It’s a curious thing, this life. So many chance meetings and threaded destinies as a sophisticated tapestry of interdependent artefacts, entities and systems – all seeking self-expression and sustainable continuity while at same time and for the most part deeply, profoundly and reflexively afraid or wilfully unreceptive to the fact that none of us are […]
It’s curious that the cognitive systems and languages through which we aspire to illustrate these existential intricacies of mortality are themselves so viscerally and intimately dependent upon teleological endpoints as anchors of meaning that when they attempt to embrace the meaningless vacuum and grand tautology at their core, they always fail. Is this failure of […]
Those small fragments of recombinatory information through which we understand and define ourselves and each other are nothing more or less than a patterned instance of the local, national and global cultures we inhabit and that, equally, inhabit us. In this way we are no different than the diverse and essentially narcissistic artefacts, entities and […]
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 […]
Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]
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 […]
A chair, being neither true nor false and present as a fact or the concept that references one, is only ever the sum over all that it is not and in this sense represents an ontological absence to the presence that inversely defines it. The artefact as teleological narrative or cognitively reflexive endpoint is in […]
Almost exclusively, this human life and shared cultural experience represents some kind of an existential kindergarten. Our world is essentially a half-mirrored labyrinth of recursively self-validating communication and endlessly self-propagating patterns of information; encoded (in general) as the difference and notional distance through which we are each and all reflexively defined. Our behaviour, thought and […]
It is a philosophical as much as a psychological enigma. Yes, we might define freedom as the absence of fear but any definition by counterfactual (or negation) is always and already intimately shaped by – and anchored upon – an inadvertent dependence on that which it asserts that it is not. In the above sense, […]
The thing which scares people more than anything else is not the simplest or most obvious fact that is the existential self-negation of personal (or even civilisation) death so much as it is the deeper and more profound discovery that there is an irreducible absence of meaning. This is why people so vigorously attach themselves, […]
We are always and already primed, cultivated and prepared by those cultural information systems we inhabit to possess some primitive – but essential – form of self-deception. There is a necessary blind-spot in self-identity that very much forms the core around which that aspirational bundle of ambiguities, uncertainties and insecurities we identify as Self is […]
I wonder what it is about an image that fools the mind so swiftly, so sweetly and so completely. The suspension of disbelief in the essential illusion with which we are presented is so natural and so subtle as to be all but invisible to us. It is perhaps precisely in this invisibility that they […]
Daedelus Kite 