Categories
technology

Hardening Democracies against Disinformation and Cyber Vulnerabilities

Context: The next pandemic may be cyber — How Biden administration can stop it Interesting article, but the centralisation of resources and administrative control is a limited and piecemeal assertion over a global and overall systemic problem: • the irreducible, implicit and generally unacknowledged insecurity of digital technologies represents something of a leaking bucket that could […]

Categories
Philosophy

Information Entropy

Information is a measure of difference and the extent to which we might assert that it possesses meaning is a function of the entropy or unexpected qualities it possesses or is perceived to have. Our minds are fine-tuned towards the recognition and differentiation of pattern from background noise but we quite rapidly desensitise to pure […]

Categories
Philosophy

Logical Flowers

Finding myself alone and sitting in a local coffee shop on a Saturday morning, I noticed a game of chess in progress at the table behind me. It struck me that the specific configuration of the end game being stumbled through with much gusto (and less art) was quite possibly a unique pattern of logical […]

Categories
environment Philosophy

Dead Heat: Climate

Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]

Categories
Philosophy

Uncertain Selves

It is not so much a simple matter of solipsism as it is of considered logical analysis that there is and can never be an “outside” of any system, from that system’s individuated point of view. For this reason, everything is self. Curiously – the metaphysical unknown of a world beyond ourselves is ontologically and […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

The Dream Police

Context: ‘This is not science fiction,’ say scientists pushing for ‘neuro-rights’ Dystopian authoritarian visions notwithstanding, there is a strong philosophical argument to be made that consciousness, sentience or intelligence only possesses the value (and, indeed, the substantive reality) it does because there are aspects of self and indeed of complex systems self-organisation that are not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Language lies to us, through us.

The primary purpose of language is not communication. It is self-replication. Communication is a side-effect of the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and logic that, in passing through us, reproduce us – just as we recursively reproduce them. Information flows through us, it is true, but in both ways (inwards and outwards) simultaneously as a […]

Categories
Philosophy

Are Strawberries Real?

Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Selfies: Cultural Diversity, Regional Variation and Recursive Abstraction

Context: Visualising Facebook I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Quicksilver Spectres of Endless Introspection

Even while we all actively generate endless tides of digital self-representation (as images, data points, digital footprints, biometric and geolocation records, corporate and institutional identifiers or classifications) of self-identity we find ourselves simultaneously slipping away from reality, certainty and any notion of existential closure. This irreducible uncertainty and quicksilver spectre of endlessly self-inflected introspection as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Continuity

An endless stream of temporal effervescence, flashing past at the speed of light and being that our poor monkey brains were never made for understanding high-dimensional concepts beyond 3 or 4 critical components or objects of interest, we encrypt our world into symbolic abstractions and equations that for all their explanatory power always lose a […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Peaceful Delusions of Well-Intentioned Logic

Effective critical thought is only ever as effective as the axioms upon which it is founded and being that all linear, axiomatic and aspirationally well-ordered systems of logic (or belief) are generally only as good as their own implicit and irreducible discontinuities or functional and structural or cognitive blindspots allow them to be, we usually […]