Categories
Philosophy

In Diversity, United

E pluribus unum, a phrase born of an early republic trying to hold together difference without crushing it, means quite plainly out of many, one, yet its force lies not in patriotism or unanimity but in the harder truth that a coherent whole does not precede its parts but arises only because distinct lives, voices, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Atlas, Debugged

I no longer believe the world can be healed by better arguments, smarter policies, cleaner data, or more sophisticated machines. These things mostly just turn the volume up on whatever is already broken. The deeper condition is non-closure: the simple fact that complex systems do not stabilise by resolving tension, but by holding it in […]

Categories
Philosophy

self

The self never settles because the world never settles. Your body changes. Neural chemistry fluctuates. Memory edits itself. Relationships move. Context rearranges. Words drift. Culture turns. New facts arrive, old certainties decay, and the feedback never stops. So the self is not rewritten because it is faulty, but because it is embedded in conditions that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Teresa Brennan: Philosophy of Affect

Teresa Brennan was an Australian feminist philosopher whose work crossed psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory, frequently placing her at odds with academic orthodoxy. She challenged dominant Lacanian interpretations by insisting that affect is not a linguistic effect or private feeling but a materially transmissible force that moves between bodies and across institutions. This stance drew […]

Categories
cybernetics

Policy Brief: Field Logic, Delay, and Runaway Self-Reinforcement

Field logic approaches complex systems as relational fields sustained by difference over time, not as collections of discrete components governed by linear causation. It is most relevant where systems are fast, tightly coupled, and vulnerable to runaway self-reinforcement, as in contemporary technological, media, and political environments. In these regimes prediction does not mean forecasting specific […]

Categories
technology

Divided

Technologically mediated communication intensifies what language has always done: it isolates, divides, and distances us from one another, and from ourselves, as a necessary precondition for meaningful communicative experience to arise at all. Given the nature of the world, I carry a quiet regret at not having known more people more fully, even while understanding […]

Categories
Philosophy

Philosophical Alienation

Consciousness entails perspectival isolation. Subjective experience is necessarily local, bounded by the fact that one mind does not have direct access to another. Philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cognitive science converge on this constraint, whether framed as first-person authority, privacy of qualia, or irreducible point of view. Language does not remove this barrier. It operationalises […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Edge of Chaos in Conflict and Communication

Language and (other) communications technologies are built around and positively amplify the signals of difference by and through which human beings define, understand and share or record their experience of the world. The abbreviated macrostates of variously competitive self-definitions emerge and converge in ways that recursively drive the adaptive self-propagation of the communication systems and technologies that embody their primary transmission […]