Categories
Philosophy

Technological Uncertainty

Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates? There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) […]

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Philosophy

Shipwrecks, Memory, Technology and Forgetting

Our shared future is built from our collective past every bit as much as is this present moving moment. Even as the technological juggernaut of contemporary civilisation endlessly accelerates around us, we rarely find time to gaze long and deep into this collective past through the many artefacts, entities and cultural systems that came before […]

Categories
life

Transience

I’m sitting on a small bench by the sea. Dolphins peacefully fishing near the rocks below. A gentle cadence of waves addressing the shoreline filters up through the trees to a small bench. People walking their dogs. Women talking and laughing. A cool winter breeze and the hum of a small plane passing overhead. A […]

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Philosophy

All Philosophy, Futile…

All philosophy is futile; all language, deception and were it not that we find ourselves lashed to the mast of this listless human endeavour in knowledge and technology, we should hardly know or be anything much at all. Philosophy seeks to explain with words that which must remain constitutively inexplicable. There falling inevitably backwards upon, […]

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Philosophy

Putin as Historical Blemish

I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]

Categories
history

No Place for Tyrrany

There is no place in this world for Vladimir Putin and all tyrants like him in all nations, everywhere. He belongs to another time, an era of indiscriminate bloodshed and rapine brutality between warring tribes that is hardly even the greater part of history but returns as though a metastatic cancer and tragedy that haunts […]

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Philosophy

Bad Vibes

Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]

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Philosophy

Technological Erasure

Even as technology provides us the arc and contour of combinatorial individuation, it reduces us to a mere shadow, superficial reflection and fading memory of our own experience.

Categories
life

Skipping Stones

A recent family bereavement has left me with no less questions than ever as to the essence of this human experience we all share but has necessarily shaped the form and flow as qualitative flavour of inquiry. The salience in my cartography of grief has been to discover – or, perhaps, to rediscover – that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Damocles

The essence of a human life is in so many ways its natural orientation towards anything and everything other than death, negation, extinction and the oblivion of forgetting or of being forgotten and yet so many of our actions, behaviours and mental abstractions lead and leave us so perilously close to the abyss. There is […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Future of History

Out of the uncountably many possibilities that might actually happen, those events that do become in some sense encoded in (and as) spacetime and personal or shared historical memory are often as difficult to unambiguously define as the futures they came from. Just as forecasting future events is deeply infused with uncertainty and complexity, the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pale Blue You: a Beautiful Brain

Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our […]