The singularly unifying property (as an aggregate sum total entropy and hyper-inflating combinatorial multiplicity) of all diverse methods, logics and schools of philosophical thought is precisely the enduring presence of the absence of unity. This is instructive as to what ontological properties reality (as much as experience or valid descriptions) might possess. If the unifying […]
It’s quite unpalatable but is also true that for the overwhelming majority of us, access to the means of digital self-expression remains inversely proportional to either our reach or effect upon others and the world at large. Subsequently, almost all of our heartfelt longings, witty aphorisms or philosophical insights and literary anecdotes are bound to […]
Unread letters, like forgotten dreams acquire as much literary value in their obscurity as they do an equivalent degree of emotional gravitas. There was a time when people wrote thoughtful, reflective and intelligent letters to each other and in all the playfully-constructive ambiguities of language and meaning there sought to explore, discover and redefine themselves […]
We trade substance, experience and a visceral, lived sense of meaning for a hollow representation of these same things and in finding ourselves dissatisfied and haunted over the transactional deficit of a mechanism that always loses energy and value, we feel quite positively compelled and emotionally motivated to double-down on our losing hand. This is […]
I’m a disavowed “swipe left” in this world of manifest superficiality and instantaneous digital gratification; not much interested in the narcissistic hedonism of commercially-mediated myopia and all these profoundly narrow behavioural games and shallow conceptual vocabularies, I really am completely out of place here. Nevermind that all we ever do by embracing and chasing all […]
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, […]
