Context: Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads The disconnect between experience and the counter-intuitive products of (a) material logic is endemic to cognition and it is, in essence, an irreducible discontinuity. It may change form as theory and popular narratives of science co-evolve but the foundational peculiarity and […]
It is fascinating that human beings are in general so fixated upon provisioning plausible or compelling ontologies (of “how things are”) that they quite happily trade away their own conceptual creativity and intellectual aptitude for the lean pickings of effectively fictive narratives that rarely if ever meet anything like the lofty ambitions towards which they […]
As objective reality is essentially an unattainable metaphysical assertion, all systems of belief and subjective identities are anchored not in fact but upon themselves.
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 […]
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]
Context: Aliens are a mirror to humanity Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Mary Shelley would all and also very likely recognise these narrative tropes of alien Other as being endemic behavioural and psychological reflections of humanity itself. More interesting, perhaps, than that we find ourselves serially encountering our own image and bundled native biases in fiction is […]
Context: Prometheus’ Toolbox Even if the only way we might ever find technology viscerally intelligible is as just such a Golem of projected corporeal self-inflection, we almost always seem to miss an important point. That which is created or copied and which then endlessly regenerates itself with all the logical necessity of a Von Neumann […]
Context: The simple reasons online disinformation may never be fixed It is not only a question as of how best to engage the persistence of disinformation so much as it is of how the Global (as much as political or strategic) information-processing and media system has come in many ways to functionally depend upon the […]
Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]
I read “Lord of the Rings” twice at age 9. I imagine this must have had some kind of formative downstream consequence for my own cognitive grammar, conceptual vocabulary and integrated perception of those grander narratives and historical tides within which we all must necessarily learn to swim if we are to survive and thrive […]
Context: China, Russia, Iran Spin Capitol Insurrection A note on geopolitical spin: very much like quantum entangled pairs, it exists in a superposition of states – measurement along a particular axis produces the reality. Most instances of perceived weakness can as easily infer strength – it just depends upon which axes of measurement (and narrative) […]
We are all quite conditioned to think in terms of history as a process that contains some irreducible rational thread; that while the events, entities and artefacts that constitute history might themselves be chaotic or even (and in many cases) entirely meaningless, that there is a logical truth of history no less than there is […]
Daedelus Kite 