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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]
Attempting to comprehensively explain the many and diverse ways in which information autonomously self-propagates as and through cognition, communication and culture is a subtle process. More often than not, such aspirations towards linguistic, mathematical (or other) conceptual closure devolve into meaningless noise that is only saved from complete irrelevance by that pattern-obsessed brains and sociotechnical […]
Even while we all actively generate endless tides of digital self-representation (as images, data points, digital footprints, biometric and geolocation records, corporate and institutional identifiers or classifications) of self-identity we find ourselves simultaneously slipping away from reality, certainty and any notion of existential closure. This irreducible uncertainty and quicksilver spectre of endlessly self-inflected introspection as […]
What is sleep? We may as well ask ourselves “what is language?” Sleep is in general a measure of the absence of language, of incessant mental chatter and an accelerated internal narrative that our minds are quite naturally oriented towards. If we might assert that language is a technology as much as it is the […]
Daedelus Kite 