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In: Happiness, Human Nature, Love, Uncategorized

CREDIT: David Gyung From the 2013 movie, Her: Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So, basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.’ — Samantha This is a chatbot professing sentience in the 2013 movie, Her, in which a lonely man in the near future falls in love with an AI of his own creation. The ‘near future’ they spoke of back then is now yesterday (around 2017 at a guess when Replika released social chatbots) andRead More →

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In: Freedom, Love, Telling it True

I approach it gingerly as though I’m not looking, but I am.  I always look.  I have been looking at this place my entire life. I pull into the driveway and park beside a mini-skip.  It is bashed in on one side where I imagine someone has backed into it.  I hate the skip.  It reminds me we are selling our family home, my sister and I.  We are being practical, grownups, now our are parents are gone.  It is up to us to be wise.  You see, if we sell we will be more financially secure.  If we don’t, we will need to spendRead More →

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In: Creativity, Freedom, Love, Reading

We carry our cynicism on our backs as snails do in defense against certain inevitabilites, death not the smallest amongst them.  It’s best not to be shocked. Let’s not, in our naivety, be taken by surprise. Let’s put it out there, warts and all, before life slaps us squarely in the face. Our cynicism opens doors for us in social circles and we lean against lamp posts and on dinner tables with a terrible nonchalance that may, if we are lucky, look like wisdom or street smarts, at the very least. We’ve broken down traditions which were worn out echoes of less understanding days and there are moreRead More →

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In: Human Nature, Love, Science

We say,  “It hurts.”  “Our hearts are broken.”   “It was like being punched in the gut.”  This is the language we use when we attempt to describe how it feels to lose connection with people we love.  Whether it be a romantic break-up, a loss of a friendship or the death of loved one, we talk of the experience in terms of physical pain.  What if the way we describe rejection and loss is not just a metaphor? Neuroscientist, Matthew Lieberman, and social psychologist, Naomi Eisenberger, set out to explore this question using an fMRI machine and a virtual ball tossing game.  To simulate social rejection and what is termed ‘socialRead More →

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In: Love

I’ve finished the first draft of a novella with internet dating as its central theme and I’m back to considering the idea of dating profiles etc.   Alain Badiou’s ideas, already discussed in a previous post, were helpful in terms of ‘safety first love’ with the dating profile allowing us to pick and choose people prior to meeting them.  But its not just this ability to check up on someone anonymously that has me flustered.  I think its that we come to meeting the person with a prior knowledge we wouldn’t have access to otherwise and this colours the way we see them. The Philosopher’s MailRead More →

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In: Love

In 2008, a conversation took place between philosopher, Alain Badiou and interviewer, Nicholas Truong at the Avignon Festival as part of the ‘Theatre of Ideas’ series. This conversation was later extrapolated on, translated into English and entitled In Praise of Love. I discovered this work while researching for a novella on online dating. There were reservations, you see. I felt an underlying brutality to this new system of love-seeking, more a ‘king hit’ from a street thug than the lovers’ embrace, but I could not put my finger on it, until In Praise of Love. Badiou calls it ‘a safety-first concept’ of love. In nominating traitsRead More →