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Philosophy

Dialects of Emptiness

I’m pretty sure that all we ever do is generate fragmentary dialects of pre-existing languages, codes, behavioual patterns and conceptual relationships or symmetries. These are ordered structures and complex (adaptive) systems of information and reference that maximally self-propagate and replicate themselves through us as their primary transmission medium, just as they are also our binding […]

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Philosophy

The Deception of Duration

It occurs to me that the impression of stasis and insignificant (as non-living) dynamical properties in, of or as inorganic or inanimate objects and entities is really only a matter of the foundational deceptions that limited scope and range in time and space afflict upon us. If we were to perceive a mountain, a galaxy, […]

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Philosophy

Insignificance

It’s quite unpalatable but is also true that for the overwhelming majority of us, access to the means of digital self-expression remains inversely proportional to either our reach or effect upon others and the world at large. Subsequently, almost all of our heartfelt longings, witty aphorisms or philosophical insights and literary anecdotes are bound to […]

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Philosophy

The Void

“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” – Jorge Luis Borges How true, and yet the solution to this enigma is not to entirely disassemble or invalidate the riddle but (quite counter-intuitively) to embrace it. While it is true that no rational […]

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Philosophy

Nothing

The presence of absence is a curious thing. From Lao Tze through to logical incompleteness as a function of the indefinite extensibility of all non-trivially sophisticated complex information and energy-processing (i.e. natural, computational) systems. What is really interesting, though, is that the absence of overarching structure and patterned grammar or organisational unity is an inverse […]

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Philosophy

The Invention of Reality as Art

Overwhelmed by a reality that serially offends and threatens us, we construct our own and there find an exquisite emptiness and existential superficiality that we can finally appreciate without transactional cost or emotional burden. In this way, the implicit masquerade of art represents a kind of freedom that we all seek but know we never […]

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Philosophy

Personal non-existence ain’t so bad…

Context: Epiphenomenalism: one of the most disturbing ideas in philosophy Consider, also, the unpalatable likelihood that all of our attachments to self-identity and the various, vicarious and endlessly complicated confusion and chaos that difference and conceptual or ideological distance brings: it’s all the internal surface of an autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing system that optimally […]

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Philosophy

Depression

Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times […]

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Philosophy

Ontological Lego

“System differentiation is nothing more than the repetition within systems of the difference between system and environment.” Niklas Luhmann, ‘Social Systems’, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 7. The abstractions are effectively the difference between a(ny) system and its environment, replicated and recursively reproduced as the self-inflation and fact that is that system. The abstraction that […]

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Philosophy

Constructive Emptiness

The reason you can not find yourself is that no such self has ever existed. Finding ourselves overwhelmed and swept away by a complex fact of material and psychological existence, a hyper-inflating system of intricately entangled self-reference in which the only response we could ever find intelligible to is to posit any starting point at […]

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Philosophy

On Infinity and Nothingness

Some days, I just fade away. All dreams, desires, playful remedies as patterns of linguistic reminiscence or passionate aspiration – they just dissolve into the emptiness from whence they came. Dust and mindless, meaningless turbulence remains – spiralling into a slow oblivion in resonant sympathy with an unfurling tapestry of Universal decay and relentless forgetting […]

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Philosophy

Negation

Negation is an irreducible property. Speaking of ontology, epistemology: these are all different flavours on the same buffet cart. Where we speak of a thing, a system, a person, a point of view, a technology or a system of belief – it is always from that system’s point of view or aspirationally-privileged perspective. We are […]