It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed "everywhere".It is not that what we are is anything radically other…
Political Problems: the ubiquitous, intractable and shared enigmas of outsourcing our rationality to those least able to effectively use it
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material…
Why do scientific theories become more complex?
"Bonini's paradox is the name given to the problem that emerges when a model of a phenomenon is just as hard to understand as the phenomenon that it is supposed to explain."University of Alberta's Dictionary of Cognitive Science A critical point of reason here, and one for which we may all be fairly poorly furnished, as…
Ascending An Impossible Self-Disassembly of Infinitely-Extensible Emptiness
Some truths are only known by inversion, by negation and through a proof by contradiction. Alan Turing's proof of the undecidability of non-trivially complex algorithms, that is - the impossibility of analysis to arrive at certainty concerning whether a given computer program will terminate or continue forever, was just such a proof. Kurt Gödel's proof…
Digital Transformation and Cultural Bottlenecks
Organisations are information and energy-processing systems. Information and energy-processing systems are autonomously oriented (via physics, logic, mathematics) towards low energy states. This orientation or endemic systems -bias towards low energy states bridges inanimate and living systems but may be considered to have obtained a special status in living systems.The differentiator of life in this context…
On Mechanism, Holism and (an) Organisational Logic of Life
On mechanism and holism: we often enough mistake the discrete, bounded artefacts with which we are presented as being the reality and substance of this world when it is the immaterial abstractions and a matrix of interdependence and representational cross-reference between them which is the true reality. This is where a "logic of life" manifests…
Beauty and Impossibility
Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration…
Evanescence
Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay…
Monday mornings…
...a vast and yawning abyss of commuter futility only partially masked by the endless distraction of engorging ourselves on information artefacts, channels, opinions, fiction and repetition. It is as though we can not even savour our loneliness and feelings of dispossession or pointlessness at all of this cyclical and directionless repetition. The cognitive landscape of…
On deep dives and dumbing it down…
I am the living entropy of embodied experience and a philosophical longing for truth, intelligence, wisdom and beauty. As are you. The requirements for popular communication and subjective comprehension of this world act like a vast and ponderous anchor and dead weight on our collective aptitude to save ourselves, from ourselves. We must unevitably bear…
Taxonomies, Marmalade and Technology
Taxonomies, the branching logic of binary algorithms and decision-trees that - as though by the stealth of cultural (and commercial) entrainment and that generally unwitting human self-obsession which rarely notices that the rising tide and hyper-inflating menu of choice has become anything but an augmentation of freedom - have flooded us with logical paths and…
FOMO
Fear of missing out is much deeper and more challenging than the superficiality with which it is commonly portrayed. At some level we are all aware that we have very little effect on this world, that despite our starring role in the narrative theatre of our own life - we have almost no influence or…
