It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war. What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified […]
Bertrand Russell once remarked that all of mathematics consists of tautologies. In this sense, we are considering as logically foundational a vast, complex panoply of equivalences, equations, symmetries and relationships asserting unproblematic definitions, references, ontologies. It may be true that from within any system of reference, any conceptual schema whatsoever only acquires and maintains aspirational […]
The general assertion of significance and meaning as belonging to symbols (of Self, of nation, of Other, of flag or tribal, ideological and cultural association) is a direct and inverse consequence of a foundationally incomplete psychological identity; itself being little more than the symbolic or communications system and technological hyper-extension of a general principle 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 […]
Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]
…and by that measure, love is the absence of hateful artefacts or experiences, peace is the absence of belligerent acts and associated technologies of violence. Where, though, is self? Can self be negatively defined in quite the same way and, if not, then what is it that is being happy, loving or peaceful but the […]
Meaning is just a game we play with words; a mere symbolic manipulation of the intrinsic curvature and self-inflected logical spaces of language, information and complexity that we inhabit and that – equally, if not more so – inhabit us. If we were for even a moment able to cast aside the base psychological narcissism […]
It is a strange game we all play with ourselves where we hide those truths that possess us and in their place assert shallow caricatures of ego and two-dimensional superficiality and by the bonfire of all these vanities we shelter as though the flames and chaos were not really harming us all in profound and […]
The single biggest barrier to good decision making is believing that the complexity of our world can be captured in singular lists or taxonomies which are easily communicated and become objects of salience in a landscape of information over-abundance to minds which are struggling to cope with all the noise. There is no one solution, […]
…and there we all are, staring longingly into the mirror of our own projected aspirations to completeness, wholeness, happiness and peace; there only to discover that as soon as we identified the concept, the idea and Object of our desire – of our Self, of an Other or some compound material external entity or (self-)possession […]
Wittgenstein once remarked that when addressing mystery and that which lies beyond language (and thus – beyond cognition) we should remain silent as there is nothing useful that can be said. He was correct, but for the wrong reason. That which lies beyond language and structural or grammatical utility does not necessarily (or at least […]
What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
