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
cybernetics

Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the drones of war…

Recently reading of airborne multiple-drone systems that, being once (and unsuccessfully) modelled on insect swarms, are now being modelled on wolf-pack behaviour, it got me thinking. Biomimetic systems are powerful but I do wonder if and when the analogies that compel them might at times become inadvertently inhibitory. Logic and technological (as much as biological) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Life: Outside the Comfort Zone

I believe it was Paul Verlaine who once opined that “l’application c’est le plupart de l’intelligence” but without struggle, without the broken, breaking symmetries and dissociative, alienating furnace of experience and entropy, nothing is learned, nothing is gained and intelligence (as much as life) uselessly dissipates into all oblivion and forgetting. What, then, to say […]

Categories
Philosophy

Genius and Insanity

Sufficiently sophisticated insights into the function and structure of this world are effectively indistinguishable from insanity. In this regard, a profoundly delusional mind is as often aligned with genius as it is with utter absurdity. Questions we might ask here are as to the profound and natural orientation of extreme creativity towards alienation and isolation. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Nietzsche as Teacher

More important, I feel, than any particular aphorism or penetrating psychological and historical insight from Nietzsche is that he teaches us how to think. Much the same might be said of Bach; the patterns and complex symmetries of logical abstraction he defined and refined do not (only) instruct us in the use of any particular […]

Categories
Philosophy

Strategy

Most good plans are like the best poetry and prose – they just kind of write themselves. Seek insights into your optimal strategies in life by realising that those better paths and dreams you seek are all already there in front of you, in plain sight and as a matter of logical necessity you just […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

History is Only what is Left after Everything else is Forgotten

It is interesting to note that history, as a symbolic abstraction, must perhaps (and necessarily) constitute the aggregate sum of all aspirationally least-incorrect assumptions, mnemonics, cartographies and narrative conveniences.  The path through any forest can be as popular, arbitrary or random as you would prefer to choose and while we might consider it as an […]

Categories
technology

Cyber: Hidden Patterns

Consider the many ways that the cyber arms-race is precisely this – a procedurally-incremental measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. The hyper-inflating combinatorial possibility space of attack and defence as a gestalt creates it’s own momentum and self-propagating, patterned structure(s) and open or extensible system(s). The evolutionary nature of this process is inescapable. Each act of interdiction then […]

Categories
technology

Technological Overextension: Security, Entropy, Logical Hyperinflation

The accelerating hyper-inflation of information and communications technology networks and systems is an overextended structural entity. The primary reason it does not immediately collapse back upon itself is the existence of uncertainty, useful ambiguity and logical entropy. The more components and logical relationships we have, the more those systems themselves generate further artefacts, abstractions and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

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 […]

Categories
Organisation

Organisational Inertia

Entrenched resistance to mature and well-informed organisational metamorphosis and (useful) new ideas is simultaneously: a concise characterisation of (the) fear of novelty, difference and change; the essential pattern and shape of (pretty much every historical instance of) organisational, political and ideological pathology; a reflection of core psychological symmetries and reflexive boundaries through which self- (or […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophy of Creative Writing: Say What You Mean

There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can […]