Categories
Philosophy

Social Media and the Need to Feel Loved

You might think it’s about being loved for how you look. But what you truly need is to be loved for who you are—beneath the image, before the performance, outside the frame. Only one of these forms of love endures. And only you can sense which one matters. This isn’t something you understand by reading […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning

We should not be surprised that our collective and individual search for meaning in life is difficult to resolve. The tools of language by which we attempt to plumb the depths of life and existence are unfit for defining or comprehending ultimate meanings in either ourselves or the worlds we inhabit. The language and logic […]

Categories
politics

Democracy

We are never going to find, define or unambiguously inhabit a “perfect” ideological, socioeconomic or political system. None of us – never. What we are able to do is to cultivate open, adaptive, complex networks and communities that most accurately approximate to modelling the natural world from which we emerged. Once we accept the implicit […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Oblivion of Broken Things

I am endlessly captivated by the many and diverse ways that this world of ours, for all its patterned continuity, already and always bears a certain discontinuous fracture, harmonic displacement and logical dissonance at heart. It is as though all our vainglorious aspirations to meaning as the symbolic mirror of existential assurance and cognitive (or […]

Categories
Philosophy

Biological Complexity: Bootstrapping Explanations

The endemic, near-ubiquitous orientation of dynamical systems towards the emergence of purposive information and energy-encoding and processing (as essentially computational) mechanisms is astonishing. When and where these artefacts, entities and relatively closed (as bounded or measurable and defined) self-propagating patterns arise, it is worth reflecting that while the coding logic is in general our main […]

Categories
Philosophy

Solving Complexity

Complex systems require complex solutions and global problems require global thinking. The application of holistic analyses to complex adaptive systems obligates us to come up with solutions that are themselves complex adaptive systems. An evolutionary feedback loop is the only plausible way to align adaptive technical solutions with “real-world” volatility and uncertainty. Obtaining contextual tenure […]

Categories
environment

The Universe is Alive and Creative

Notice from the arc and trajectory of flow that it is adaptive, dynamic and as a complex, open system in constant flux quite uncannily similar to a living entity. This is one among many instances of dynamical systems that indicate in their reflexive growth and endless iterative creativity that what might appear to be an […]

Categories
culture

Ebb and Flow

A favourite pastime of mine is sitting in cafes, reading relatively complex academic books and pondering deep thoughts. I consider the noise and distraction of my environment as resistance training, as an incentive to concentrate mental focus upon the hidden layers of experience that dwell so intimately, viscerally and yet innocuously in these everyday moments, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Production

It is worth reflecting upon the unresolvable core of contemporary working life in the post-industrial “West”. This is a suggested contemplative practice that does not seek meaning or purpose so much as it asserte that there is none. Beyond the gravitational center of a system of work, production and consumption that is optimally (if inefficiently) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Embodied Uncertainty

Context: A Gut Bacteria That Improves Memory in Bees The model of intelligence and cognition that is emerging is one in which all component processes, information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) sub-procedures and dependencies are contributing factors. The catch is that the sum total of all dependencies is uncountable and as unpalatable as this remains to […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

I don’t know if there’s life after death, but…

I don’t know if there’s life after death, but I do know that facing personal mortality would be a hell of a lot easier if there was some sense in which we could be certain that humanity was likely to persist in this Universe, that all of our lives and suffering as collective endeavour possesses […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

All War is Civil War

How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]