Categories
Psychology

Therapeutic Psychedelics

Context: Psychedelic Therapy Is Poised To Create A Revolution In Mental Health, Can VR Accelerate It? It is worth noting, also, that in traditional cultural – often shamanic – contexts these chemicals were used in reference frame of religious or spiritual engagement that positively shaped the perceptions and experiences of those who took them. Beyond […]

Categories
technology

Artificial Intelligence in Medical Surveillance Technology

Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]

Categories
Psychology

Mental Illness as Endemic Property of Subjective Identity

It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Sustainable Food Systems

Context: Working More Systemically Towards Sustainable Food Systems: A Co-Inquiry Process A critical issue at the heart of this issue is that we lack a comprehensive, resilient and adaptive systems ontology upon which to build the structural, organisational and sociotechnical or cognitive/intelligent and technological systems we actually require. It is one thing to identify a […]

Categories
Philosophy

When your job is killing you…

The things we do to survive in life can lead to the inevitable shortening of our lives and through this almost completely defeat the purpose of doing them in the first place. We have all been there and the truth is, in a choice between just scraping by and low income versus sufficient income or […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Return of the Wicked Problem: Antibiotic Resistance

The return of the Wicked Problem. The problem of antibiotic resistance characterises a key symmetry of “wickedness” in any problem-space. That is, the activities, responses, interdictions and behaviours that might solve the problem are also those inadvertently exacerbate it. It is an endemic property of complex systems to seek optimal patterns of self-propagation. What at […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

COVID-19: Pandemic Logic

From a purely logical standpoint – the implicit, endemic and enduring possibility for (and probability of) systemic extensibility is by recursive insight and bootstrapped self-inflection back into the structure of a system itself. The most profoundly deleterious vulnerabilities in, for instance, Cybersecurity are those 0-day pearls which, like axiomatic booby-traps just waiting to be triggered […]

Categories
Philosophy

2020 Pandemic: how to even begin understanding our historical moment?

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship […]

Categories
technology

Will Technology make us Stupid ?

Will technology make us stupid ? Or is there more creative and innovative opportunity than ever before to be derived from our tools of cognitive extension ?

Categories
Psychology Science

Concept Creep and the Necessity of Organisational Ambiguity

PTSD and psychological trauma remain empirical facts to be disentangled and negotiated through tactful intervention but the hyper-medicalisation of that knowledge and administrative reach into an individual’s experience foundationally inflates the expected contours and probable expressions of those pathologies.

Categories
culture

Harm Minimisation and Epidemiological Criminology ?

An epidemiological approach to violent crime ? It has proven to be a successful strategy and seems to me to be eminently sensible.