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 […]
Tag: intelligence
Other forms of life in the Universe…
Context: A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say Fascinating article above, discussing the logical (i.e. hypothetical) presence of life and intelligence inside stars. We are of course blinded by our own intimate familiarity with a form of life that we ourselves take for granted as normative or necessary and […]
Semantic Ambiguity
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]
There is always a choice. No matter what we do, there is always a choice. It is in general a wonderful thing to be able to choose and even when we do not necessarily possess (or need) any control over the spectrum and menu of choices available, it remains a fact that we would rather […]
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.
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
The world is so beautiful and perfect in all the glorious randomness and unexpected symmetry or beauty of it’s flow and form. Why is it that the perfection of this world deviates in the way it does from simple linearity to recurse itself into hidden patterns of mathematical complexity that displace this symmetry into opaque […]
On Orwell
The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]
Unifying the World
Context: Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation A key and core critical issue is that, even as the hyper-inflating representational information and knowledge matrices we inhabit find themselves piling specialisation upon specialisation and complexity upon complexity, the underlying (and arguably – overarching) factors that bind – and effectively unify – those […]
Or: Why The Enlightenment Inevitably Consumed Itself Each new system of thought, each extension, each insight, each historical inflection-point and distributed, systemic phase transition or levelling-up of human civilisation and each new branching of the tree of combinatorial (human) possibility – it opens the degrees of freedom, of motion, of growth and – simultaneously – […]
Concepts of truth have been debated for at least the last several thousand years – across cultures, times and places and as a matter of Philosophy (which as an intellectual endeavour itself far outshines the dissociative political metrics into which fact and falsehood are rendered in our fractured contemporary context). The provision of value in […]