Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]
Tag: life
Extinction
The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we […]
That which we love, kills us.
That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody – it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked […]
There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can […]
Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and […]
Biological Computation
Context: Workshop: Do living things compute? More fascinating collaboration from the Santa Fe Institute. In short and in gestalt: it all seems to invoke a form of computation that is neither particular or distributed but is both simultaneously; that is not finite or discrete in the sense of having easily-defined or simply-encapsulated boundaries; and it’s […]
If there is one thing of any value to learn about the ways that the forms of our lives exist, it is that there is no single, simple or final answer. All of logic, all of knowledge and all of reality finds itself riven by that mysterious discontinuity and self-inflection that, in encountering itself as […]
The Freedom of Words
In every sentence, every voiced utterance and subtle nuance or aspiration towards meaning and purpose, we are that through which the world comes to know itself. These patterns and vibrant tapestry of mixed, living concept and blind, unknowing information are doing little more than that which the world is bound by necessity to do. It […]
As you get older it seems that your options diminish, quite literally and as entropy takes hold the vast numbers of disordered states that you might end up in become less improbable, more certain. It is not so much a matter of age as it is of experience and an aggregate burden of negotiating the […]
It is the strangest thing that all of this exists. The unlikely arrival in the Cosmos of any of this human world is profound. Our world, our cultures and all of our myriad differences and similarities – it is a wonder and peculiarity in all of the vast immensity and silent, unknowing turbulence and mindless […]
Amazon Inferno
The Amazon is burning and with it is going humanity’s hope of holding back the worst consequences of Global climate change.
There are always things beyond the intelligible boundaries of the cognitive logic and cultural grammars within which we live.