Categories
Philosophy

When your job is killing you…

The things we do to survive in life can lead to the inevitable shortening of our lives and through this almost completely defeat the purpose of doing them in the first place. We have all been there and the truth is, in a choice between just scraping by and low income versus sufficient income or […]

Categories
Philosophy

Constructive Disinformation

Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

There is (perhaps) no greater dream than to for once and for all just extract and abstract ourselves from the source of all our worries, the need to work or to perform any other task which we can as intelligent people quite easily and rapidly identify as being fairly meaningless in the bigger picture of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning is a Function of Probability

All meaning is a function of probability, of uncertainty or ambiguity and ignorance. As an adaptive or transient property of words, we can infer that not only is any particular or specific meaning not itself of the words to which we assert it belongs, but that meaning is an inverse property of all those other […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless

The more I discover about the Universe, the more meaningless this mad parade of anger and human confusion appears to be. This is not to say that this whole chaotic game of charades is without value because anything so rare in all of time and space must have an inestimable worth and far beyond money […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Our Tribalism is Endemic but Silly

How to alienate and enrage 99% of the world? Tell them that almost all of their contemporary cultural practices, beliefs, interests, hobbies and pastimes are shallow, superficial assertions of tribal identity that do little more than provide temporary comfort in an ultimately hostile, selfish and uncaring world. It is not that these cultural practices and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beauty, Truth, Duplicity

Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Fear

The thing which scares people more than anything else is not the simplest or most obvious fact that is the existential self-negation of personal (or even civilisation) death so much as it is the deeper and more profound discovery that there is an irreducible absence of meaning. This is why people so vigorously attach themselves, […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Perfect Selfie

The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unprovable me…

I wonder sometimes: am I the sum of my past, the simple aggregate bundle of sensations and experiences or memories and otherwise material or extended causes and effects I leave behind me (in time) like vapour trails? This Self I carry around as some interior burden or mirror of external expectations or normative cultural conventions […]

Categories
Philosophy

Spontaneity

Spontaneity is a living essence but in naming, we destroy it. I am trapped in and by the very labyrinth of words and language with which I seek through speaking (or writing) to free myself.

Categories
life

Letters to Eternity

I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]