Symbolic systems presuppose an experiencing subject, yet no symbolic system fully accounts for the existence of experience itself.
Categories
consciousness and the human world
Tag: ethics
Political science inherits the person from philosophy without explaining it.
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institutional failure
You cannot make the world better by changing who occupies positions of power while leaving the structure of power itself, and the machinery rewarding its behaviour, intact.
Fear of others is not finally fear of difference, but fear of the gap through which the self discovers it was never solid, never alone, and never entirely its own.
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Ethical Selves
What is missing precedes the language with which we attempt to describe its consequences.
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Kindness
No, Elon, empathy is not the weakness of civilisation. Kindness, compassion, and mutual care are the conditions that make civilisation possible at all. Large-scale cooperation, cultural continuity, and institutional complexity do not emerge from fear, dominance, or competition. They emerge from trust, reciprocity, and the slow accumulation of relational stability. Without these, society collapses back […]
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Powerless
When the brute force of simple narratives overwhelms complexity, you see analysis and ethics crushed by scale. That is the moment you start to doubt purpose on this fragile, beautiful planet. Political chaos feels pre-scripted; people pivot their morals with alarming speed when pressure rises, and it’s hard to believe it was ever different. Riding […]
I accidentally bought a pack of chicken hearts, cooked half of them, and then found myself staring at the rest, wondering whether I should bury them instead of eating them. It was a strange moment, almost an epiphany—suddenly seeing that animals must have their own context, their own interior lives, and even if no one […]
Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]
So, I’ll just leave this here: Yes, violence is NEVER the solution in these circumstances and wildfire complexities. The problem of juridico-political and/or racial and cultural inequity is one to which systems of governance classically apply linear solutions, quite unwittingly reinstituted g the matrix sacristan of self-propagating socio-affective turbulence. It is a poorly-managed problem and […]
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Environmental Law
The generative indeterminacy of (a) living diversity is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the variously atavistic legal frameworks with which we might frame them. Discontinuities between law and activism are, in this context, the result of a false dichotomy. That is – the differences and environmentally unsustainable if not outright and questionably unethical outcomes […]
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Evil
When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]
Daedelus Kite 