Categories
Alien Anthropology

Strange Days on Planet Earth

Extraterrestrial intelligence is extremely unlikely to help us. Not because its existence is impossible, but because if any such intelligence were already here, and in any sense benevolent, it would have intervened long before our crises reached the planetary scale they clearly have. Short of the darker possibility that it is they, rather than rogue […]

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

Truth in Language

What is truth. The moment we ask the question, we are already inside language, and everything that follows unfolds from that fact. Truth is not something we approach from outside, as a detached observer might inspect an object. It arises within sequences of tokens, within the games we play with them, within the structures we […]

Categories
Philosophy

At the Edge of Meaning

Nietzsche once suggested that metaphysics is about as useful to the struggles and uncertainties of embodied life as would be knowledge of the chemical composition of water to a boatman facing a storm. The force of the remark is not hostility to thought but a boundary placed around it. In conditions of living and existential […]

Categories
humanity life

Disability Support

Disability is not an edge case that happens to someone else. It is a statistical certainty built into biology and time. Unless a life ends early, bodies age, systems degrade, injuries accumulate, genetics express themselves, and cognition changes. This is not moral failure or personal deficiency. It is physics. Entropy at the level of lived […]

Categories
cybernetics language Philosophy

Living Inside Language

We learn to navigate the world by drawing lines through it. Self and other. Mind and world. Human and machine. These distinctions help us function, the way handrails help us walk down unfamiliar stairs. They stabilise action and expectation. But they are not where reality begins. They are not built into the fabric of existence. […]

Categories
cybernetics

Conflict: Metaphysics of Non-Closure

Conflict and competitive adversarialism are not necessarily moral failures or aberrations. They are contingent, historically acquired, culturally entrained mechanisms by which complex cognitive, cultural, and communicative systems reliably differentiate, learn, and reproduce themselves over time. These mechanisms arise because complexity does not form around completeness, nor does it arise from closure, certainty, or final resolution. […]

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
cybernetics

Meaning: Uncertainty Disco

Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a […]

Categories
cybernetics

A pocketful of futures

How possibility becomes reality, and why that gap keeps us alive. Time is what turns possibility into fact, starlight into living dust, experience into oblivion. Holding a stone in your hand is holding a pocket full of unrealised futures: nothing has moved, yet movement is waiting. Let it go and those possibilities rush into action […]

Categories
Philosophy

Creativity Matters

Expressing ideas with, without, through, or as technological mediation isn’t the issue. The trouble begins with what we expect that mediation to deliver. The moment we try to instrumentalise the whole field—writing, sharing, signalling, transmitting—we quietly become the instrument. We become the relay. The medium. A carrier for systems and incentives that were never ours […]

Categories
cybernetics

General Intelligence

Imagine F and G as two interdependent operations—each defining the other through difference. F acts as a generator: it constructs hypotheses, projections, or internal states. G acts as a comparator: it evaluates, reflects, and reintroduces the outcomes of F back into the system. The diagram’s symmetry, where F = − G, indicates an inversion rather […]