The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now - thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it's logical complement of…
2020 Pandemic: how to even begin understanding our historical moment?
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo."So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the…
Philosophical Fallibilism, Incomplete Knowledge and a Science of the Unknown
Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and (indeed) all ordered systems of knowledge or organisational practice. The indefinitely extensible essence (and raison d'etre) of all material, biological, cognitive, cultural and technological systems is irreducible; it is simultaneously strength and vulnerability in (and as) everything we build, cultivate and…
Artificial Intelligence and a Fallacy of Complete Knowledge
An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time - perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) - when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of…
Defining Intelligence
The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be…
The Constancy and Enduring Paranoia of Digital Security Updates
Cyber security is now just a part of everyday life. Update, update, update... all this requires is a sufficiently entertaining marketing campaign to elaborate and celebrate the fulfilment of a life spent in the gamified Panopticon of endless technical paranoia and system updates; sitcoms and lifestyle gurus explaining the invaluable personal experience of incessant technical…
Libraries are Mirrors
This city... the morning sun rises as though summoned by the gently floating hot air balloons and here, the National Library of Australia is so wonderfully, poetically framed in representational space. This architecture - like some ancient Greek monument to a memory of the Gods and their dramas; but the only theatre here is that…
Unattainable You
You can not be whole for the same reason you can not control the world - there is at base no controller, knower or self and this is the greatest unacknowledged enigma of our world.
The Tribal Self-Validation of Academic Cliques
A view from the periphery on the tribal self-validation of academic cliques.
Fear of the Dark
Afraid of the Darkness that the Other and the Unknown represent, we inscribe this upon ourselves, into ourselves.
CRISPR Wars: The Inevitability of Technological Entropy ?
The great enigma of scientific and technological progress: for every great leap forwards there exists a concurrent potential for even greater (catastrophic) leaps backwards.
Quieting the Ego
Psychological closure or completion of an isolated ego remains a functional, technological and sociological impossibility.
