"Reality" is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way - we often mistake the discrete,…
On Knowing Nothing: A Consolation of Philosophy
In seeking truth and meaning I find that I must return again and again to the endless mysteries of emptiness, negation and nothingness. It is clear that any assumption of the existence of meaning (or meaningfulness) is of a different order of existence than is an equivalent assertion regarding truth. Notwithstanding that both of these…
Non-sense
Just what would you think if it came to pass that everything that you thought was you was not and everything else was inside out? Like that light that strikes the back of your eye, doubly inverted before it renders a representation and (dis)simulation of reality inside the effervescent neuroelectrical enigma of you - that…
FOMO
Fear of missing out is much deeper and more challenging than the superficiality with which it is commonly portrayed. At some level we are all aware that we have very little effect on this world, that despite our starring role in the narrative theatre of our own life - we have almost no influence or…
The Reflexive Isolation of this Digital Life
The more technology connects us, the more it isolates us and the more these tools of information and communication allow us to define ourselves and our lives, the more uncertain they leave as to who we are and what (if any) purpose we have in life. We do not use information technology so much as…
Emptiness of Words
Words are the atoms of our minds; their meanings are like those mirrors that in discovering that their reflected superficial image was always an enigmatic uncertainty and impossible recombinatory constellation of borrowed energy, endlessly fade into some kind of dusty emptiness or purposeless entropy and vacuum. Our minds, also... and letting go is never easy.
The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing
In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards,…
Extinction
The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we…
Not
We are not so much trapped in our own minds and lives as we are trapped and bound by and in those of others. Personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness is common, perhaps ubiquitous, and is at base a shared endeavour; for all its dissonance and discomfort, it must be assumed that it is a property of…
When we close our eyes…
Broken symmetry... This is what we all see when we close our eyes and look deep inside. It is imperfect, discontinuous, fractured and incomplete. This is also why it is beautiful. The world is a broken symmetry and imperfect self-reflection and this is exactly why there is diversity, complexity, creativity and life. Some things can…
Who Made Who?
It is an interesting thought that while we all appear to possess some degree of free will and self-determination, and beyond the intractable differences of a diversity of philosopical (and, let's face it - political) thought on the matter, much of our mental lives are shaped and patterned by the contexts that we find ourselves…
These Masks Wear Us
These masks of self obscure only the fact of their own emptiness.
