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 […]
Tag: Philosophy
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We’re on the Road to Nowhere
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 […]
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Social Distancing
…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 […]
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Worthless Chemistry and Orchid Dust
Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning – it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and […]
Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and all ordered systems of knowledge or organisational practice. The indefinitely extensible essence (and raison d’etre) of all material, biological, cognitive, cultural and technological systems is irreducible; it is simultaneously strength and vulnerability in (and as) everything we build, cultivate and share. […]
These marble busts at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg silently contemplate an ancient wisdom; that the metaphysical vacuum beyond ourselves and as represented by the deep mystery of Other minds is identical to that logical discontinuity and foundational uncertainty within our own minds and there is, as Wittgenstein said of these deep (but everyday) […]
What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the […]
When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference. It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]
All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information […]
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A Cultural Vacuum of Self
The strangest thing about personal identity and subjective psychological experience is that, at core, it consists solely of internalised references to an external world of images, ideas, idioms, languages and conventions. This “external” world is only ever the substantive collection and dynamic aggregate of all of those other individual nodes, similarly empty, and swimming in […]
The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]
