What Is This Place?

Blog || Politics || Philosophy || Science || Fiction || Quotes


Short Version:
Roughly weekly blog dedicated to news, musings and rants on politics, technology, philosophy and related material.

Long Version:
Strange Loops Journal is not written by a professional journalist, nor the holder of a Ph.D., nor the worker of any government. I offer no claims of perfect objectivity, coherency or professionalism, nor do I offer claims of everlasting life (try someone else for that). Live with it.

What you will find here is news and interrelated links combined with thoughtful opinion and rants on subjects ranging from technology/transhumanism/science to politics/anarchy to skepticism/freethought/atheism, along with the rest of that stuff which makes us humans slightly more interesting than fungi (and it's hard to beat slime-mold; they're pretty dynamic). You'll also find the occasional philosophical musings and wanderings. I try to strike a balance between longer, more content-based entries, and those containing links to content elsewhere, so if one doesn't interest you, surf down a bit.

A lot of the opinions I express on the blog are early-stage thoughts that might later be developed into full-on articles for the main Strange Loops webpage, so some of the stuff in the older archives might show up in another form on the main page later.

What the hell does "strange loops" mean? Well, I borrowed the term from Douglas Hofstadter, author of the profound mind-fuck known as Godel, Escher, Bach. As the title suggests, Hofstadter finds some subtle, underlying thread connecting the complex compositions of J.S. Bach, the impossible artwork of M.C. Escher and the revolutionary mathematical work of Kurt Godel. That magnificent something that is constant among their work Hostadter dubs strange loops. He develops this idea with great depth and ludic fun, fashioning a sort of strange loops thesis on consciousness - what it is, how it works, where it comes from. The book profoundly resonated with me, and I think he is on to something amazing with his strange little loops, something that could apply to every level of life, existence and thought. Hence, it seemed a good name for a site dedicated to, among other things, exploring human existence. Expect a more thorough piece on strange loops to be added to the main site in the future.

For those who require easy-fit labels and categories before they'll listen to my opinions, the best I can offer is the following:

  • I tend toward anarchistic political beliefs (anarchy being order through responsibility instead of order through force), but I think the only way to get there is not revolution or even social change within an existing framework, but by changing our minds and freeing ourselves from traditional structures of authority.
  • I tend to write off dogmatic religions, simplistic gods and new-age whackiness, but I consider myself open to the mystery of the universe and thus might be called a skeptical mystic. Alternately, a freethinker, atheist or agnostic.
  • I tend to aim for a thoughtful, ludic lifestyle, and am turned off by ultra-consumerism and an arbitrary forty hour work week.
  • I tend toward a seriously (but at the same time playfully) skeptical epistemology. I have trouble claiming that anything can be known "absolutely" - whatever that means - and so I try to infuse my philosophical musings with a healthy reminder of the perpetual possibility of error. I think John Burden Sanderson Haldane was on to something.
  • I tend to view transhumanist and futurist speculation with excitement, while keeping a vigilant eye on the fact that new technology is generally designed, made, distributed and controlled by either corruptible governments or greedy corporations.

    Those are just some examples - and my opinions are in constant flux - so you can see I don't lend myself to simplistic labeling schemes. Get used to it. We've been sold false dichotomies (like leftist or rightist, futurist or luddite) too long. People are complex creatures, so pay attention to what they do and say, not what category they fit in, and your fellow humans become a whole lot more interesting and real.

    Everything found on the page is temporally limited, expressing only one aspect of my thoughts at one time and constricted to a linguistic framework. I caution against reading too much into what I've written as representing me as a person; rather, I offer these words as a means of provoking thoughts in others and offering material to riff off of for further development.

    For the record, everything on this site that is not attributed to another author is anti-copyright. In the name of free expression and creation, feel free to redistribute and add to or modify anything I have written (even without credit and/or notification, though those are appreciated). Taking a cue from UWI, the above does not extend to the following groups or organizations, each of whom must obtain full written permission prior to publishing and/or reproducing anything on this site:

  • any non-academic periodical with a circulation over 10,000
  • anything run by one or more individual(s) who make more than US$100,000/yr each
  • any US nation-wide service provide or carrier

    Comments? Email me at evalramman25(at)hotmail(dot)com.

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