Categories
culture

Please, give peace a chance…

I can not lie, this European war is already a monumental catastrophe but it does not have to get worse. Please stop this war. No one can win. No one ever truly wins wars and even if this a truth we are all still yet to fully acknowledge, please reflect deeply upon it because it […]

Categories
Philosophy

New World, New Self

All actions, all choices, all approximation to unambiguously individuated (as subjective) self-determination tends to fade away in such an exquisitely, eloquently, interdependently entangled Cosmos. More subtly rendered: the kinds of self and other or system and environment that such a complex world as this invokes is distributed, integrated and functionally, existentially multidimensional. The reflexive boundaries […]

Categories
Philosophy

Transcending Conflict

Why does conflict still happen? Beyond the futile narcissism of authoritarian states eager to mask the logical fallacy of equating ideology with the existential fact that their long-suffering peoples represent, far outside the orbits of perennial psychological insecurities of a human animal that finds itself swept away upon a tide of sociotechnical complexity and interpersonal […]

Categories
Philosophy

Remembrance (Against the Tyrants)

So many have suffered so terribly in war. I wonder at times if the greatest act of compassionate remembrance might be to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure that such horrors are never revisited up anyone, anywhere, ever again. Even while those distant autocrats (alongside motley tinpot tyrants) everywhere beat the drums of […]

Categories
politics

Political Illusions

A magician is someone pretends not to have what they have: a trick, a method, a sleight of hand or some sophisticated logical ploy intended to deceive an audience. A charlatan is someone who pretends to have what they do not: competency, knowledge, skill, authority or substantive and sufficient intellect for whatever masquerade they seek […]

Categories
Philosophy

Solving Complexity

Complex systems require complex solutions and global problems require global thinking. The application of holistic analyses to complex adaptive systems obligates us to come up with solutions that are themselves complex adaptive systems. An evolutionary feedback loop is the only plausible way to align adaptive technical solutions with “real-world” volatility and uncertainty. Obtaining contextual tenure […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

All War is Civil War

How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Beating the drums of war…

We might do better not to ask how, exactly, an entire country might become a kind of prison so much as to ask why it would be a large-scale governance framework that anyone would think was worthwhile pursuing. This is indeed a world in which such large-scale incarceration occurs and as such it is a […]

Categories
technology

AI Crystal Ball: Pentagon Pattern Prediction

Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Strangeness of Life

The strangeness of life is so close to us, so intimate that we can not see it nor recognise the novelty and peculiarity of human existence and consciousness for what it is. Like some exotic fish swimming laps in a tank of water: embedded, immersed in it’s context and oblivious to the improbability and sheer […]

Categories
Philosophy

Territorial Insecurities, Taiwan Edition

Context: Chinese jets invade Taiwan airspace Good ideas sell themselves, it is only bad ideas that require brute-forcing. The CCP have painted themselves into a corner. The constructive dissonance of insecurity upon which their core ideological self-validation rests obligates them to an expansionist adversarialism that might fit well with their symbolic abstractions of attainment and […]

Categories
Philosophy

A game of memory and sorrow.

Memory is neither friend nor foe and when we find ourselves afraid of the past or a suffering that still lives within us we often as reflex seek to fight it, but in pushing, rejecting, setting ourselves against a painful memory or experience that is perhaps so visceral and intimate that it incorporates and becomes […]