Categories
Philosophy

Impermanent Meaning

History has tended to imagine meaning as a property intrinsic to utterance, as though the resonance of Homer’s epic, a political slogan, or a fragment of scripture was carried forward by some eternal flame of truth. Yet the record suggests otherwise: what endures is what circulates, and circulation itself confers the aura of importance. The […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Before Words

It is a continuum that precedes the adaptive scaffolding of rules, a topology in which emergence is not sequence but diffusion, inertial self-entanglement . No stepping stones, no waypoints: only gradients that viscously descend into what later appears as order, meaning, belief, purpose. The Shepard tone of entropy is its register—always rising, drift where difference […]

Categories
cybernetics

Spinning Wheel: Rethinking Unemployment

Unemployment is never just a matter of individual misfortune; it is the visible seam of a whole system that, by its very structure, requires some to fall outside. Support services exist to catch those who slip, but the system is double-edged: their presence signals both care and the ongoing persistence of the very gaps they […]

Categories
cybernetics

Democracy, redux

Democracies now find themselves grappling with something deeper than electoral cycles or policy gridlock. The very substrate they rely on—shared information, communication, interpretation—has fundamentally changed. The informational field is no longer a backdrop; it’s an autonomous, dynamic system, with its own turbulence, feedback loops, and emergent properties. It behaves like weather: shifting, recursive, indifferent to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Thingness

Thingness uplifts the self through reference, yet binds it through relation. The self emerges only by pointing beyond itself—by anchoring meaning in aspirational yet ultimately fictive external structures, signs, echoes. But that gesture, that outward reach, also cages it in a loop of dependency: to be intelligible, it must be relational; to be relational, it […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI and You

There is a central self-gravitational pivot and compound acceleration in the distributed, patterned fields of dynamical symmetry that spontaneously emerge as a communications bridge between human experience and artificial intelligence. The first principle to realise is that, just as there can be no ordered descriptions beyond the languages and encoding systems with which we assert […]

Categories
Philosophy

Who copies the copiers?

We are the mockingbirds, compulsively copying the copies and idiomatic machinery of our shared times and places, of our competitive or collaborative systems of belief. We don’t copy things, we reflexively copy their encoding mechanisms. Each and every coding error breeds further evolutionary metamorphosis. This indicates our critical dependency upon, and endless invocation of, productive […]

Categories
Philosophy

Induction

Context: Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of an Entire Universe Such induction to general principles from instances is itself, also, a broader lesson regarding complexity. If recognisable (i.e. “real world”) properties of cosmological matter and energy distribution can be inferred from a single galaxy, in what other systems does such a depth of logical […]

Categories
Philosophy

Borderless Boundaries

Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Hollow Wheel Turns

All our ontological aspirations to reflexively self-validating linguistic closure are forever shrouded in the mist of uncertainty that language itself invokes. Having found a resting place as existential security blanket and nominal narrative of purpose and reality, you will likely move on again, after a time, to another semantic center of gravity – it is […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Sinking Ship

Opportunities are the anchors that like grappling hooks we cast out and upon the stochastic turbulence and mercurial probabilities of uncertain futures and there, in identifying them, in defining or formulating the possibilities they invoke we do well not to forget all those other unrealised worlds that might also exist and which yet as ontological […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ontology, Hierarchy, System

Differentiation in ontology often asserts unnecessary-as-eminently-redundant-distinctions, however: Systemic hierarchies seem to come in two main flavours from which later differentiation and confusions emerge. There are designed hierarchies and there are un-designed hierarchies. The first is an assertion of order, planning and control on a spectrum from brute-forced top-down through to the most sophisticated and nuanced […]