Categories
Philosophy Psychology

These Masks Wear Us

These masks of self obscure only the fact of their own emptiness.

Categories
culture ideology ignorance systems

Disentangling Hate

Who benefits from stoking the fires of fear, insecurity and hatred?

Categories
Philosophy

Disassembling Sentience: Distributed Multidimensional Computation

If we seek to explain sentience and consciousness we might not be particularly comforted by what we ultimately discover.

Categories
culture

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.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

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.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

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.

Categories
technology

A.I. Authors – Content without Comprehension

Advances in autonomous, automated information processing technologies appear closely coupled to a qualitative devaluation of what we have always assumed were uniquely human attributes.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Online Success and (its) Information Famine

Integrated and distributed information and energy processing systems are biased by physical principles towards the minimisation of uncertainty.

Categories
communication culture Psychology

On Tribal Narratives and Environmental Catastrophe

A core human psychological trait of small-scale tribal herding may work against the kind of global organisational unity and cooperation required to cultivate substantive industrial and economic change in the limited time still available to us.

Categories
Philosophy

Impossible Things

Given sufficient complexity, energy or information flow and time, the logical end-state of any particular process need not itself under analysis appear as though rationally derived or even substantively plausible.

Categories
Psychology

Is Your Inner Narrative You ?

That little voice inside your head – is that really who you are ? That reflective, incessant narrator of self…

Categories
culture

Building Blocks

It seems that we require the constant validation of the simplest narrative building blocks and a recurrent reinforcement of superficial trivialities…