We assert aspirations to self-control, to self-determination and free will through the multiplicity of options and variables or combinatorial dimensions and degrees of freedom available to us but even as we assert control, it slips away. There are logical enigmas in rationality, in psychology and in the effervescent, autonomously self-propagating information systems that we inhabit […]
That boundary between the world as it is and as any of us would rather have it be is a stark cartography of relentless dissatisfaction. The expanding volume and referential space between what is and what might be is that labyrinthine, glorious confusion around which this, our own selves, orbit and upon which the essential […]
We (all) often forget that every single thing any of us does is so stupendously unlikely in such a vast and ultimately meaningless Cosmos that every act, every thought and every artefact or consequence is of monumental significance. We corral these wonders into the small, everyday concepts and containers of art and objects we can […]
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 […]
Our own natural cognitive or creative emotional flow and adaptive self-expression can be catastrophically inhibited by a hyper-awareness of what we think that other people might think of us. That is the enigma of social media platforms – in particular Instagram – for which a distributed cultural and individuated channel of self-representational identity construction can […]
…and in trying, aspiring, in reaching out and making a purpose – or a difference – where there is (demonstrably) none we find ourselves reweaving a semantic tapestry from the bare mechanism and engineered fact of brute (-forced) realism. (Shannon excluded meaning from Information Theory because the complexity is exponential, not because it wasn’t there […]
“What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” – Virginia Woolf […]
Context: Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn …and all the while, humanity stumbles and lumbers around from one profoundly tragic self-inflicted catastrophe to another, all but blind to this darkening existential threat and profane insult to life itself that emanates like dusty, choking smoke and tar from the ill-purposed machines of civilisation. What […]
Context: The most common organism in the oceans harbors a virus in its DNA Meta-replicatory strategies (as explained in the article linked above) being those of diversifying and exploiting multiple channels of optimal and simultaneous self-replication. The referenced order of magnitude more viruses than bacteria in the ocean already suggests that the grey-zone between “living” […]
If all of life, all of matter, energy and the autonomously self-propagating, soliton-like and computational shock or compression wave of sentience and intelligence is to mean anything at all, it is in the glorious ambiguity of semantics and degrees of freedom by and through which we bootstrap ourselves back up into that world of logical […]
In what ways might melancholy and a gradual (or rapid, accelerating) slide into sadness or feelings of hopelessness be the natural heir of organic experience in a material world that is always and already dissonant with energy diffusion and the endemic thermodynamic burden of what amounts to irremediable emotional and corporeal loss and decay? All […]
The raison d’etre of all creation is reproduction but, as is so often the case, the naked fact(s) and essential truth of this matter is right there, unadorned, in front of us – too obvious to be seen. The Cosmos is a magnificently self-inflected logical shockwave of difference and differentiation, of information and energy – […]
Daedelus Kite 