Even while we all actively generate endless tides of digital self-representation (as images, data points, digital footprints, biometric and geolocation records, corporate and institutional identifiers or classifications) of self-identity we find ourselves simultaneously slipping away from reality, certainty and any notion of existential closure.
This irreducible uncertainty and quicksilver spectre of endlessly self-inflected introspection as shimmering mirage and optical illusion of Self is not, however, only a consequence of any inadequate cognitive aptitude we possess when engaging the hyper-inflating complexities of our contemporary world and information systems.
It is much more that the core emptiness and axiomatic ambiguity of all this shape-shifting and endless aspiration towards self-validation, representation and knowledge is a necessary property of the extended gestalt of information and energy-processing systems that we inhabit and that – equally – inhabit us.
Our experience of this complex system of accelerating, self-propagating material, biological and technological artefacts and entities is almost always and exclusively from an aspirationally-unique and singular endpoint.
We are (as the hollowed-out eye of this storm) the endlessly self-inflected quicksilver spectres of introspection that, as a sentient experience of indefinitely-extensible logical and material information and energy-processing systems are foundationally unable to ever successfully triangulate, isolate or irrevocably identify and know our own selves because to do so would be to invalidate the implicit uncertainty and error-encoding mechanisms of that world which creates us in this way, as broken and discontinuous partial self-representations of its own reality.
The whole, gestalt system of world (and the very many selves that inhabit it) requires just such a discontinuous absence as this is in fact the only way that a whole or complete system of functionally and operationally self-contained material or logical information and energy can ever manifest.
The unique (and paradoxical) emptiness is experienced as discomfort and loss or an irreducible, implicit and often haunting melancholy and this is the very human self-representation of a microcosm that can only ever manifest as incomplete and ambiguous.
In this way, our all too human failings, regrets, mistakes and an unrelenting adversarial futility of competition, conflict and war represents little more than our collective inability to recognise or acknowledge the core mystery and enigmatic, autonomously self-propagating logical void at the heart of both reality and ourselves.
We can never fully grasp this because to do so is simultaneously to extinguish the existence of both ourselves and this mischievously mysterious and Cheshire cat smile of paradox that lies at the center of everything.
This logical hollow is the secret sauce in both life and human intelligence and we might never fully or comprehensively understand these things if we do not open our minds and embrace this paradox of logical emptiness and recursive system self-containment.
Daedelus Kite 