Categories
Philosophy

Portrait of an Unfinished Universe

Life in the universe is not one among many values. It is the value. Everything else derives its weight from the fact that consciousness, however fleeting, reflects upon it. To be alive is to inflect continuous entanglement between matter and meaning, where the universe contemplates itself in fragile intervals of abstract self-awareness. This awareness is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Before Words

It is a continuum that precedes the adaptive scaffolding of rules, a topology in which emergence is not sequence but diffusion, inertial self-entanglement . No stepping stones, no waypoints: only gradients that viscously descend into what later appears as order, meaning, belief, purpose. The Shepard tone of entropy is its register—always rising, drift where difference […]

Categories
Philosophy

Cosmological Evanescence

Context: How will the Universe end? Cosmological evanescence as measured against the eternal darkness and endlessly meaningless expanses of infinite duration without life, experience or purpose. I expect the podcast might both begin and end with the generative complexity and radiating dissipative properties of thermodynamic entropy but I wonder how such vast existential facts can […]

Categories
Complexity

Self-Organising Criticality in Brains, Battles and Universes

The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]

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
life

Skipping Stones

A recent family bereavement has left me with no less questions than ever as to the essence of this human experience we all share but has necessarily shaped the form and flow as qualitative flavour of inquiry. The salience in my cartography of grief has been to discover – or, perhaps, to rediscover – that […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

When the Music’s Over

When it is all said and done, this current and potentially Globally catastrophic war, I wonder what will remain? A broken landscape of human suffering as sown seeds for generations of hatred and retribution yet to come? A barren and scarred planetary desert of radioactive futility? A humbled humanity that yet again sailed far too […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

E.T. ?

In a Universe of potentially 2 trillion galaxies, by some models of cosmological inflation necessarily infinite in extent, we should be much less surprised that we have not found our own very specific and plausibly transient technologies staring back at us from this abyss. For perhaps no other reason than relative developmental and logical self-consistency, […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Twilight Zone of Logical Incompleteness

Reference: Kurt Gödel The beauty of this area of logic is that we find ourselves quite inadvertently inhabiting (as much as being inhabited by) a profoundly mercurial and indefinitely extensible as autonomously self-propagating soliton-like system of explanation, definition and knowledge. The resonant antinomy encoded in a system which can both be and not be bounded […]

Categories
Philosophy

Bootstrapping Cosmological Analogies

The most interesting analogy of all in the cosmological domain is that of a self-generating Universe. That is, the gestalt bootstraps itself into existence. It is more a function of the teleology endemic to language (and its corollary constrained cognitive conceptual vocabularies) that finds us limited by something much less than the range of all […]

Categories
Philosophy

Intractable Uncertainty in Nature and Mind

Context: Paradox at the heart of mathematics makes physics problem unanswerable What happens if we are to assert this reflexive tesseract of indefinitely-extensible symbolic information as abstraction at (and as) the beating heart of autonomously self-propagating, soliton-like logical vacuum and necessity that compels this Universe forwards? What might it mean to engage with uncertainty, incompleteness, […]

Categories
environment

The Universe is Alive and Creative

Notice from the arc and trajectory of flow that it is adaptive, dynamic and as a complex, open system in constant flux quite uncannily similar to a living entity. This is one among many instances of dynamical systems that indicate in their reflexive growth and endless iterative creativity that what might appear to be an […]