The more technology connects us, the more it isolates us and the more these tools of information and communication allow us to define ourselves and our lives, the more uncertain they leave as to who we are and what (if any) purpose we have in life. We do not use information technology so much as […]
Category: Philosophy
Categories
The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing
In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]
Categories
Extinction
The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we […]
There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can […]
We believe that meanings and values are stored in things, in objects, places, people but this is not true. Meanings and values are stored as and in the distributed properties of complex, adaptive and interdependent fields and relationships of reference. The value of an artwork is not in the artwork itself, it is a property […]
Categories
Not
We are not so much trapped in our own minds and lives as we are trapped and bound by and in those of others. Personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness is common, perhaps ubiquitous, and is at base a shared endeavour; for all its dissonance and discomfort, it must be assumed that it is a property of […]
If there is one thing of any value to learn about the ways that the forms of our lives exist, it is that there is no single, simple or final answer. All of logic, all of knowledge and all of reality finds itself riven by that mysterious discontinuity and self-inflection that, in encountering itself as […]
It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]
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When we close our eyes…
This is what we all see when we close our eyes and look deep inside. It is imperfect, discontinuous, fractured and incomplete. This is also why it is beautiful. The world is a broken symmetry and imperfect self-reflection and this is exactly why there is diversity, complexity, creativity and life. Some things can only manifest […]
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Redundancy and Replication
Cultural entities, artefacts and places are simple moments, nodes in time and space. It is true that any particular node in some way encodes the whole culture in its form and the patterned flow of information and energy from, around, through and as that thing. Cultural systems protect themselves from catastrophic failure by distributing their […]
Categories
Who Made Who?
It is an interesting thought that while we all appear to possess some degree of free will and self-determination, and beyond the intractable differences of a diversity of philosopical (and, let’s face it – political) thought on the matter, much of our mental lives are shaped and patterned by the contexts that we find ourselves […]
I appear to have made several fatal errors of judgement in attempting to decode culture, cognition, communication and complexity. The essence of comprehension and information that we attribute as rational, foundational and amenable to explanation is not encoded in such a way as to ever be fully decompressed, unpacked, structured and recorded. It has always […]
Daedelus Kite 