It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]
As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]
Context: The Human Genome Is—Finally!—Complete This is interesting, of course, but access to the catalogue of the Library of Congress is not the same thing as understanding its contents. (Enter: John Searle’s Chinese Room, stage left.) Of note here is that a record of information is as a function of observable difference in or as […]
Context: Juukan Gorge inquiry: Rio Tinto’s decision to blow up Indigenous rock shelters ‘inexcusable’ Wittgenstein at one point identified meaning as a function of use. From a social constructivist perspective, this follows quite naturally as a corollary fact of epistemological (as much as linguistic) self-reference that all integrated information-processing, meaning-generating or socially-constructed contexts embody. It […]
Meaninglessness is really (and surely) just a matter of perspective and of degree, as is meaning. I am never so sure that we wrap our brains around science (or technology, let alone tribal belief) quite so much as it wraps its own internal logic and indefinitely-extensible necessity around us such that we embody the transmission […]
“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” Charlie Chaplin Amateurs indeed, and yet – as with so many things – we perceive not only the implicit limitations of our minds (and lives, collectively – of cultures and civilisation) but also intuit the significant persistence of doubt, […]
Context: New words – 17 May 2021 These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents […]
Almost exclusively, this human life and shared cultural experience represents some kind of an existential kindergarten. Our world is essentially a half-mirrored labyrinth of recursively self-validating communication and endlessly self-propagating patterns of information; encoded (in general) as the difference and notional distance through which we are each and all reflexively defined. Our behaviour, thought and […]
There was a time when I used to stare into sunsets and ask the sun what it was. I would raise my eyes to the starry skies and silently whisper to myself that such vaulted majesty just can not be real. I spent years learning, accumulating knowledge and deep intuitions about the stars, the galaxies, […]
“In the end, we all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood My life would not be a book so much as it would be a box of scattered paper fragments. Each fragment containing a narrow aperture on the life and experience or learning I have undergone. Each narrow aperture, a window on a moment and a […]
Fictional though it may ultimately be, there’s something that profoundly bewitches intellects in such aspirationally complete future states and through which psychological and tribal identities endlessly and self-reflexively define themselves, invoking meaning as this undiscoverable (or unrecoverable) endpoint or perspectival projection and horizon. After all, what better way to displace plausibly unmanageable complexity in the […]
