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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The core question is that of continuity versus change. Not only do we find the genotypical logic of Aristotelian syllogisms whispering back to us in various ways in and as these aspirationally cognitive technologies, but we also find ourselves engaging in similarly antique philosophical reflections at almost every inflection point. Aligning personal experience and socioeconomic […]
The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to […]
This year I had the opportunity to pursue an aspiration I have had for a very long time. Life of course had other ideas and rolled a very large boulder through my world. I survived and find myself still pursuing my dream, just more slowly and with the considerable trepidation that comes from having just […]
Context: Solar storm on Thursday expected to make Northern Lights visible in 17 states These events are nothing if not a reminder of the diminutive transience of our own lives and (all of) our aspirations, agendas, affiliations and vanities. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the character Zaphod Beeblebrox enters a machine called […]
An impassioned defence of anti-materialist ontology as addressed to the indeterminacy of provable, definable or unchanging values and the meaning of (a) life. The enigma infusing materialism must forever remain that of the partiality and incompleteness of any aspiration to construct (and reduce) knowledge in regards to the demonstrable facts with which the world presents […]
For a world in which aggression, control and variously domineering forms of persuasion and exploitation have been serially celebrated and canonised as virtuous – communicating the significance of humility and compassion takes on all the character and significance of an authentic act of kindness. You are never simply stuck in bad traffic, you (and we […]
Entity and context, system and environment, part and whole. Behaviour and purpose is not bounded or purely or completely encoded in an entity, regardless that our linguistic (as much as cognitive or technologocal) teleologies and intuitions reinforce and validate such a belief. Symbiosis also occurs at the level of whole systems. Entity and environment both […]
Defining “improve” or “better” in the context of our lives is always an interesting proposition. Following a generally Buddhist ontology and cathartic acceptance of suffering as irreducible, I wonder if the role of suffering and imperfection is so profoundly and intricately entangled with happiness and (an) aspirational ascent towards perfection that – if our lives […]
Daedelus Kite 