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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We might do better not to ask how, exactly, an entire country might become a kind of prison so much as to ask why it would be a large-scale governance framework that anyone would think was worthwhile pursuing. This is indeed a world in which such large-scale incarceration occurs and as such it is a […]
In the world of diplomacy, India may be remembered for its last-minute push to downgrade coal language at this year’s climate talks. Scientific American, November 16, 2021 More children are in hospital with breathing problems as pollution levels remain dangerously high in New Delhi, doctors warned on Wednesday, and the government shut five power stations […]
Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]
Context: Watch This Caterpillar Turn Into A Puss Moth Big picture: speciation, differentiation, radiation, change, growth – all instances of an underlying algorithm representing an optimally concise or (computational/logically) compressed method for the reproduction of an algorithm representing an optimally concise or compressed method for the reproduction of itself. The instances are indeed beautiful but […]
The strangeness of life is so close to us, so intimate that we can not see it nor recognise the novelty and peculiarity of human existence and consciousness for what it is. Like some exotic fish swimming laps in a tank of water: embedded, immersed in it’s context and oblivious to the improbability and sheer […]
Context: Single-celled organism can ‘change its mind’ despite lacking a nervous system This is an example of entropy as degrees of freedom; intelligence as manifest choice. Not quite a solid vote for panpsychism but certainly heading in the direction of autonomously self-propagating biological computation being universal within observed biotic artefacts, entities and systems on Earth. […]
Finding ourselves existentially foregrounded as the protagonist in and of all we do, it is almost inevitable that we come to think of ourselves as exceptional or special and in those instances when the healthy doubt of a wise, common or garden-variety insecure intellect dawns upon us, we quite rapidly and gratefully barter our own […]
Memory is neither friend nor foe and when we find ourselves afraid of the past or a suffering that still lives within us we often as reflex seek to fight it, but in pushing, rejecting, setting ourselves against a painful memory or experience that is perhaps so visceral and intimate that it incorporates and becomes […]
Daedelus Kite 