Categories
Philosophy

Narrative

Narrative is a curious beast and whether or not we assert it as resident or absent in minds, lives, cultures and selves – notice that we only ever invoke and generate more words when we debate a point upon it. I think we do just as well to consider that in as much as human […]

Categories
Philosophy

Your Systems of Belief are Fictions

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unexpected Words

I am quite interested in the ways in which a normative gamification of language (in wordle, crosswords, quizzes, tests and other educational, institutional, political or ideological taxonomies) reflects and reinforces the essentially probabilistic information signal that inflects all linguistic statements, descriptions and assertions of fact with significance. The words, concepts and downstream grammatical or cultural […]

Categories
Philosophy

ChatGPT: Linguistic Tesseract of Deception

There has been a wildfire of online interest in ChatGPT over the last couple of days. The software possesses no insights, intuition or understanding and yet its relative eloquence is compelling. What truly fascinates me about all the effervescing interest in this particular language model is that its primary effect has been the generation of […]

Categories
information

Breathe In: Lungs, Language, Civilisation

There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Self-ish Resonance

This morning I read an interesting online aphorism from a wise school that suggested that most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment. Much the same might be said, in functional microcosm, of the perceived value of a social media post or comment. We could ask how […]

Categories
Philosophy

Exopolitical Enigmas of Human Language

Context: If We Make Contact With Aliens The Biggest Danger Will Be Our Politicians, Say Scientists Yes. It is quite true that the communication systems endemic to our species have had a catastrophic tendency to percolate precisely the wrong kinds of self-interested personalities into positions of power. While it is not always the case that […]

Categories
Philosophy

All the Simple Things

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Wrong Words

Have you ever noticed how even the most deliberate thought collapses at the boundary where concept attempts to become utterance? The effervescent liminality between inner image and external word sediments itself between lived cognition and its skeletal representation. Thought arrives whole, textured, multi-dimensional. Language receives it late, fragmented, already reduced. In the act of speaking […]

Categories
Philosophy

Deceptive Replication

Communication is not primarily a function of truth or any kind of existential necessity – survival, organisational continuity and culture. It is a process that engages and contains these things but where we tend towards error is when we think we know what communication intends. The intentions are purely of our own individual, collective, collaborative […]

Categories
Philosophy

Organisational Orbitals of Language

It is as a consequence of the extent to which linear logic and causal intuitions have been successful (as technology) that we tend to assert similarly deterministic prescriptions regarding the relationships between artefacts, entities and systems in the world. Yes, there are often simple abstractions that map with relative fidelity upon the facts of our […]

Categories
Philosophy

Paradise Lost, Found and Unbounded

Something that really annoys me is that academia, but not only academia, requests of us the simplest possible assertions and explanations as atoms of maximal communication but seems to fail to understand that this is not at all how the world actually exists. The aspirationally reductive simplicities of a lowest common denominator of communicative social […]