Categories
Philosophy

The Vanishing

More reflections on cosmological conundrums, today. It occurs to me that whatever the Universe (or really – our descriptions of it) is, it is actually trying to vanish. The natural bias and orientation towards entropic disassembly and diffusion is that through this system in gestalt aspires to reach the lowest energy state. The mischievous irony […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Hollow Wheel Turns

All our ontological aspirations to reflexively self-validating linguistic closure are forever shrouded in the mist of uncertainty that language itself invokes. Having found a resting place as existential security blanket and nominal narrative of purpose and reality, you will likely move on again, after a time, to another semantic center of gravity – it is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Metaverse, Value, Meaning

The value of art or any other commodity is quite uncannily aligned to the acquired significance (as structural endpoints) of meaning in language, of nodes in networks and of neurons in brains. That is – value is a function of where and how an artefact (or word) sits relative to all other artefacts, of the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

Categories
environment

Climate Emergency

The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophy of Time

Philosophical debates on time are rarely about time. They are primarily about the language with which we order our conceptual vocabularies, our reflexive sociotechnical and behavioural grammars, about what can or may be legally, rationally or intelligibly asserted. Competitive oscillation between established (proxy tribal or political) positions solves nothing and yet, counter-intuitively, it is precisely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Idioms of Simulation

An effervescing philosophical idiom of simulation hypotheses is really just Cartesian doubt wearing steampunk cosplay. Even then and in so very many ways the associated concepts of rationality stretch back to an Aristotelian logical turn that passes through many minds and places before a Boolean backflip into computational brevity as manifest cybernetic control and all […]

Categories
politics

Dictatorship: Living in Two Worlds

Dictators of course arrive wearing many diverse kinds of masks and singing all manner of simplistic songs of self-interested nationalism. For those of you out there who find themselves living under such a regime, it must be a really strange experience. It is true that we all tend to desensitise to hardship or suffering after […]

Categories
Philosophy

Pale Blue You: a Beautiful Brain

Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our […]

Categories
Philosophy

Many Worlds

A question worth pondering is that of whether or not the genealogy that percolates as ascendant method(s) of questioning is the one and only possible radiating path through a complex space of all possible (incomplete) logical trajectories. Of all possible worlds and laws of physics (or technical extrapolations of these), something constrains the sum total […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is colour a purely subjective experience?

To what extent might we ever comprehensively or justifiably speak of an external or “objective” reality? Internal experience is intimately interdependent with an “external” world, assertions of certainty regarding subjective ownership of an experience of colour remain somewhat unreliable. Experience exists, but as an inductive inevitability the doubt regarding objective reality is mirrored in that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unreality

The singularly unifying property (as an aggregate sum total entropy and hyper-inflating combinatorial multiplicity) of all diverse methods, logics and schools of philosophical thought is precisely the enduring presence of the absence of unity. This is instructive as to what ontological properties reality (as much as experience or valid descriptions) might possess. If the unifying […]