A brief thought for today but based indirectly on a peculiar montage and vintage vignette of Lacanian mirrors and Zen voids. We all wear masks. To be a person, an individual, a subjective experience in the world is to adopt a role, a pattern or perceived or expected and normative self hood. Underneath it all, […]
Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]
It is groups of individuals that inhabit these virtual meeting places but beyond a certain threshold of technological complexity, individuation becomes an erasure and hollowing dependency on the technical, the integrating network and the potentially irreversible colonisation of choice, memory and identity.
Even as technology provides us the arc and contour of combinatorial individuation, it reduces us to a mere shadow, superficial reflection and fading memory of our own experience.
Language is a struggle against the very dissolution and metamorphosis that language itself depends upon for growth and change. The extent to which it is paradoxically unfit for purposes of communication and comprehension is a measure of its success in a primary objective of iterative self-replication through the transmission medium that we ourselves represent. For […]
Context: What to wear in the Metaverse? Why should we even need bodies? The momentum (and compulsion) towards abstraction is and has always been towards the progressive refinement and umbilical detachment of a fully virtualised bundle-of-experiences as self. In as much as this self is still grounded in material information processes and thermodynamic-as-energy costs, what […]
It’s not easy to accept that we might all be implicitly, irreducibly and intractably broken and regardless that such an assertion forms the basis of rationalising exactly why the human world is in many ways such a shambling mess of confusion and fear, the possibility remains that even while we find acknowledging our limitations to […]
Context: Metaverse: Augmented reality pioneer warns it could be far worse than social media It has been said that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg. The extent to which the idioms of technologically-mediated subjectivity we inhabit are the primary methods of information system self-propagation remain as generally opaque to us as […]
Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The […]
At a relatively recent “reunion” event, I noticed that the primary social process with which people were engaged was the negotiation and confirmation of facts, measurements, names, identities and dates. They were all, in essence, reconstructing a network graph of personal histories as effective coordinate systems by and through which to render their shared experience […]
Context: Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads The disconnect between experience and the counter-intuitive products of (a) material logic is endemic to cognition and it is, in essence, an irreducible discontinuity. It may change form as theory and popular narratives of science co-evolve but the foundational peculiarity and […]
Not so much listening to as hearing a neighbour’s car stereo droning out a persistent rhythmic baseline this afternoon provides room for reflection. It occurs to me how such assertions of public identity, of enthusiastically announcing a place in whichever cultural coordinate space we might choose or otherwise find ourselves inhabiting, there is a certain […]
Daedelus Kite 