The “femme fatale”, a dangerous, panther-like beauty in which all of man’s desires and fears are realised in one gorgeous, dark and explosive bundle of alluring seduction and imminent volcano-like fury. This is the fantasy of woman upon which an unwitting, gullible and endlessly-amorous male identity anchors itself – in language, image, technology, culture and […]
Perhaps love trumps (vincit) all precisely because this power, wisdom and enduring value of compassionate or selfless care is of a class of entities that remain unpolluted by acquiescence to a proof or measure of their value and presence. That which can not be measured, though perhaps implicitly metaphysical, can also not be bounded and […]
Language, like logic or mathematics is alive with a dynamic and self-inflected metamorphosis of endlessly-extensible, recombinatory abstraction. It is the means of our self-expression, of the essential causal and cognitive architecture of language and the shared experience of culture, and it is the core pattern around which conscious and unconscious self-identity and symbolic processing self-gravitates, […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]
The greatest mystery of mathematics is, to me, that all of these patterns and logical systems appear to almost (and autonomously) seek higher-dimensional self-representations. In category theory or combinatorics we can relatively simply determine and demonstrate the way a set of properties or relationships seeks something of an implicit, intrinsic and endemic higher-dimensional geometry. The […]
I am endlessly astounded by the way so many essentially unique and fundamentally different individuals lash themselves to hollow systems of belief, ideology and narcissistic self-gratification for nothing more than a deep and unrelenting tribal urge to copy other people, to self-validate and affirm identity through the distributed and prefabricated grammatical and behavioural prescriptions of […]
An observation from Complex Systems Science: Regardless of those (internal or external) who might be seeking to generate more friction and to extract political or ideological value from it, the contemporary extremity of partisan adversarialism and dissonant turbulence that characterises the US political system has the characteristics of a dissipative system – that is, a […]
The question is surely as to a definition of meaning. As Russell remarked in “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions – ergo and by way of endemic circularity there is no anchor or Archimedes Point upon which to hang notions of a “most meaningful” life. All meaning is […]
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
I do wonder if we perhaps miss the forest for the trees, here. The primary function and operational practice of any cognitive or cultural communications system is that of encoding self-replication as sustainable continuity. Where we are all quite intimately bound to and fascinated by these technologically-mediated interpersonal spaces, in an implicit near-narcotic and narcissistic […]
Daedelus Kite 