Categories
Philosophy

The Value of Good Ideas

Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

Categories
Philosophy

Self-ish Resonance

This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]

Categories
Philosophy

Paradise Lost, Found and Unbounded

Something that really annoys me is that academia, but not only academia, requests of us the simplest possible assertions and explanations as atoms of maximal communication but seems to fail to understand that this is not at all how the world actually exists. The aspirationally reductive simplicities of a lowest common denominator of communicative social […]

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
creativity ignorance imagination

On the value of not stealing ideas…

…and yet the persistent absence of intellectual creativity is a necessary condition for its acquired significance and perceived value. A principle of scarcity in economics resonates. That said, I’m not certain that the boundary conditions between intellectual theft and ethical practice in any autonomously self-propagating sociotechnical (information) system has been, or perhaps ever could be, […]

Categories
culture

On unwritten words…

I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Companionship of Ideas

I treasure freedom of mind and thought and as against tides of wilful ignorance and meaningless superficiality I can quite accurately assert that where a companionship and friendship in or of ideas does not exist, the ideas themselves can become your friends. In this sense, my best friends are the concepts I inhabit and endlessly […]

Categories
life

Some days…

Some days it all just gets away from me. I try to value and appreciate the words and worlds of those around me but they ring so hollow and haunted that I just seem to end up clutching my own similarly fictional, if ever so slightly better-informed, reality to my chest as a treasured possession […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Blogging

I guess blogging is really just a daily diary, a notebook into which we inscribe our thoughts, our feelings and whatever other existential paraphernalia we might find decorating these interior surfaces if self and subjectivity. Do we write because we want or need an externalised sense of validation that this experience brings? Perhaps, but there […]

Categories
Philosophy

On good ideas…

Good ideas sell themselves. It is only the bad ideas that need to be brute-forced upon a people that then, having been bludgeoned by repetition for so long, comes to believe that such incessant cruelty is the normal state of things. Human beings are really quite naturally amazing and despite their natural curiosity and native […]

Categories
Philosophy

Murakami’s Talking Cat

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory”. – Haruki Murakami. A talking cat – clearly an absurdity but in many ways no less absurd than that any of the mad parade of human civilisation and the shared confusion and beauty of this […]