Categories
life

Apple-Picking

He walked with his head tipped back, eyes pressed into the wide blue, clouds dragging their shadows across him like indifferent hands. The paddocks on either side were brittle with grass, and the orchard ahead leaned heavy with fruit. Apples, not just apples, he thought—each one a record of chance, a refusal to collapse. He […]

Categories
Philosophy

No Regrets

To live a life is to move through time as a bounded organism, continually drawn forward by needs, constraints, and the unchosen momentum of events. It is to be carried in the current of continuity, while making sense of that current by binding fragments into something resembling a narrative. The “good life,” if it can […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Shack by the Sea

He lived in a shotgun shack by the sea, patched with tin and leaning under the wind. The tide was his only clock, the gulls his only critics. He fished enough to eat, carried crates at the dock when it was needed, and spent his nights hunched over scraps of paper, writing lines that never […]

Categories
cybernetics

Life as Symptom

Life isn’t a straight road to a clean finish. It’s a current, an unfinished line, carrying us forward without ever dropping us at the end of the map. Death isn’t the enemy at the gates; it’s the shadow that makes the light visible. The two belong together, circling each other like hawks on a thermal. […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Suffering

Suffering is not a mistake in the order of things; it is the order. What feels like rupture, misalignment, or lack of closure is the very condition that generates motion and awareness. Without tension, the field would dissolve into stasis. The loop persists because it cannot do otherwise, and every attempt to escape its curvature […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dependent Definition

The more precisely we define and describe any system, the more deeply it becomes embedded in the field of relations (and/or language) that makes it possible. This is not an accidental by-product of analysis but a structural inevitability: to single something out is to weave it more tightly into what surrounds it. Every definition is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Out of Phase: Structure of Long-Term Unemployment

Long-term unemployment doesn’t just deprive you of income. It disconnects you from the feedback circuits where recognition, relevance, and reality are conferred. The world continues, but the rhythm is no longer yours. You’re not simply on the outside—you’re out of phase. What long-term unemployment reveals, often with brutal clarity, is how thoroughly access to experience—joy, […]

Categories
poetry

Language Leads

Language leads. That’s the hinge point—what swings open the door to everything else. It’s not merely a mirror of thought, or a tool we use. It thinks us, moves us, builds us. Once language emerged, it didn’t just describe life; it became its own strata of evolution. A self-propagating layer, viral in structure, cognitive in […]

Categories
environment

Gaia: Daisyworld

James Lovelock (1919–2022) was as pioneering as he was resisted. Uniquely famous for proposing the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that Earth behaves as a self-regulating system—he faced deep scepticism, dismissed by many as mystical or unscientific. Yet it was Daisyworld, his elegant simulation of a planet populated by simple black and white daisies, that provided a […]

Categories
cybernetics

Holistic Systems 101

Any system, when considered in its entirety, has no external reference point. If it is an abstraction, then it is wholly self-contained, looping back into itself without remainder. But if that abstraction maps onto reality, then the implication is staggering—there must be a fundamental discontinuity woven into the structure of existence itself.°° Absence is not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Death, Life and other Symbols

I wonder about what we lose when we die. While the cultural transmission medium and distributed super-organism of embodied human being is as dependent upon transient existence and experience as it is upon the literal apoptosis of imminent dissolution, none of this renders mortality in any sense intelligible from within the mixed salad of words […]

Categories
Philosophy

Alienation and Meaning: Bartering Emptiness with Language

The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]