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Generative Absence in Language

Where we come up against the boundaries and endemic incompleteness of (a) symbolic language, it is art and poetry that might take (and shake us towards) that step beyond. As though the generative discontinuity of indeterminate ambiguities and alliterative insights (like skipping stones) weave a little constructive extra-dimensionality from all this stochastic entropy. Of course, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Embodied Uncertainty

Context: A Gut Bacteria That Improves Memory in Bees The model of intelligence and cognition that is emerging is one in which all component processes, information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) sub-procedures and dependencies are contributing factors. The catch is that the sum total of all dependencies is uncountable and as unpalatable as this remains to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Truth and Ambiguity

Truth is a mischievous beast. Everywhere asserted, almost nowhere justified and in those rare instances when it might have been said to have been proven or unambiguously defined, it requires we suspend ourselves on contraptions and hooks of such intricate complexity that it is quite easy to forget what we were initially discussing or seeking […]

Categories
Philosophy

Communication Breakdown as Constructive Dissonance

Indeed. I do wonder if a little constructive self-deception is the necessary cognitive consequence and corollary of a symbolic language that is anything other than perfectly fit for the purpose of unambiguous communication. In this sense, are discoveries really accidental dialects? Feynman diagrams being an (abstract, representational) case in point.

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Philosophy

Reality

Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should […]

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Philosophy

Meaning is a Function of Probability

All meaning is a function of probability, of uncertainty or ambiguity and ignorance. As an adaptive or transient property of words, we can infer that not only is any particular or specific meaning not itself of the words to which we assert it belongs, but that meaning is an inverse property of all those other […]

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politics

Political Pragmatism: Unexpected Destinations, Creative Fabrications and Artful Dodgers

A strange property of systems of ideological or political thought is that they offer constitutively unclear or ambiguous paths between their declarative values and the end states they aspire to. Many Democracies (for instance) celebrate those generic Constitutional assertions constructed around the self-evident importance of free speech, freedom of assembly or various rights oriented towards […]

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creativity culture technology

The Utility of Ambiguity

It appears that a degree of ambiguity may be an inverse function of the generalised utility of any concept.

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Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Said one mirror to another…

Rationality is (a) key, but it can not explain (or unlock) itself.

Categories
culture

Uncertainty

Even a mature narrative of impermanence and endemic metamorphosis can sometimes be little more than an existential security blanket…

Categories
culture

Untruth

Belief has always been quite easily uncoupled from reality…

Categories
culture

Truth and Falsity

The confusion, ambiguity and uncertainty concerning Truth and Falsity in the statements and assertions people and organisations make in the media and online in our shared information spaces is a natural, endemic part of cultural and organisational communications systems.