The extent to which psychoanalysis is a successful or compelling theory is really a very interesting question in and of itself, even before considering its subject matter. This same dark thread was identified by Nietzsche as being a symptom of more distributed belief-system neuroses. Regardless of where, when or how anyone asserts the causal factors […]
Category: Philosophy
Fascism
Context: The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz – The New York Review There is “a certain orientation of life toward death” that forms the basis and existential kernel of a pathology that transcribes the arc and trajectory of (an) industrialised or mechanised rationality that in being (or becoming) aspirationally unbounded from the consequences of its […]
The Void
“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” – Jorge Luis Borges How true, and yet the solution to this enigma is not to entirely disassemble or invalidate the riddle but (quite counter-intuitively) to embrace it. While it is true that no rational […]
Life as Function of Approximation
Finding ourselves existentially foregrounded as the protagonist in and of all we do, it is almost inevitable that we come to think of ourselves as exceptional or special and in those instances when the healthy doubt of a wise, common or garden-variety insecure intellect dawns upon us, we quite rapidly and gratefully barter our own […]
We trade substance, experience and a visceral, lived sense of meaning for a hollow representation of these same things and in finding ourselves dissatisfied and haunted over the transactional deficit of a mechanism that always loses energy and value, we feel quite positively compelled and emotionally motivated to double-down on our losing hand. This is […]
A language is not its parts
The artefacts and instances as microcosms or individuated and particular salience are indeed not the essence of a linguistic system, but notice how that from within the grammatical and ordered sub-set of logic that language (inadvertently) embodies – the projective and asserted totality of intelligible meaning or self-consistent systems is some kind of statistical average […]
Nothing
The presence of absence is a curious thing. From Lao Tze through to logical incompleteness as a function of the indefinite extensibility of all non-trivially sophisticated complex information and energy-processing (i.e. natural, computational) systems. What is really interesting, though, is that the absence of overarching structure and patterned grammar or organisational unity is an inverse […]
Logic Deceives, Usefully
The limits of language as an inadvertent or accidental sub-set of all logical possibility (as sum entropy of referential) systems possess a peculiar property of masking the limits of logic. Notice that within language we can assert total, consistent and compelling assertions as to the nature and reality of the system of language (or the […]
Distributed Intelligence
Intelligence is somewhat catastrophically problematised by our inability, from within the system, to ever fully capture or represent the system. From within language (and logic) we generate models as fantasies of complete and consistent truths that much more closely approximate to systems of belief that, similarly, simulate closure and completeness without ever being able to […]
Probability is Real
Probability is as real as are tables and chairs. It is only our limited cognitive capacity which fails to understand that the complex information spaces that surround us are as real as we are.
Individuality is really a kind of unacknowledged emotional isolation for which by reflex we cultivate more self-definition as a cure, but only ever generate further discomfort and alienation. In this way, personal subjectivity and individuated psychological experience come to unwittingly depend for emotional security upon precisely the referential distance and difference (of aspirational uniqueness) that […]
Belief is a system of fictional narrative that by sufficient self-replication begins to masquerade as truth. In systems of language and communication, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions that inevitably loop back to enfold the entire system in a singularly intricate autocatalytic loop of self-referential tautology. Systems of belief are similarly self-inflected […]