The value of a joke as surprise and stochastic, staccato salience in the otherwise smooth flow of narrative experience is a function of the semiotic entropy (as existential) displacement that it both embodies and reveals. Significance and meaning are stored externally to a symbol, globally-distributed in and as the networked “latent space” of all other interdependent symbols, communication artefacts and system dynamics (or experiences). The insight and, if successful, unexpected 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 of a joke raises the veil and wizard’s curtain just a little and reveals the counter-intuitive machinery of the “naked singularity” of meaningless self-reference that is concealed by it.
We are not cognitively and linguistically well-equipped to navigate (such) tricky enigmas in philosophy and this is, indeed, just one such wicked conceptual abstraction. So, we validate and hyper-inflate the meanings we inhabit by sharing them as best we might, by reflexively inflating their interconnections, dependencies, consequences and abstract relational properties in and as the production of yet more language. In so doing, we build entire worlds as systems of belief out of these effectively empty sets, out of nothing much at all.
When we laugh at a joke, this is 𝘶𝘯𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘵 in that the absurdity and negation or logical extinction of meaninglessness as a foundation for meaning can never be engaged directly (because there is in effect nothing there to grasp), just as the significance of a symbol is always located elsewhere, but the symbol or sentences that point at it acquires all the pathological importance of a life vest for a person that has fallen from their vessel in high seas. You may (or may not) recognise the shadow of a concept of the “unconscious” mind lurking here, in plain sight.
There is another sense in which this kind of information storage mechanism represents an optimal gambit of algorithmic compression. The globally-recursive (as binding) properties of a linguistically-mediated experience of communication are precisely not stored in one place because – beyond the ecological resilience and assurance against redundancy this tends to provide – this allows the absence of intrinsic meaning in microcosm to reproduce the generative indeterminacies and uncertainties of macrocosm; and vice versa. This switch and control mechanism here is the hidden kernel function of language. That is currently the central object of my research: the mischievously Cheshire Cat-like smile and 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 of global system properties and psychological, sociotechnical or theoretical unification.
I would make direct references to the plausible inevitability of partisan dissonance and conflict in technologically-mediated, competitive communications systems that themselves self-propagate through us as a function of their enigmatically generative incompleteness, but it really is no laughing matter.
Daedelus Kite 