This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]
If wisdom consists of knowing that you do not know, knowledge and all that ever creatively emanates from it can only ever be built upon such shifting sands. Technology is, for better and for worse, an extension of this principle. In every innovation, every inflected discontinuity of human ingenuity, and in every ratchet up the […]
Sometimes we see ourselves as separate and isolated from a world which asks (or as often, demands) of us that we be or become these separate nodal trees as labelled identities and alienated decision-machines of consumption and compliance to fuel the swirling, rolling, tumbling chaos and confusion that our cultures and Global civilisation represents and […]
The more I learn, or – rather – the more that this world unveils itself to me through experience and reflective consideration, the less I understand and the less I know. It is always this way – learning aligns to discovering how little you truly know; a little like how love seems to always accompany […]
…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]
What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is […]
There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]
An obsession with material beauty is in many ways the natural consequence of an embodied psychological experience implicitly oriented by evolutionary momentum towards the possibility of self-reproduction. In this sense we should not be surprised that the most prevalent symbolic and overt (or corollary hidden, unconscious) forces in this all too human world are intrinsically […]
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
One thing that appears as something of a universal property of human behaviour is that we define ourselves much more by negative experiences than by or through positive ones; regardless of the extent to which we might prefer to maintain positive affirmations and self-perceptions – the darkness looms large in our imaginations. Most shared (national) […]
How true it is: even as responsibilities (and their flip-side of worry) proliferate, as we take on so many more burdens and find that we must internalise the normative expectations and behavioural or cognitive and technologically-mediated vocabularies of a world that itself hardly knows any better than does an infant when first learning to walk, […]
It never ceases to haunt me that the only love I have ever been able to truly understand has been that in which all aspiration must forever fall short of its goal as though seeking to obtain some infinitely distant horizon that recedes further away with every self-directed step of instinct or reflex taken towards […]
Daedelus Kite 