It is of course possible to make similar observations about (many) other contemporary and earlier systems of belief. Nietzsche wasn’t restrained in such a critical context. I’m not so interested in what these systems represent, as such median hyperbole percolates to ascendance everywhere and in almost every instance dissimulates the possession of a truth that […]
Have you noticed that the collective self-definitions that unite us are simultaneously the boundaries and borders that isolate and alienate us from each other and from ourselves? We are (all) both freed by and trapped in the linguistically-mediated systems of belief we inhabit. I don’t think this is a resolvable enigma but it is certainly […]
There’s an idiom to the effect that when you find yourself in a traffic jam you are never “stuck in traffic”, you are traffic. It’s something of a cognitive and linguistic reflex to identify an artefact, entity or system as a bounded or isolated fact in the forest of references and definitions that we inhabit. […]
What is known (or is believed to be known) varies, adapts and undergoes the relentless metamorphosis of entangled streams of intersubjective abstraction we experience as cultural (and now, explicitly, technological) reality, but amongst all this effervescing percolation and uncertain intentions of identity and difference there remains a constant. The song, that is, remains the same […]
Armageddon is in the news just now – how strange to have a word which invokes the end of all meanings, a system of belief that renders all belief as void and an Imperialist state that unwittingly seeks to atomise all kingdoms, all kings. The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me and yet […]
In regards to some study and incidental (as unplanned) research I was engaged in recently, it seems to be most eminently true that the very information and communications technologies upon which we now so critically depend are profoundly, deeply and irredeemably unreliable. This may be no big news to you but I think it justifies […]
Understanding that language is essentially quicksilver and almost impossible to control or unambiguously direct for communication and meaning is a difficult realisation to negotiate. A consequence of this problematic ambiguity is that the kinds of language and narratives or systems of belief that percolate to ascendance tend to be quite remedial and simplistic. This inevitably […]
Many of us might wonder why so many people (and indeed – nations) fall backwards upon a pyre of absurd belief and foolish cruelty. The larger portion of humanity that now inhabits a twilight world of near-perpetual, technologically-mediated connectivity and material dependency should, it seems, be perfectly content with the meaning and methods we now […]
I’ve been fascinated for some time in the many ways that systems of belief are essentially performative. Those beliefs that people hold to be self-evident and unquestionably true exist almost exclusively as public expressions of identity and cultural affiliation. In both religion and politics, but not limited to these, the expression and coded pantomime that […]
One thing that human minds as intelligent entities maintain particular fluency in is the recognition and conceptual or material reproduction of patterns. It allows us to generalise by analogy and to draw inferences across multiple facts to derive underlying symmetries and principles. This lateral pattern-matching across domains is a uniquely powerful mental facility but may […]
When it is all said and done, this current and potentially Globally catastrophic war, I wonder what will remain? A broken landscape of human suffering as sown seeds for generations of hatred and retribution yet to come? A barren and scarred planetary desert of radioactive futility? A humbled humanity that yet again sailed far too […]
Oh yes, mortgages are now a thing in the Metaverse. There is something really interesting here, from a speculative philosophical and psychotherapeutic perspective. Some people are quite willing and enthusiastic to jump on the bandwagon of perceived or projected value in and as virtual artefacts, entities and systems. This is plausibly because at a reflexive […]
Daedelus Kite 