A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is…
Evolving Narratives and Cultural Behaviours to Negotiate a Global Pandemic
Sociality and interdependence is our species' strength but is simultaneously also our weakness. The complex networks and intangible feedback loops of behaviour, communication, material artefacts and technologies upon which we have built a Global civilisation, such as it is, are autonomously self-propagating information systems. Once such psychological, social and cultural systems have gained energy and…
Curiouser and Curiouser: The Complex Emptiness of (Self and) Words
The curiousity of narrative is precisely the (very) many degrees of freedom available to the hyper-inflating interior spaces of language and an associated conceptual eloquence of psychologically-resonant teleology implicit to story-telling. The resonance derives from the ways that language and narrative reflexively shape experience, perception, culture and cognition. The degrees of freedom highlight the logical…
Culture: Using Fiction to understand Fact
To understand the mood and the Zeitgeist of an era, inspect the art, the fiction, the entertainment and the overtly and consciously, intentionally superficial. It is in the manifestation and cultivation of oblique and useful falsehood that the underlying axioms inexorably reveal themselves. What is considered "real" or "important" reveals itself as merely being another…
The Psychological Vacuum of Games
I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the…
Self-Propagating Miracles
It is the strangest thing that all of this exists. The unlikely arrival in the Cosmos of any of this human world is profound. Our world, our cultures and all of our myriad differences and similarities - it is a wonder and peculiarity in all of the vast immensity and silent, unknowing turbulence and mindless…
These Masks Wear Us
These masks of self obscure only the fact of their own emptiness.
Disentangling Hate
Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?
Disassembling Sentience: Distributed Multidimensional Computation
If we seek to explain sentience and consciousness we might not be particularly comforted by what we ultimately discover.
Minority Report
It requires humility to acknowledge that your own ostensibly unique personality, conceptual vocabulary and social self-expression might be little more than a contingent recombinatory node of meaning in a dancing landscape of shifting patterns, linguistic fields, meanings and concepts.
An Unconscious Narrative
Unconscious and unacknowledged, the true power of narrative lies in the self-propagating autonomy it expresses - above and beyond any putative human control. We do not own the stories and meanings through which we live so much as they own us but an essential dissimulation of reflexive psychological self-definition endlessly fails, and is foundationally unable, to recognise this fallacy.
Human Intelligence 2.0
A characteristically long and wordy waffle on the topic of human intelligence, the cognitive hyper-extension of technology, an iterative fracture of grand narrative into abbreviated artefacts, unconscious biases and a Global turn towards authoritarianism.
