Categories
Philosophy

Dreamers

Pragmatic rationality should keep the dreamers from losing their way but, similarly, the dreamers are necessary to remind the rationalists that they have already lost theirs.

Categories
Philosophy

Closure: does reality make sense?

Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unconscious Worlds

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether humans do.” B.F. Skinner Whether humans think or not seems to be a null question as so many clearly do not, finding themselves quite happily swept away upon whichever tide of passionate belief or causal provenance as first takes them. What interests me more is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Irrational

It is perhaps because we know, unseen and unpalatable, that each and all of us is only ever bound to achieve what in the ultimate reckoning is transient and quite probably inconsequential that we double-down on the rule-shuffling, grammatical orthodoxies, methods and practices of an abstract tokenised rationality that in all truth hardly serves us […]

Categories
culture

Quantitative Methods for Ethical Prescription?

Context: The Calculus of Ought It is a curious world in which what can ever and only be proven from within the clockwork constraints of complex quantitative and logical tautologies might become the foundation and justification of and for ethical prescription. Of course, science is invaluable and proceeds from strength to strength by proof and […]

Categories
culture

In What Ways is Science Like Religion?

A key reflection might be: in what ways does the contemporary experience of science, of technology and of an empirical, evidence-based world view actually (and perhaps inadvertently) fulfill many of the traditional functions of religion? In what ways, in short, does science as a paradigm of thought perform the same essential tribal binding and reflexive […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Image in the Mirror is the (Intelligent) Machine

We build machines to define ourselves but in neither do we find the certainty or the completeness we seek.

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Said one mirror to another…

Rationality is (a) key, but it can not explain (or unlock) itself.

Categories
Philosophy

On Ethics

The implicit inconsistency of sufficiently complex logical systems implies that ethical systems, abandoned by the metaphysical anchor of immanent divinity, must seek their own internal anchors and logical certainty.