Institutional continuity (and all that follows) is reciprocally self-defined through assertions of regulatory control, surveillance, power and – yes – strategy; an interface and communications bridge or feedback loop of some sort forms and self-sustains in this way. This mirrors many a parochial epistemology, but – is the control system and model as adaptive as […]
Language and its corollary of narrative communication finds itself quite poorly-fit for engaging with anything other than the products and assumptions of language, as rich and diverse as they may ultimately be. This is a primary method of communication system self-replication through indefinitely extensible introspective self-reference. We don’t often notice this because we are all […]
Thousands are protesting in Ladakh, India, demanding constitutional provisions to protect the region’s ecology and autonomy over land and agriculture decisions. The region, affected by climate change and territorial disputes, is seeing worsened conditions due to militarisation. Activist Sonam Wangchuk is leading a “climate fast” in freezing temperatures to highlight these issues. The protesters seek statehood and […]
Context: Solar eclipse 2024: Millions in North America will view what promises to be a blockbuster We reflexively attribute significance as a function of the extent to which astronomical facts can be rendered intelligible by the transient communicative adaptation we more readily recognise as culture, as language and as the variously dissimulated fidelity of partial […]
I suspect that human confusion and belligerent insecurity may be irreducible. This is not to say that these things are endemic or necessary properties of either ourselves, or of the world more generally. It is to suggest that our historical development and evolutionary inheritance has so profoundly entangled intelligence with uncertainty that we are not […]
Consciousness is (in Lao Tzu’s sense) the hole in the wheel that makes it useful. It is the conspicuously absent (but mischievously omnipresent) ontological unity, the counter-intuitively hollow yet binding property and inarticulable metaphysics of the manifest antinomy of logical system self-containment.
Loneliness. How can we unburden ourselves from an experience of absence? There is nothing to remove, so we can not cure ourselves of this existential affliction.
Spirituality more broadly seems to have been seduced by a personality cult that opportunistically misrepresents and all too easily misunderstands messenger and signal as isomorphic with message, quite agnostic of the significance of any particular narrative. This is an elementary projective narcissism, identifying individual with an essentially inarticulable metaphysics of Other and world that is […]
Notice: this hybrid constellation of symbols, narratives, and competitive idioms is the central band and “strange attractor” of a probability distribution we might otherwise recognise or identify under some definition of entropy. In a complex system, the paths that emerge and persist are those that reproduce and sustain their environmental containers, contexts, and communication systems. […]
There are strange attractors in the high-dimensional possibility spaces that exist all around us. Our evolutionary inheritance and over-saturated attention dissociates us from it. Idioms and cliches are the central bank of a probability distribution. The simplest theatrical narratives and conceptual, behavioural vocabularies as compression. A battery and mirror for experience and decompressive enculturation. Information […]
Signification supersedes the semantics it claims as its own. The accuracy of a representation is subordinate to the act of representing. This is also how compression functions in cultural systems: it abbreviates by cross-reference, by the innvocation of possibility. The methods of system self-replication become more important than the discrete snapshots and timeslices with which […]
A totalising political mindset becomes about as self-imprisoned by censorship as it is ever emboldened by it. If it were an unambiguously measurable property, I’d say the damage inflicted upon a nation’s prosperity and sustainable continuity is directly proportional to its self-isolation.
Daedelus Kite 