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 […]
The most beautiful people and cultures exist far beyond any simple experience of desire for material acquisition or cosmetic attractiveness; it is a little melancholy that an implicit loveliness that comes with knowledge and wisdom is hardly the most celebrated property of any human being in a world (like this) that endures endless tides of […]
We live in a world that trains us all to suspect that people want something from us, that we should always be careful and it is in many ways and unfortunately an existential necessity – we can not trust everyone because this is not and likely never will be the best of all possible worlds. […]
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
