Wilfrid Sellars characterised the aim of philosophy “(…) abstractly formulated, (…) to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. The foundational discontinuity of history and in our current Global “civilisation” (such as it is) that leads us into endlessly futile internecine […]
Meaning is an associative property. We define terms in reference to other terms and then those definitions tend by a trick of the (circularly recursive or holographic) light to assume standalone substance and significance but at the base there is nothing, no foundation or ontological anchor upon which to secure our languages, our selves and […]
Information, like entropy, is always created. When considered in gestalt: successful cultural, technological or socioeconomic systems (and their diverse artefacts or entities) are autonomously-oriented towards self-propagation as biological as much as material facts of information and energy-processing. One of the common errors we make when we engage the growing presence of both amateur and professionally-bespoke […]
The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]
Curiouser and curiouser: observe how an aspiration to coordinate or construct and administratively or diplomatically assert peace becomes itself yet another game and grammar of difference, of competition, of jockeying words, behavioural idioms, contested concepts and roles; exclusive and self-sustaining as a professional career or community of experts which, while the endeavour is nominally admirable, […]
In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]
Fake news (as disinformation) is real, it is not new, it is used against all of us in every place and context or belief system and it is successful precisely because it exploits preexisting, foundational psychological symmetries and insecurities which have never been maturely or adequately analysed, assessed, addressed and neutralised. This is of the […]
Beauty is a consequence, a visceral inhabitation (sic.) of the semantic, the experience and uncertainty of a numinal, a transcendental that always hovers – bootstrapped – above the ever growing rational and quantitative cartography of blind, clockwork and digital (soon – quantum) self-replication. That experience lies just outside of a logic that can not quite […]
How curious that at precisely the (Anthropocene) moment in which the living biosphere and almost all of its diverse inhabitants find themselves threatened or constrained and diminished apace, we produce replicas and robotic golems that quite dramatically dissimulate that they do not in fact possess that life or indefinable (unprovable, logically) living fact that we […]
Context: The Calculus of Ought It is a curious world in which what can ever and only be proven from within the clockwork constraints of complex quantitative and logical tautologies might become the foundation and justification of and for ethical prescription. Of course, science is invaluable and proceeds from strength to strength by proof and […]
There is really only one problem. It is the problem of Everything, all at once. Every different problem we seem to experience, every difficulty from broken door handle to Global pandemic or from from optimal social organisation to climate change – there is only one thing that we need to understand to solve them all […]
Is philosophical truth bounded by paradigms of scientific convention or proven fact? Well, no – just as mind is not bounded by the limits of language in the way ordered or rational cognition is. Language may be the limit of my world, but it is not the limit of mind, sentience or consciousness.
Daedelus Kite 