Sometimes we see ourselves as separate and isolated from a world which asks (or as often, demands) of us that we be or become these separate nodal trees as labelled identities and alienated decision-machines of consumption and compliance to fuel the swirling, rolling, tumbling chaos and confusion that our cultures and Global civilisation represents and […]
Tag: life
Climate Disunity
The conspicuous absence of Global unity on climate change is horrifying and, notwithstanding that if human beings do anything particularly well in gestalt it is to perpetuate an endemic disagreement and adversarial dissonance that optimally and endlessly reproduces itself through and as us, you would think that the one thing we might at least all […]
Our shared global environmental responsibility is implicit. Notice, however, that the extent to which care for environment constitutively and foundationally is care for self is occluded by a particular – one might say spectacular – naivete born of best-guess and generally blind approximation to existential self-interest. A technologically-mediated civilisation-scale individuated, interpersonal and collective subjectivity breaks […]
Fixing a Broken World
If it is true that there does in fact exist a class (or singular, if enigmatic, presence) of global systems theories that successfully, comprehensively and usefully abstract universal properties, theorems or logical relationships in any one non-trivially complex or sophisticated system and integrated, adaptive and evolutionary context; then those insights, abstractions and global properties solve […]
Comforting Repetition
Listening to radio news this morning, pondering the endless cycle of repetition-with-variation that constitutes the sporting events, politics, media fluff and assorted other sequential, temporal tokens of entertainment and news through which so many people measure and assert their collective tribal individuation and participatory self-determination, their subjective Self. It is all really so much emotional […]
Beautiful Faces and Bad Decisions
Having breakfast today and, grateful for a brief respite from wearing surgical masks in the current pandemic context, someone truly eye-catching walked in to order coffee. Young, petite, pretty with clear skin and sparkling eyes that were as yet undulled by the disillusionment of time and age. She was quite naturally beautiful and everyone there […]
Someone, somewhere…
It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]
Meaningless Existence
Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]
Kessler Syndrome
The Kessler Syndrome is a clear and stark reminder of just how intransigently daft the militarisation of space might eventually prove itself to be. One idiot with a missile and LEO indefinitely inaccessible for everyone. No less painful than the consequences of even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons (anywhere) but, if you noticed, the […]
Information Explosion
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would […]
The Movie that Ruined my Life
Showing my age here, but when I was a teenager I saw a movie that completely ruined my life. The Day After was a 1983 drama that illustrated the immediate consequences of nuclear war. It was such a singularly depressing experience that I really don’t think I have ever been the same since. Perhaps it […]
Cicero: “exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis”.(The exception that proves the rule). Context: The chaos theory of word creation Interesting etymologies coursing as arcs from quarks through stochastic serendipity into literature and beyond but then most etymology is found fascinating to reflective minds. Neologisms are the recursive concatenation and hybrid juxtaposition of pre-existing symbol […]