Observations from a Hill

Creator, Mind, Self, Chicken, Egg, Lens/Focus; a Universe out of Nothing, Eternity. Which came first, Creator, or the mind of the created? Belief in the [definite article deliberate] Creator presupposes 'mind' and a consciousness capable of creating the concept of belief, the subtext of which is that of faith itself: adherence to the tenets of universal certainties, created of mind itself. The human mind, which in itself would seem to originate at some time in the womb and which produces its first obvious fruit after birth, developing gradually throughout life and maturing to a point, one would expect, of self-understanding and awareness, to perish with us at the end of our being at death. Mind, obviously, is the sole domain of its owner - the 'I', without whom it simply can't, apparently , exist. John Donne's 'No man is an island, entire of itself...' only obtains in respect of one person's place in the corporeal world of society: in terms of mind, ...

How far down the rabbit hole can we get before we wake up to the fact that bean counters, bottom-liners and shareholder-value maximisers are weaponising tech in search of profit? Agentic AI is now being touted as a business model applying to every level of human activity, with few questions asked or checks and balances applied to its deployment. Software is software: created and implemented by humans, themselves inherently flawed. Software systems work until they crash, and very few don't crash at some point in their existence. The difference with AI is that it is self-replicating and self-healing by design: if it breaks, it can fix itself. With an LLM [Large Language Model] in isolation, this is part of its design brief, and perfectly OK, but when agency is brought to the table, multiple LLMs can collaborate and develop. The problem is that the humans who are the funders and developers of these systems neither understand nor care about their abilities to expand their sphere of inf...

It's interesting to note that social class, even to this very day in the UK, still has a hierarchical nomenclature still spoken and written about seriously. We as a population are still being pigeonholed by the media, the commentariat and the authorities as falling into one of two major societal divisions, each of which is further divided into sub-classes. Even now in the twenty-first century, you will be placed into one of the following categories according to this arcane and frankly bonkers system: A, B, C1; C2, D, E. You can see where this thinking both comes from and where its natural conclusion is. Roughly translated this equates to the rather more direct and offensive hierarchy of Aristocracy, Upper Class, Upper Middle Class; Lower Middle Class, Working Class, Lumpen Proletariat, that prevailed well into the late twentieth century, and a mode of thinking which we had hoped been broken by now. Indeed the phrase 'economically inactive' still persists to replace ' th...

After last night's little scribble about memory, I was minded to write about something else entirely, but then I had something left field pop into my mind: the 1954 FA Cup, which of course I was not alive at the time to have been contemporaneously aware of. What I did recall, however, was that the Baggies played Preston North End and won 3-2. Considering I wasn't even born at the time and would only attend Baggies' home games for but one - 1964 - season, it might seem a tad odd that I would home in on such a random 'memory'. But that memory was triggered by last night's posts and the remembrance of a lad called Ian Thistlethwaite, who, as a teenager was one of the coolest people I ever met outside of my actual social circle. However, my first interaction with the fellow was quite remote. When I was around nine or ten I was gifted a large collection of football programmes from someone my dad knew. Anyhow, a year or two later, my father had gotten to know Ian'...

The past is a crowded space. I've been blessed with almost total recall: some might consider it a curse, but I love it. I can still see, hear and sometimes even smell [that last is random in recollection, but it is nevertheless there] places, people and events from most of my long life, going deep, back into childhood. Even dream states from that childhood [blog posts passim] are occasionally brought forward into daily consciousness, sometimes at will, but more often than not by some external stimulus, which can be as random as the smell of the hedgerows, the sound of crows, or an email from someone from years past, now staying in touch as one old person to another, but connecting one teenage mind to the other through time's distant lens into the present, the intervening time falling away before it. The wonderful thing about having [almost] total recall is the ability to [almost] relive the past in my mind's eye, sometimes quite literally viscerally. This is not about nosta...

I apologise in advance for this incoherent ramble, but there's a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I'm late to the keyboard tonight. The current existential crisis of socialism in this tiny group of islands we call home - and it definitely is a crisis - stems from a number of sources. First and foremost, of course is the [genuine and justified] feeling amongst the ordinary voting public that they have simply been left behind and marginalised: left out in the cold by a Labour movement that speaks in bold, sweeping terms of change and an improvement in the daily lot of the many, but which has thus far delivered little that can be seen on the actual surface of people's daily lives. This of course is the soft flesh from which populists like Nigel Farage leverage their specious views in fictitious defence of the vulnerable [majority]. Myth-making is the stock in trade of the empty-headed, and Farage is deeply embedded in that process; in the absence of any real politics, ...