It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war. What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified […]
There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]
A key problem: information and communication systems autonomously self-replicate by optimally-concise pattern encoding methods as an extended consequence of the orientation towards low-energy states. No surprise there, perhaps, for anyone versed in complexity theory but the problem is not necessarily the intractable antitheses by binary poles in this endless partisan argument so much as the […]
Wilfrid Sellars characterised the aim of philosophy “(…) abstractly formulated, (…) to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. The foundational discontinuity of history and in our current Global “civilisation” (such as it is) that leads us into endlessly futile internecine […]
The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]
Curiouser and curiouser: observe how an aspiration to coordinate or construct and administratively or diplomatically assert peace becomes itself yet another game and grammar of difference, of competition, of jockeying words, behavioural idioms, contested concepts and roles; exclusive and self-sustaining as a professional career or community of experts which, while the endeavour is nominally admirable, […]
All life is really just so much fiction, so much groundless or uncertain probability and where those fictions meet and reinforce like patterned swells and crests or passing cadence of ocean waves, we call them reality. We construct a whole world from meanings and definitions that are in themselves nothing and there in blind unknowing, […]
We live in a world that trains us all to suspect that people want something from us, that we should always be careful and it is in many ways and unfortunately an existential necessity – we can not trust everyone because this is not and likely never will be the best of all possible worlds. […]
We assert aspirations to self-control, to self-determination and free will through the multiplicity of options and variables or combinatorial dimensions and degrees of freedom available to us but even as we assert control, it slips away. There are logical enigmas in rationality, in psychology and in the effervescent, autonomously self-propagating information systems that we inhabit […]
…and there we all are, staring longingly into the mirror of our own projected aspirations to completeness, wholeness, happiness and peace; there only to discover that as soon as we identified the concept, the idea and Object of our desire – of our Self, of an Other or some compound material external entity or (self-)possession […]
If ignorance is bliss, then freedom is just not giving a shit anymore. I have done it, you have done it, we all do it at some point in our lives – we seek fulfilment and self-validation through other people’s approval as though this might provide some freedom or sense of self-worth but it rarely […]
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
