Categories
Philosophy

Identity

An identity cannot recur unchanged because recurrence itself is a transformation.°° There is no neutral repetition. Each loop, each attempt to return to what was, carries the imprint of what has occurred since; vortical stochasticity. This is as true for personal identity as it is for culture, civilisation, politics. The moment you repeat, you alter—because […]

Categories
Philosophy

Selfless Identity

Identity is not a fixed entity but represents a shifting construct and constellation of relationally-networked facts, orbiting in some sense around an inherent emptiness—an enigmatic absence that defines rather than diminishes. In this space, identity and meaning emerge as relational, shaped by the dynamic interplay between self and other. Language, too, becomes part of this […]

Categories
Philosophy

It is its own shadow.

A torus floating against a dark background. This torus is its own negative space. It is a singularly continuous topological surface that is unbroken but that also contains at its core an absence, a discontinuity and a recursive entanglement. The identity theorem (here) is that logical incompleteness precisely is the presence of an unbounded and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Empty

Signs (like words, information, communication systems and the dependent subjectivities that so vigorously self-propagate through them) are intrinsically meaningless. Meaning and value are relational properties of communication systems such that complex dependencies render isolated nodes (or words, even persons) with a subtle kind of productive futility. Not so problematic from the interior referential perspective of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Not

The suspension of disbelief is a concept that illustrates a kind of game we play against, with and as our selves. The twist in this tale is that we seek to mask (as though by self-hypnosis) the unreality of a world that only becomes real as a function of the extent to which we become […]

Categories
Philosophy

Theater of Identity

Self-identity is almost always if not exclusively at some level performative and theatrical. We most assert ourselves in the world as some kind of reflexive emulation of what we would like others to see us as. In this way, we come to know self as always and already being some kind of stranger and internally-worn […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Usefully Misunderstanding Words

We prefer ingesting prose that reflexively confirms back to us the identities and systems of belief we perceive ourselves as inhabiting. As a general observation of the mischievously discontinuous arc and trajectory of this plausibly ineradicable narcissism that compels our choices, actions and words – the texts we prefer tend to be slightly off-center and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Reflection

There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]

Categories
Philosophy

AI and the Labelling Game

Context: Is your face gay? Conservative? Criminal? AI researchers are asking the wrong questions Beyond eugenic atavisms and endemic biases in contemporary technological (and downstream) cultural ontologies, it is worth reflecting that this kind of aspirational certainty in labelling features of identity and character is itself the amplified signal of a psychological reflex that existed […]

Categories
Philosophy

Identity

The strangest thing about being a person and having an identity is that none of those concepts and labels or phrases and idioms we build our selves around actually belong to us. To be a person, an individual, an identifiable difference as distinct from all the background colour and noise of whichever time and place […]

Categories
Philosophy

Borderless Boundaries

Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]

Categories
cybernetics

A.I., Creativity, Copyright and Plagiarism in Art

Context: Copyright infringement in artificial intelligence art I know a developer that pulled all their code from Github because of Copilot. It is an interesting area of study because, much as has been said of Mozart, AI in its variously generative species are in essence not doing anything profoundly new, they are doing what has […]