George Cantor (1845–1918) transformed mathematics with his revolutionary work on set theory and infinity, proving that infinities could be compared and hierarchised. This intellectual breakthrough redefined the foundations of logic and abstraction, yet came at great personal cost: facing professional opposition and isolation, Cantor struggled with #depression throughout his life. His legacy endures as a […]
Because it is, at its core and as are we all, a fundamentally introspective process: (a) it cannot isomorphically enclose itself or provide epistemological certainty (cf. logical incompleteness), and (b) it contains within, through the globally recursive seed of entropic unboundedness, a partial and experimental key to unraveling the enigma that it itself embodies. The […]
Asteroid City was an entertaining movie. Less roller-coaster, more linear regression but in either case and most certainly a probabilistic approximation to something inexpressible in language. A simple calculus of possibility suggests that not only are there far more meaningful sentences and thoughts than humanity might ever express, but amongst the plausibly infinite set of […]
Information vulnerability is an implicit, endemic and irreducible cost of communications technology. It doesn’t really matter which instances and risks are in ascendance at any particular moment, as consequential and complex as they may ultimately be, because the underlying fact remains that there is no information security “safe harbour” and every action taken, every assertion […]
Metaphysics is an interesting consideration. I wonder if it is only ever and really a problem of words and language. In some senses, it could only ever be this game of words, semantics, of communication. It’s a problem to which Zen applies the kōan, analogous to the Gödel sentence of a narrative mind. It’s actually […]
Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]
The mystery of the void is that the absence beyond knowledge is indistinguishable (and arguably identical) to that within. Our embodied experience of life and knowing then become less the container of a mystery and more that other mystery that is itself simply an island of transience amongst all this unknowing. There is a tradition […]
Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]
I know of no other way than to seek the impossible beyond ourselves in the paragon of perfect forms or infinity other than as simultaneously and endemically manifest in and as the incompleteness, doubt, undecidability and uncertainty within us. In this, we come to understand that the distance and difference by which we seek and […]
Ascending the asymptote of taxonomical complexity is a process that in many ways reflexively defines what science both is and does but there is a core problem and ontological vacuum that lies here, unacknowledged and largely unexplored. This is that the sum total entropy and complexity of information and energy encoding and processing systems in […]
We are all struggling with what are really little more than the contemporary stone axes and torches of technological hyper-extension of human intelligence to comprehend and leverage the implicit complexity ourselves and- inevitably- of the Cosmos from which we emerge and ofvwhich we are each microcosms. On an infinite arc and trajectory into complex systems […]
…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]
