Categories
Alien Anthropology

Russian Roullette: Strategic Void

Putin has mastered a political game of Machiavellian command and control, of surveillance and power but he remains quite clearly overwhelmed by the unmanageable complexities of the war he has invoked and inflicted as much upon his own people as upon the peoples of Ukraine and, through them, of the free world. The danger of […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Knowing, Unknowing and Ignorance

The diminishing returns of a double negative. It is such a subtle linguistic game to play because, yes, the absence of absence constitutes a problem representing anything other than the accrual of benefit, but the nature of knowledge as indefinitely-extensible referential matrix indicates that new information and insights are always (similarly) a negation upon what […]

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Philosophy

Naive Happiness

Whether as a function of age, ignorance or blind good fortune to never have suffered any of life’s indignities or inevitable hardships – it always strikes me that the happiest people I know have pretty much no idea how the world really works and just how dark it can be, how unfair and complex or […]

Categories
Philosophy

Viral Misinformation

Context: The misinformation virus Systems of belief are without exception only ever aspirationally grounded upon the objects of their attention. It is as a function of endemic logical (as much as material or cognitive, cultural and communications system) extensibility that these systems become anchored as effective tautologies upon themselves. In this way they can adaptively […]

Categories
Philosophy

Curiosity kills me…

The more I learn, or – rather – the more that this world unveils itself to me through experience and reflective consideration, the less I understand and the less I know. It is always this way – learning aligns to discovering how little you truly know; a little like how love seems to always accompany […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ignorance as Enemy of Knowledge

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking …and yet, how often is ignorance really little more than the illusion of knowledge? We can quite easily  observe (very many) belief systems masquerading as factual, informed knowledge in all spheres of human life. Scientific knowledge is a […]

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Philosophy

Ignorance

Ignorance (as a choice) of course comes with its own price tag, usually measured in surprise and complete nonplussed naivete as to the causes and consequences of thoughts, actions and statements as facts in the world; ironically by this complete (and more often wilful) stupidity, to unwittingly recreate the preconditions for most of this human […]

Categories
Psychology

Ignorance is Bliss

If it is true that ignorance is bliss, I am surprised that there are not many more blissfully happy people in this world. Ignorance, of course, has quite little to do at all with acquired knowledge or education and is more often a direct measure of a person (or group) being unable to accommodate the […]

Categories
culture

Art as a Function of Ignorance

Could art (and its attendant adaptive contours of information artefacts or entities that we recognise as religion) ever have become what it was if representational technologies such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter existed at the time of Jesus’ life, or even the Renaissance? Is religion a function of unknowing and does faith necessarily require the […]

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Philosophy

Intelligence

Intelligence is either there in (or as) someone’s mind or it is not. Where it is not there, no amount of rhetorical hyperbole or tribal and ideological alignment can dissimulate its absence. Ignorance can in most cases be remediated, lack of intelligence is a little more difficult to amend.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Fools are Flying this Civilisation into Self-Destruction

A contemporary proliferation of fools is not half as terrible as their common access to digital communications platforms through which they might channel, diffuse and disseminate their compound and stagnant simpleton’s craft of remedial unknowing. In waving these great banners of stupidity, they seek to bludgeon rationality, intelligence and civilisation itself into humble (and submissive) […]

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Philosophy

Bread Crumbs

Going with the flow of natural law and optimally-concise emergent complexity proves to be an intractable enigma for the collective geopolitical neurotic atavism of our world.