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
culture

Fiction

Fiction as myth is humanity’s first form of collaborative, cultural self-simulation. Clear boundaries between systems of belief and proven facts might forever be intricately indeterminate but the power and consequence of fiction is unquestionable. The role and power of creative language and an unbounded (if pragmatic) technological imagination should never be misunderestimated. The speculative forecasting […]

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

Totalitarian Abstraction

The totalitarian mindset is uniquely fixated and dependent upon an essentially fictional abstraction of closure and control. The sheer impossibility of their aspirations allows them to remain in power because being oriented in this way towards an unattainable goal provides an endlessly self-validating narrative of struggle and purpose.

Categories
humanity

The Sum of all Errors

Human history primarily self-propagates as a function of its errors. The turbulent dissonance and dissembling confusion of our shared experience and memory generates the optimal transmission medium for change, innovation, evolution and – inevitably – also catastrophe. I was watching a French TV series, Ganglands, just now. It is a fictional portrayal of the essential […]

Categories
technology

Artificial General Intelligence: Self-deception

Context: Elon Musk & Joe Rogan talk to “conscious AI” If our intent in seeking to scale the complex asymptote of AGI has been to convince ourselves that it is conscious and possesses subjectivity, personhood or sentient experience, then it is perhaps inevitable that we will arrive at a point where the reflexive conversational and […]

Categories
cybernetics

Cybernetics and the Fiction of Objectivity

Objectivity is a strange beast. The language and corollary cognition with which we engage complexity is itself the constitutive invocation of a necessarily partial model of the systems we seek to define, articulate and/or usefully shape. The definition of a “system” being quite clearly the manifest as epistemological reality of that artefact, entity or logical […]

Categories
Philosophy

On the topic of not casting stones…

Beyond the most broad brushstrokes of inductive intuition, we should never assume anything about others’ thoughts or intentions and yet find ourselves quite naturally predisposed by endemically limited information to do precisely this. A corollary assumption being that not only are the assumptions we make as essentially and irreducibly metaphysical assertions regarding others most likely […]

Categories
culture

Fallible Beliefs and Ideological Myths

It is fascinating that human beings are in general so fixated upon provisioning plausible or compelling ontologies (of “how things are”) that they quite happily trade away their own conceptual creativity and intellectual aptitude for the lean pickings of effectively fictive narratives that rarely if ever meet anything like the lofty ambitions towards which they […]

Categories
Psychology

Fantasy

As objective reality is essentially an unattainable metaphysical assertion, all systems of belief and subjective identities are anchored not in fact but upon themselves.

Categories
Philosophy

The Fictional Deception of Self

If it is true that we must in some sense build ourselves upon what is or may be the irreducible self-deception of a language and logic that can only ever pretend or deceive as to its ability to ever hold as certain knowledge the closure and self that is the pearl at the center of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Fiction

Life can (and most certainly should) be enjoyed, where and when possible, but don’t forget to question the nature of the reality with which you have been presented because the truth, the secret hiding in plain sight, is that almost everything we believe and say or think is little more than myth, fiction and the […]