How often we despair as though all our paths to freedom and happiness are limited to a singularly impossible, indeterminate and unknown road that we fear to even believe that we might ever find, much less take the first few hesitant steps upon. Even less do we ever acknowledge that there can never be only […]
System/environment boundaries are really somewhat arbitrary. It is generally only on the simplest and most rudimentary vectors of analysis that we can ever speak clearly of any kind of Manichaean system/environment differentiation and unambiguously-articulated identity or closure. Where and when boundaries are easily delineated, the systems under discussion are generally quite uninteresting and unrealistic. Systems […]
At a relatively recent “reunion” event, I noticed that the primary social process with which people were engaged was the negotiation and confirmation of facts, measurements, names, identities and dates. They were all, in essence, reconstructing a network graph of personal histories as effective coordinate systems by and through which to render their shared experience […]
A curious revelation of logic, mathematics and physics is that the concepts themselves are never really all that difficult and can usually be quite rapidly grasped if the method of education is sufficiently powerful. The difficulty lies in acquiring an aptitude to intuitively understand and leverage the relationships between the symbols that are used to […]
Context: Studying maths beyond GCSEs helps brain development, say scientists Mathematics is a truly wonderful mystery and I only wish that it had been taught as such when I was at school. The concepts are fascinating, mysterious and completely astonishing once a triangulation between the paradoxes of logic, physics and material reality is rendered intelligible. […]
“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, […]
Context: Can the Universe Learn? It seems to be something of an inevitability, in some sense, that the mothership from whence all complex emergence arises is itself an instance and template case of autonomously self-propagating distributed learning systems ontology. The inadmissibility, in general, of such concepts is very much more a consequence of rank psychological […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 