Compressed: It is something of an inevitability of both logic and of physics that the more components a material system has - including the diverse and recombinatory abstractions and logic of algorithmic, information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems - the more disordered states of entropy that are also possible, indeed - probable within and as…
Communications Culture: Diminishing Apertures of Opportunity
It might just be me but I feel an utter irony and sense of futility that the acceleration of our cultural, cognitive and communications systems has passed a threshold (or is it an event horizon) beyond which only compressed triviliaties and inconsequential noise is able to percolate up to popular awareness. Diminishing apertures of opportunity…
Information Systems: Self-Gravitational Collapse
In a world of information over-saturation, where the constant bombardment of spectacle, news and entertainment has reached a fever-pitch of colour and noise, where images, faces, people and (our) lives rush past (and through) us at an ever-accelerating pace - we find ourselves inhabiting the vacuum of our own dissatisfaction and dissonant disconnection with the…
The Reflexive Isolation of this Digital Life
The more technology connects us, the more it isolates us and the more these tools of information and communication allow us to define ourselves and our lives, the more uncertain they leave as to who we are and what (if any) purpose we have in life. We do not use information technology so much as…
Emotionally Random
I wonder at times if all of our emotional lives are little more than random fluctuations and transient, effervescent flickering candle flames in the chaos of our minds and of this, our shared world. Somewhere between the volatile, if probabilistically determinate, entropy of physiological or cognitive reflex and those diverse rationales and causes we retrospectively…
Intuition, Computation and the Plausible Continuity of Human Civilisation
Intuitions are the common solutions or theorems of our everyday life. Going with a "gut feeling" is, however, very likely unrelated to the complex of neurons that actually exist in your gut. It is perhaps more of an insight into the patterns and symmetries of information and energy within (and as) which we exist. An…
Quicksilver Concepts
I appear to spend an inordinate amount of time peripatetically wandering around pondering wistful wisdoms, diverse philosophical insights and complex intuitions. Capturing or projecting mental insight and creative visualisation into written (or spoken) words is an exercise which loses a great deal in translation from the quicksilver or pure thought to the grammatical and semantic…
The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing
In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards,…
The Plausible Necessity of Political Incompetence
Why is it that ideological, political and organisational ineptitude and incompetence are endlessly reoccurring phenomena? If the longer-term evolutionary or biological history of a living system, including it's diverse manifestations in and as cultural and political systems, is oriented towards efficient self-replication and continuity, why is it that so many poor-fitting (and indeed - positively…
That which we love, kills us.
That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody - it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked…
The March of the Immaterial Abstractions
A patterned liquid probability and abstract symmetry of information flow. The form and flow of this life and logical information space we inhabit is as much a matter of what we are not as what we are; we are manifestations and expressions of that life beyond us as much as that within. There exists a…
Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and…
