It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]
Tag: identity
Threaded destinies…
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 […]
An introspective taxonomy of labels and the grammatical order of participatory technology in – and as – systems of knowledge and control has always been the nature, kernel and subjective essence of personal identity. It is difficult to identify a particular inflection point at which this Linnean, categorical game evolved from constructive personal boundary and […]
On Blogging
I guess blogging is really just a daily diary, a notebook into which we inscribe our thoughts, our feelings and whatever other existential paraphernalia we might find decorating these interior surfaces if self and subjectivity. Do we write because we want or need an externalised sense of validation that this experience brings? Perhaps, but there […]
Personality Tests: Political Metrics
Context: http://www.politicalcompass.org This kind of test resonates with precisely the kind of personality assessments that Cambridge Analytica so successfully exploited. I’m not asserting that any inadvertent conspiratorial undercurrent exists in this instance but there may be (other) rich philosophical seams of insight to be mined here. Notice that an observational, participatory metric and expression of […]
Uncertain Selves
It is not so much a simple matter of solipsism as it is of considered logical analysis that there is and can never be an “outside” of any system, from that system’s individuated point of view. For this reason, everything is self. Curiously – the metaphysical unknown of a world beyond ourselves is ontologically and […]
Seduced by Language
We are seduced by a language that endlessly recreates itself through us. These are all languages; all of these online platforms, communities and commercial engagements superficially appear to only be that through which we enunciate, articulate, align ourselves to ideological or emotive positions and communicate as an existential necessity but it is precisely in our […]
Money
Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be. We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it. Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature […]
Self-identity is a complex fiction.
Self-identity is little more than a complex fiction. Attempt to suspend your disbelief or any moral affront you might at first experience when engaging such a thought as that the foundation upon which you build a world of meaning and purpose is utterly and ultimately insubstantial. In fact, the vigorous spectrum of discomfort and aggression […]
Language lies to us, through us.
The primary purpose of language is not communication. It is self-replication. Communication is a side-effect of the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and logic that, in passing through us, reproduce us – just as we recursively reproduce them. Information flows through us, it is true, but in both ways (inwards and outwards) simultaneously as a […]
Are Strawberries Real?
Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]
Platitudes
Platitudes are memes (in Dawkins’ original sense) and optimally self-propagate through minds, artefacts and other information-processing systems in direct proportionality to the extent that they provide mechanisms, not for individuation or narcissistic self-validation, but for the regeneration of the assumptions, the grammatical and logical rules, and the gestalt contexts from which they derive. We do […]