Categories
Philosophy

You are the Culture that is You

There’s an idiom to the effect that when you find yourself in a traffic jam you are never “stuck in traffic”, you are traffic. It’s something of a cognitive and linguistic reflex to identify an artefact, entity or system as a bounded or isolated fact in the forest of references and definitions that we inhabit. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Whispering Doubts and Paradox

I wonder if we whisper little doubts to ourselves as ways of staying alive. Entertaining certainties is reassuring but leads to complacency and this, in turn, can lead to catastrophe. It is worth remembering that the definitions and identities we inhabit are only as bounded and certain as are the languages with which we inflate […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Deception of Duration

It occurs to me that the impression of stasis and insignificant (as non-living) dynamical properties in, of or as inorganic or inanimate objects and entities is really only a matter of the foundational deceptions that limited scope and range in time and space afflict upon us. If we were to perceive a mountain, a galaxy, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Borderless Boundaries

Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Vanishing

More reflections on cosmological conundrums, today. It occurs to me that whatever the Universe (or really – our descriptions of it) is, it is actually trying to vanish. The natural bias and orientation towards entropic disassembly and diffusion is that through this system in gestalt aspires to reach the lowest energy state. The mischievous irony […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Bonfire of Meaningless Belief

Many of us might wonder why so many people (and indeed – nations) fall backwards upon a pyre of absurd belief and foolish cruelty. The larger portion of humanity that now inhabits a twilight world of near-perpetual, technologically-mediated connectivity and material dependency should, it seems, be perfectly content with the meaning and methods we now […]

Categories
Philosophy

Damocles

The essence of a human life is in so many ways its natural orientation towards anything and everything other than death, negation, extinction and the oblivion of forgetting or of being forgotten and yet so many of our actions, behaviours and mental abstractions lead and leave us so perilously close to the abyss. There is […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Zen of Systems

All systems exist in contexts, environments and distributed, often integrated, other systems from which they gather or variously acquire (as effect, consequence, experience or memory and encoding) information as internal structure. This internal structure or variety is only possible and sustainably continuous by offsetting the inevitability of growing internal (as thermodynamic or logical/information) entropy to […]

Categories
environment

Climate Emergency

The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]

Categories
Philosophy

On things we can never know…

Context: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, The Inherent Limitation Of Mathematics The discontinuous boundary condition at the edge of (as much as being that around which we built) logic, physics and mathematics is a global property, distributed across and as the complex hypersurface of a self-propagating, soliton-like hybrid matter/energy/information system. It is as though a logical vacuum, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Production

It is worth reflecting upon the unresolvable core of contemporary working life in the post-industrial “West”. This is a suggested contemplative practice that does not seek meaning or purpose so much as it asserte that there is none. Beyond the gravitational center of a system of work, production and consumption that is optimally (if inefficiently) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth and Ambiguity

Truth is a mischievous beast. Everywhere asserted, almost nowhere justified and in those rare instances when it might have been said to have been proven or unambiguously defined, it requires we suspend ourselves on contraptions and hooks of such intricate complexity that it is quite easy to forget what we were initially discussing or seeking […]