What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
Information increases constantly – as a corollary and parallel (energy-processing) thread to the form and flow of natural, physical phenomena and thermodynamic diffusion. We might even call that part of the world that avails itself of observation and description – and which is for that reason usefully or operationally defined or described and deployed – […]
Context: In 2020, let’s stop AI ethics-washing and actually do something The most mystifying aspect of this ethical issue is that, on a quick survey of available literature, the emphasis is clearly on “fixing the technology” but leaves as conspicuously absent any concerted attempt to “fix our societies” even though these are in fact the […]
A problem that I find myself returning to incessantly over the course of extended study and participatory observation in this human life and the diversity of cultural experience we all share is that of misunderstanding. The Philosophers would perhaps identify the problem as being one of Ontological Misunderstanding, of an essential mischaracterisation or ill-informed pattern […]
Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]
In what ways might melancholy and a gradual (or rapid, accelerating) slide into sadness or feelings of hopelessness be the natural heir of organic experience in a material world that is always and already dissonant with energy diffusion and the endemic thermodynamic burden of what amounts to irremediable emotional and corporeal loss and decay? All […]
Trompe-l’oeil is clever but, beyond immediate aesthetic effects and technical mastery, is really just the specific instance of a generalised principle of deception by which an artist fools our gullible brains into suspending their disbelief in the reality with which we are presented. The presence of a logical depth is in this way emphasised by […]
Economics provides an ordered symmetry, compelling fantasy and mercenary ideological fallacy of reflexive psychological certainty and control that does not actually exist. Certainty is a conspicuous absence in the base axioms of mathematical logic, the probabilistic entropy of complex adaptive systems, or the volatile neurochemically-driven hormonal broth of chaotic human beings. The key error we […]
The kind of puzzle indicated here are commonly associated with a genre of social media clickbait that often leads down a steep rabbit-hole of commercial datapoint acquisition. Cambridge Analytica’s artful gullbility-harvesting tests were a case in point and emphasise a significant correlation between (personal) online identity-construction and the production of an implicit informational value around […]
No one is in control of life anywhere near so much as we might choose to believe. At some level we all know this but we also rarely choose to acknowledge it; it frightens us. Our endless fascination with pattern and order, with declarations of certainty and knowledge – these are at least in part […]
…and in all of our isolation, our distant alienation from all the life we once knew, when all social contact and that intimacy or literal warmth of another’s presence and friendship has become a silent vacuum of absence – what do we have left? We have our empty, listless lives and the dawning awareness that […]
Daedelus Kite 