An impassioned defence of anti-materialist ontology as addressed to the indeterminacy of provable, definable or unchanging values and the meaning of (a) life. The enigma infusing materialism must forever remain that of the partiality and incompleteness of any aspiration to construct (and reduce) knowledge in regards to the demonstrable facts with which the world presents us as much as the falsifiable theories with which we engage it. That is – an asymptotic ascent towards explanatory closure and the co quest of endemic psychological insecurities always and already concedes the impossibility of truth to the differential, alienating and fractured facts that it must invoke and inhabit to maintain epistemological leverage and cultural self-validation.
The reflex remains to divide and conquer but having done so and subsequently finding ourselves inhabiting and reproducing the effervescing complexity of a discontinuously uncertain causal system of intention and reference, we discover that our descriptions eventually aspire to validate only themselves. The video frames this context with the example of someone asked to give an oration at a funeral proceeding to describe the deceased as having been the relative quantities of chemical constituents that a human body and brain on average expresses.
Materialism and all other flavours of sociotechnical and regulatory determinism as governance and system-steering are functional, useful and provide some kind of existential assurance. However, they are not the final or totalising enclosure that our colloquial intuitions and common symbolic languages suggest or towards which our narrative minds approximate.
A life, a history, an ecology can be reduced to linear mechanisms but only if we are willing to accept that exclusion and myopia are then conceded as endemic, irreducible and persistent – even if, or perhaps because, they are then left unrecognised or unacknowledged. Why does it matter? It is precisely because it is at yet another systemic inflection point of cocksure hubris and runaway technological change that our psychological reflex is to grasp at abstractions, symbols and virtualised promises of permanency and meaning without once publicly conceding that these meanings and values are all as transient as we are.
We find ourselves inhabiting a hyper-inflating referential matrix of culture and technology in which the combinatorial valence and unobstructed linearity of simple sentences and causal remediation is in ascendance. We seek to offset our own cognitive burden to the communications systems we inhabit, even as these variously entangled and interdependent communications systems offset the information (as data) production to us.
There is something missing. Computation is not experience and knowledge is not knowing but the glaring absences, ambiguities and arrogant certainties of materialist closure have, if you narrow your eyes and turn your head in just the right way, an uncanny way of self-validating their own aspirations towards an impossible closure.
The core philosophical questions of human experience, of life and death, and of purpose and meaning have never even once been resolved. This plausibly unresolvable essence is what makes them so interesting.
Daedelus Kite 