mechanism that always loses energy and value, we feel quite positively compelled and emotionally motivated to double-down on our losing hand. This is […]
The certainty of self, other and identity that is sought in language is only ever represented in language but is never of it nor of the world we assert it upon as system(s) of belief. Notice here that the self-gravitation towards repetitive patterns of thought as unacknowledged pathology is the most common form of mental […]
Daedelus Kite 