What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
It is unlikely to be a popular or perhaps particularly useful philosophical reflection but, as it turns out, many of the questions of complexity, complex self-organisation systems and the underlying logical discontinuities by which emergence and self-propagation occur and persistently manifest are not a difference in kind but of degree to the ways in which […]
…and in trying, aspiring, in reaching out and making a purpose – or a difference – where there is (demonstrably) none we find ourselves reweaving a semantic tapestry from the bare mechanism and engineered fact of brute (-forced) realism. (Shannon excluded meaning from Information Theory because the complexity is exponential, not because it wasn’t there […]
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
Context: Nobody Knows Anything About China It is of the nature of a science or an art of existential introspection (not to mention institutional knowledge) to seek the least-incorrect and lowest-energy, succinct model of an Object or Entity. The curiously mischievous enigma of such a psychologically-reflexive aspiration towards ordered pattern as #truth or fact – […]
It is interesting to note that history, as a symbolic abstraction, must perhaps (and necessarily) constitute the aggregate sum of all aspirationally least-incorrect assumptions, mnemonics, cartographies and narrative conveniences. The path through any forest can be as popular, arbitrary or random as you would prefer to choose and while we might consider it as an […]
Context: HyperNormalisation… “HyperNormalisation is a yearning for simplicity, certainty and knowing — a fake simple world — in a world of complexity and uncertainty — a complex real world.” – Richard Schutte There are resonances here with Jean Baudrillard’s conceptually-labyrinthine Simulacra and Simulation; a conversation regarding that dissimulation which never conceals the truth, but is rather – “the […]
In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical […]
Concepts of truth have been debated for at least the last several thousand years – across cultures, times and places and as a matter of Philosophy (which as an intellectual endeavour itself far outshines the dissociative political metrics into which fact and falsehood are rendered in our fractured contemporary context). The provision of value in […]
Freedom is as this: a half-glimpsed beauty and eloquent symmetry that by it’s essential nature can only ever be experienced in part. To possess freedom, to behold it’s boundless symmetry all at once would be to try and control it, and freedom can not be constrained by the dragging anchor of mere psychological aspiration. This […]
Observe the progressive sedimentation of difference that occurs as fields of study are defined and become their own relatively self-consistent, self-propagating information systems. Each area of study (of knowledge, of associated, interdependent abstractions) becomes structured around unique taxonomies and conceptual centers. The enigma of this procedural refinement is that the structural and functional mechanism of […]
Those complicated labyrinths of formal vocabulary, taxonomy and tribalised genuflection to conventional thinking or institutional self-validitation that inflate knowledge (and science) with possibility are simultaneously the dragging anchor that binds us (all) to an incomplete and necessarily partial or flawed vision of the world. Art by Agnes Denes.
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