Category Archives: Philosophy

Permanence and technology

1. Mt. Fuji, 3776 m high. A petrified mass of volcanic discharge, thought to have been first ascended in year 663. 2. Skyscrapers in Ootemachi, Tokyo and the City, London. Buildings belonging mostly to banks and insurance companies. They appear, on some intuitive level, to have been there forever, though most of these buildings can […]

Utilitarianism and computability

I’ve started watching Michael Sandel’s Harvard lecture series on political philosophy, “justice”. In this series, Sandel introduces the ideas of major political and moral philosophers, such as Bentham, Locke, and Kant, as well as some libertarian thinkers I hadn’t heard of. I’m only halfway through the series, so I’m sure there’s other big names coming […]

Partitioning idea spaces into containers

Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an […]

Rasmus Fleischer’s postdigital manifesto

In his highly timely and readable 2009 book “The Postdigital Manifesto”, Swedish writer and historian Rasmus Fleischer discusses the effects of the digital on our relation to music and sets out his vision for how we can make music listening more meaningful. Fleischer is a prolific blogger (almost exclusively in Swedish) at Copyriot, and is […]

The absurdity of flying

The first time I found myself onboard an airplane was when I was 9-10 years old or so. At the time, travelling by myself to visit my aunt who lived on a remote island was a big experience. In particular, I think, the sensation that the environment was managed in the extreme made a big […]