Words acquire meaning from adaptively relational dependency and entanglement with other words and definitions in whichever language, mind or culture they inhabit. Extrapolating this to sentences (and beyond, to narrative and ideology or any other linguistically-mediated system of belief), the combinatorial complexity of referential dependencies quickly becomes effectively unintelligible. A useful mnemonic and metaphor is […]
Viewed in gestalt – cultural artefacts, entities and systems generate positive (and negative) feedback loops as a generative discontinuity of communication system self-reference that produces the semiotic and meme-effervescing environment in which their own symbolic sustainability and intelligible continuity remains possible. Given sufficient time and enough degrees of freedom, cultural (and technological) communication systems quite […]
It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
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 […]
I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the […]
An ideological investment in heroic figures at least partially represents the externalisation or projection of an ideal self, tainted by the biased interpretations of enlightened self-interest or other potential narrative corruption…
Celebrity death appears to allow many people to contextualise death, to understand it in a shared way, in a way that grounds the meaning of our lives in this shared narrative of culture and collective experience. We take our cues on grief and norms of behaviour from the collective narrative of culture…
I was recently reading some of David Hume‘s opinions on the values of keeping philosophical explanations as brief and to the point as possible. He criticises overly convoluted and unnecessarily esoteric language as demonstrating poor mastery of the topic being communicated. Hume believes it possible to explain essential truths and philosophical revelations without resorting to […]
The natural world around us is creative, complex, chaotic, dynamic and fundamentally self-organising. Any response to the world which hopes to successfully manage human beings and our many little worlds into anything resembling a sane organisational structure requires us to whole-heartedly embrace this complexity and chaos. Repetition and rote-learned, blindly regurgitative behaviours lead largely to […]
I remember a print hung on a wall in my father’s house when I was a child. I puzzled and fretted and stared and wondered about this image and it’s impossible, unsettling reality. The print was of M.C. Escher’s 1953 lithograph “Relativity” and I was probably only 9 or 10 years old at the time. […]
Daedelus Kite 