Categories
technology

Divided

Technologically mediated communication intensifies what language has always done: it isolates, divides, and distances us from one another, and from ourselves, as a necessary precondition for meaningful communicative experience to arise at all. Given the nature of the world, I carry a quiet regret at not having known more people more fully, even while understanding […]

Categories
art

Desire

Desire does not move in straight lines. It curves. It sustains itself through distance, delay, and asymmetry, forming a logical orbit rather than a trajectory toward fulfilment. What appears in lived experience as longing or pursuit is not a failure of arrival but the mechanism by which relational systems remain open rather than collapse into […]

Categories
Psychology

Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Absence, Approximation, Alienation

The further we push description, the more it drifts from the thing described. What begins as a gesture to bring the world close becomes, over time, a mechanism of distance. The machinery of representation translates immediacy into abstraction, and the cost is intimacy itself. To know through description is also to estrange: the signal replaces […]

Categories
Philosophy

Transcendental Homelessness of Reflective Introspection

Loneliness begins in language. Not just in what cannot be said, but in what is said and does not arrive. A sentence needs uptake to become real. When no one receives it, the words complete their neat arc and fall back like rain on sealed glass. The echo confirms existence yet withholds communion. The world […]

Categories
Philosophy

Consciousness: Unexplain This

Many theories of consciousness attempt to resolve its opacity. Some frame it as an emergent computation arising from neural substrates; others treat it as an epiphenomenon, reducible to material process. Phenomenologists insist it must be described in its own terms, while eliminativists argue it is a cognitive illusion, a misapprehension of distributed processes. Each stance, […]

Categories
cybernetics

Unveiling the Recursive Unity of Interdependent Systems through Non-Orientable Topology

Introduction In exploring the depths of complex systems and theoretical topology, I have uncovered a useful insight into the nature of self-containment and dynamic equilibrium. This chapter delves into the intricate relationships between interdependent systems that recursively contain each other, forming a unified whole whose essence is distributed across the entire surface of the system. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mind the Gap

Theory of Mind represents the ingestion, curated entrainment and epistemological event horizon of an essentially inarticulable metaphysical Otherness. Much is made of commercial opportunity and/or existential threat represented by artificial intelligence. I’m not sure we should be so concerned about the potential arrival of unregulated superintelligence, if indeed this does ever occur. We will remain […]

Categories
narrative

AI, Meaning, Absence

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Death, Life and other Symbols

I wonder about what we lose when we die. While the cultural transmission medium and distributed super-organism of embodied human being is as dependent upon transient existence and experience as it is upon the literal apoptosis of imminent dissolution, none of this renders mortality in any sense intelligible from within the mixed salad of words […]

Categories
Philosophy

Global Systemic Discontinuity

Imagine navigating a vast, intricate landscape where every path intertwines, yet no single route offers a complete journey. This is the realm of (a) global systemic discontinuity, a concept that transcends traditional logic and has the potential to reshape our understanding of complex systems. Envision this discontinuity not as a singular, isolated anomaly but as […]

Categories
Psychology

Intersecting Sets and Ineliminable Absence

Exploring the intersection of psychoanalysis, negative theology, and the distributed nature of semantics presents a fascinating and complex intellectual challenge. Here’s how these fields might intersect and provide deep insights: The intersection of these disciplines invites us to consider the profound complexity of existence, where understanding is not just about what is present and known, […]