Categories
culture

Silence

These marble busts at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg silently contemplate an ancient wisdom; that the metaphysical vacuum beyond ourselves and as represented by the deep mystery of Other minds is identical to that logical discontinuity and foundational uncertainty within our own minds and there is, as Wittgenstein said of these deep (but everyday) […]

Categories
life

The dancer is the dance: a truth of beauty…

The beauty of art (and a truth of beauty) is that beyond language, beyond culture and beyond all contingent, transient conceptions of self, meaning and identity – it can communicate without any need for the implicit difference and dissonance that we so often expect but which is as much a burden as a feature of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

We lonely atoms…

…and these, all of these bodies, these artefacts and inscriptions that were once dust will once again be dust. These that were once lonely atoms drifting in all of cosmic space and time will once again be set free to wander. Many, many trillions of years from now even atoms will devolve into a slowly-dissasembling […]

Categories
narrative

Curiouser and Curiouser: The Complex Emptiness of (Self and) Words

The curiousity of narrative is precisely the (very) many degrees of freedom available to the hyper-inflating interior spaces of language and an associated conceptual eloquence of psychologically-resonant teleology implicit to story-telling. The resonance derives from the ways that language and narrative reflexively shape experience, perception, culture and cognition. The degrees of freedom highlight the logical […]

Categories
Philosophy

Peace is an Unprovable Theorem of Logic

The conspicuous absence of Global Unity and Peace is a function of the subtle logical fact that a whole system can only ever manifest as an inverse, recursive absence within itself and this, like Love and any other enigmatic mystery of human experience you care to mention, is an unprovable theorem of logic.

Categories
culture

The Emptiness of Art

The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Climate Change and the Downward Spiral of Greed

The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally’s 2020s vision: We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our humanity

Categories
culture

The Implicit Resilience of (a) Limited Cognitive Dissonance

Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly.  This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.

Categories
Psychology

Institutional Bullying as Behavioural Reflex

Questions could be asked of whether institutional contexts inadvertently invoke bullying, cognitive dissonance and tribal dominance behaviours. Like arguing on social media, people are unconsciously driven in this direction, psychologically and behaviourally “shaped” by their context.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Mind, Information and Entropy

It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities.  The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]

Categories
culture

Psychology of Taboos

The curious thing about the psychology of taboos is that (generally speaking) the more a thing is prohibited, the more psychological currency and cultural value it (inversely) acquires, and – consequently – the more the associated behaviours self-propagate.  We might identify this counterintuitive displacement of value, meaning and fascination (or attention) as semiotic elasticity.

Categories
systems

Information, Influence and Dissonance: the Utility of Fakes and Errors in System Self-Propagation

Information systems, viewed from a gestalt/holistic perspective, possess many properties we might otherwise recognise as self-propagation, “emergence” or self-organisation. The presence of values attributed semantic (or logical) properties of truth or falsity at a level of cognition or language may be purely incidental. From a Global Systems perspective, information systems autonomously pursue the optimal means […]