Categories
Philosophy

You are not your own…

You are not your self, your own possession and private labyrinth of interior significance and reflective surfaces. Neither are you in any sense, shape or form “owned” or prescriptively and unambiguously defined by any external realm or anchor of reflexive cultural necessity. You, and I, and the whole world are not the endpoints or causal […]

Categories
Philosophy

On not knowing the names of things (and other absences)…

It is not just what is said that matters, but also – the way in which it is said, the nuance, the poetry and the subtlety. This is the second-order semantics of meaning and style in communication and thought. It is not enough to simply know the names of things, the measures and to collect […]

Categories
systems

The Shadows of Entropy

It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous – they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?

The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]

Categories
Complexity

Cancer, Senescence, Computation and Complexity

I had an intuition that rather than genetic or cellular breakage and strict malfunction that cancer represents something of an uncanny alignment with the Halting Problem of computational theory. What is on one level a function of an atavistic throwback to deep biological history where replication and continuity at all costs provides a cellular (genetic) […]

Categories
business Philosophy

Business Systems, “Best Practice” and Self-propagating Bureaucracy

Questions could (and should) be asked of the extent to which systems, architectures, models and programs can be (and are) produced for the primary self-interest of the organisations which provide those solutions. Bureaucracies and (all of) their diverse hierarchical predecessors, for instance, are classically-versed in the dark arts of creating systems and mechanisms that generate […]

Categories
culture

Evanescence

Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay […]

Categories
Philosophy

Artificial Intelligence and an Archaeology of the Present

While we are able to cultivate semi-autonomous technical solutions that provide insight into material records of communication and – through them – a historical sedimentation of the self-replicating complexities of culture and cognition in information-encoding logic (as language), we seem a little less able to apply those same technical solutions to untangle the challenges represented […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Non-sense

Just what would you think if it came to pass that everything that you thought was you was not and everything else was inside out? Like that light that strikes the back of your eye, doubly inverted before it renders a representation and (dis)simulation of reality inside the effervescent neuroelectrical enigma of you – that […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Strangest Thing: A Labyrinth of Words and Meanings

It is the strangest thing. Words are sounds, symbols and patterns of electrical energy inside brains. They are abstractions, generated from the shared world of our experience but not fundamentally dependent upon it. The words we use invoke the thoughts and concepts or images with which we think and understand the world we share. The […]

Categories
culture narrative Psychology

The Psychological Vacuum of Games

I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the […]

Categories
communication Philosophy technology

The Necessity of Proliferating Vulnerabilities: a General Philosophy of Cyber Security

Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has – including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems – the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed – probable within and as […]