Do we possess beliefs or do beliefs possess us? Are the distributed, integrated information artefacts and systems of belief actually entities in their own right? Are individual nodes in a networked, self-propagating information system really the storage components for the resilient continuity of an idea, a belief or an ideology? Are the intrinsic errors (within…
Dark Logic: The Disinformation Entropy Paradox
A curious, perhaps mischievous, property of complex adaptive systems is that they are autonomously biased towards the means and methods of their own optimal continuity, succinct encoding/self-representation and environmental self-propagation. In this sense, and while acknowledging that diverse actors can and do wilfully generate turbulence and confusion, a listless vessel of policy or doctrine is…
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…
Philosophical Fallibilism, Incomplete Knowledge and a Science of the Unknown
Such a principle (of Fallibilism) should indeed be taken as implicit to science and (indeed) 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…
Ideology
Ideology is a tool, a technology of descriptive (i.e. algorithmic) information compression and generalised (over-)simplification through which complex realities and observed facts are rendered comprehensible. Decisions, evaluations and strategic planning for continuity (of self, of organisations, of civilisation) are facilitated by compression. Having cultivated or procedurally-defined the conceptual boundaries and adaptive grammars of such systems…
Global Unity and Environmental Sustainability
The problem of Global Peace is synchronous, co-existent and reflexively resonant with the critical existential problem of environmental continuity. The conspicuous absence of unity in the International Society of Nations (such as it is) is an indication, not of failure, but of the logical presence of unity and wholeness as a distributed and manifest absence…
The Fall
What we most often fail to acknowledge is that this focal node and yawning abyss of pluripotent significance and semiotic elasticity that we experience as "Self" is in fact the doubly-inflected presence of an absence, the exponentiated self-replication of an entirely abstract self-representational void. Other than that we could hardly grow or evolve and become…
The Gospel of Emptiness
Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate - (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else "does" (or…
The dancer is the dance: a truth of beauty…
The beauty of art (and a truth of beauty) is that beyond language, beyond culture and beyond all contingent, transient conceptions of self, meaning and identity - it can communicate without any need for the implicit difference and dissonance that we so often expect but which is as much a burden as a feature of…
The Necessity of Cognitive Bias
I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which…
Creativity, Nature and Our Global Disconnect
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…
Online Communication: Talking Underwater
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…
