Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times […]
Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
No discovery without risk, no catharsis without suffering. The absence of presence in future knowledge is always the presence of absence in (and as) experience. No wisdom without pain, indeed, and as for information – no integration (or resonance) without difference (or alienation). Originally written as a comment here.
Ethical frameworks are those guiding principles within which we are free to make moral choices. The extent to which our choices align to the semantic intentions of any particular ethical framework is a definition and declaration of our adherence, conformity or alignment to it. Notice, however, that the majority of ethical frameworks we encounter do […]
It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]
Context: New words – 17 May 2021 These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents […]
There are many kinds of fear. Some of them are straightforward, unproblematic and represent a simple correlation between a concept and the thing it represents. In this sense a fear of a specific animal is usually just that and regardless that arachnophobia, for instance, rarely represents something unconscious or indirect other than a linearly-related fear […]
There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]
I’m going for yet another deep (if relatively brief) dive on the question of suffering. The natural orientation of the Universe towards dissolution and decay or disorder is precisely the reason why we have life, sentience, experience and intelligence – the entropy of material dissolution is a precondition for the structural aggregation and compression of […]
It is a philosophical as much as a psychological enigma. Yes, we might define freedom as the absence of fear but any definition by counterfactual (or negation) is always and already intimately shaped by – and anchored upon – an inadvertent dependence on that which it asserts that it is not. In the above sense, […]
Anger almost always reveals an unconscious truth and as a general principle is an agnostic omnipresence across interpersonal and complex (intra- or inter-system) psychological and social dynamics. Extrapolating on this: the generation or cultivation of frictive behaviours or narratives forms the basis and constitutive self-validation of a largely and autonomously self-propagating neurosis. The pathology is […]
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
Daedelus Kite 