Communication communicates. Our apparently natural obsession with linguistic content is the instance of a more general attachment to amplifying whichever signals of belief happen to have percolated to ascendance in the times and places we find ourselves inhabiting. Plausibly: we do not communicate to acquire closure or certainty but to self-validate a human experience that […]
Verification Principle Limitations:Logical positivism asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified or is analytically true. Critics argue that this verification principle is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, thus rendering it self-defeating. This critique challenges the positivists’ demarcation criterion for meaningful statements Reductionism and Oversimplification:Critics contend that logical […]
Our greatest risk may be that we each and all entertain and inhabit a reflexive abhorrence of the essential uncertainty that science is, if inadvertently, bound to generate. This, I think, represents a key misunderstanding in how we cultivate and describe theories (and technologies). The aspirational orientation towards epistemological closure, communication and control is a […]
In the quest to comprehend the vast tapestry of reality, we find ourselves at a crossroads of opposites and contradictions. It is as if the very fabric of existence hinges on a delicate balance, a critical dependence upon its opposite. This interplay of contrasts isn’t merely a linguistic construct or a byproduct of our cognitive […]
Sociotechnical recursion is a concept that captures the deeply interdependent nature of technological and social systems. It describes how these systems are not only connected but are continuously shaping and being shaped by each other in a complex, ongoing cycle. In this view, technology is not merely a tool or a passive artifact; it is […]
A theory describes itself and its own history as much as it ever comprehensively communicates or unproblematically renders its object, it sets out to prove that an absence of its opposite is the presence (and truth) of itself. A cunning gambit as the basis for confirmatory self-validation but grounded in this way in an abject […]
Belief systems are intricate webs of shared understanding. They anchor even the most fiercely independent or introspective identities of adversarially partisan tribalism within a vast, self-entangled tapestry of cultural and linguistic relationships. This network, this communal dance of meaning and experience, shapes our sense of self. We strive to forge an identity that feels wholly […]
Doctor Who is such a perennially fascinating character. Beyond the indefinitely extensible and Menger sponge-like topological vacuum of the TARDIS (“…but – its bigger on the inside!”) as transmission medium of unbounded self-inflection, the Doctor seems to only just have self-consciously begun to acknowledge an irreducible epistemological blindspot in his own narrative. This resembles, I […]
Even as we seek to comprehensively describe this apparently intractable enigma of experience, the descriptions by and through which we aspire to do so have begun to become active. There is much to say on the roles of generative technology in shaping our methods and paradigms of introspective discovery, but that is still waiting for […]
Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]
Understanding agency is deeply problematised by the languages with which we aspire to do so. We find ourselves haggling over meanings and inferential teleologies within a system of semantic encoding (in language) that, as complex adaptive system, maintains and sustains its tenured continuity in its environment as a function of the impossibility of isolating meaning, […]
To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and […]
Daedelus Kite 