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 […]
Science as a system of belief is no less prone to fallibility than any other but embraces this implicit doubt and uncertainty as a core strength. The procedural aggregation of a body of verifiable, ordered knowledge as scientific truth is the foundation of our Global civilisation. It is significant to acknowledge that the essential and […]
There’s a simple little fact that, once you incorporate it into your world view and if you truly comprehend and understand what this means, will change you forever. If you are to consider or attempt to understand anything (and particularly – everything) in totality and as a unified whole, then there is quite literally no […]
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 […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
Something I have noticed over the last few years of my journey through complexity theory and cognitive, cultural and communications systems is that knowing how (or even why) a something happens is not always of any particular use beyond pure intellectual fascination. Another way of saying this is that the world we inhabit optimally self-propagates […]
On yesterday’s visit to garner some domestic logistics I found myself drawn, as is quite natural for me, to a local bookstore. Rapidly yet calmly and with apposite politeness I navigated my way to the psychology and philosophy section, just next to popular science and astronomy. I tend to treat the pages of these books […]
Agreed, on learning to learn. Recursive utility. On the (later) observations of the benefits to that learning process of competitive socioeconomic systems, as mentioned, I partially agree. A degree of competition is healthy but, invoking a general principle of recursive utility again, when competitive adversarialism becomes a goal and an end in itself – as […]
Opposites are bound, entangled in ways our minds can never truly or unambiguously distinguish. This is why we make many of the mistakes we all do – again and again. The mind just exists and knows no true difference or polarity and failing to recognise our own essential wisdom, we all too easily fall into […]
“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 […]
…and in knowing, in that endlessly self-inflected and hyper-inflating abstract space of iteratively refined and asymptotically unresolvable logical evolution that knowing, intelligence and material complexity are all aspects or dimensions and vectors of – we surely embody whatever plausible unifying and Universal principle exists as would ever be sufficient to generate this Cosmos, this life, […]
Some truths of inner self dawn upon us all a little later than they should. It was just a couple of years ago now that I found myself sitting in a meeting of technical professionals discussing some lofty software vision or planned improvement for the forever leaking bucket of logical or administrative and bureaucratic extensibility; […]
