Categories
Philosophy

Conscious AI?

I’d be much more worried about an unconscious AI. The impending corporate dissimulation of an omniscient technocratic overlord will attract and acquire all the trappings and recursively self-propagating (human) interfaces of a complex system that maximally self-propagates and self-sustains as a function of the uncertainties it invokes in regards to ambiguities regarding the proof of […]

Categories
politics

Can Russia move on from Putin?

Can Russia move on from Putin? I’d say that they have no choice. His business and political model is that of a 13th Century village chieftain. He is seeking to drag his own nation (and the world with it) back into some atavistic absurdity and kleptocratic tyrrany of brutality and darkness. If humanity and creative […]

Categories
Philosophy

Of Hope (and Sorrow)

Defining “improve” or “better” in the context of our lives is always an interesting proposition. Following a generally Buddhist ontology and cathartic acceptance of suffering as irreducible, I wonder if the role of suffering and imperfection is so profoundly and intricately entangled with happiness and (an) aspirational ascent towards perfection that – if our lives […]

Categories
Philosophy

Healing Circles

The circle is and has always been a strong symbol of community, of culture, and of equality. When a person engages in the experience and living tapestry of shared value and responsibility that this geometry represents, the literal (or symbolic) circle of communication represents an optimal solution for equitable outcomes and adaptive growth. The Great […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Macabre Misanthropy of Russia’s War

Watching the aftermath of the mine on the armoured personnel carrier in that video, vehicle and body parts strewn like macabre confetti across a wide radius, I am reminded of the absurdity of a war being fought by the Russian soldiers to prop up the narrative pathologies of a political ideology that is positively addicted […]

Categories
freedom

On the Freedom of Women in Iran

The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dreamers

Pragmatic rationality should keep the dreamers from losing their way but, similarly, the dreamers are necessary to remind the rationalists that they have already lost theirs.

Categories
Philosophy

All Philosophy, Futile…

All philosophy is futile; all language, deception and were it not that we find ourselves lashed to the mast of this listless human endeavour in knowledge and technology, we should hardly know or be anything much at all. Philosophy seeks to explain with words that which must remain constitutively inexplicable. There falling inevitably backwards upon, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Better Words, Better Worlds

Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]

Categories
humanity

The Spiral of F̶e̶a̶r Peace

The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conflict, Hope, Identity

Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

A terrible sickening feeling…

…Year of the Tiger and not being the first time in history that an unrepentant tyrant has marched upon the brutalised bodies of the innocent and certainly not the first time that imperialistic misanthropes have enthusiastically misled their own people into a monumental catastrophe, it is the potentially global nature of this disaster that so […]