Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]
Given the potentially infinite continuum of expressive freedom available within language, it is something of a mystery as to why we generally only occupy such a small range of creative possibility within it.
What if deterrence fails? Here’s a quadruple-shot of caffeine for your Tuesday morning: Every silver lining has a cloud, an occasional series: nuclear science, geostrategic insecurity and civilisation extinction edition. Somewhat, IMHO, more significant than most of the babbling business of communicative noise that sustains social media systems, blogging or vlogging platforms, podcasts, news websites and broadcasters, and yet […]
Technologically-mediated idioms of symbolic communication reflect, reflexively shape, and functionally reproduce our identities and cultures. It may be less obvious but an orientation towards certainty and regulatory control is grounded in, and validated by, a core dependence upon an effectively impossible and conspicuously absent experience of closure, certainty and control. Consequently, the pursuit of closure […]
We have stepped across an event horizon in which accelerating rates of technical change and the proliferation of “cognitive” tools have outpaced our personal, professional and/or collective ability to stay on top of the diversity and utility of these rapidly speciating systems. Strategic planning for education (as much as for the broader world) will be […]
The aesthetic liberation of the depiction of the impossible is found in representational systems such as languages and narratives, which are unified by their inability to represent anything beyond their own tautological interfaces. The entity that embodies horror most powerfully is not the tangible evils of the world, but rather the absence of unambiguous truth […]
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.
