Context: New words – 17 May 2021 These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents […]
What a strange thing to find such an artefact of profound wisdom located on the wall next to a wash basin in the public toilet of a shopping center. Language is structured in precisely this way and it is around precisely such micro-choices of self-inflected emotional bias that our whole lives sometimes turn. There is […]
As much as DNA encodes information abstractions that become concrete instances expressed through phenotypes, as an information system it also represents something of an inverse mapping of the environmental context in which that phenotype provides adaptive leverage. This indicates a continuous and unbroken, singular or unified information system. We tend to think in terms of […]
Language is fascinating. From the inside of the (i.e. this) referential system, the combinatorial possibilities are effectively unbounded. Notice that linguistic compression waves of complexity as ordered information pass quite autonomously through a transmission medium of narrative cognition, culture, communication – encoded through and as our minds. Human thought and behaviour becomes the extended phenotype […]
If it is true, as I currently believe, that language manifests or instances an adaptive and emergently complex holistic structure that partially pre-processes (and stores, distributed for resilience and redundancy against loss that) information, the question of cognition-as-ordered-thought becomes one of just how much of our choices and self-determination is outsourced or displaced to the […]
What we assume as the central tenet of language and (other) symbolic systems of information-encoding is not in fact its goal, it is a supporting consequence and effective symptom of a system that, like all non-trivially sophisticated or complex entities, first and foremost seeks continuity and replication. The primary purpose of human language is not […]
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 […]
Few seem to be aware that the primary transmission medium of communication as hyper-extended technological overreach embodied in language and various, diverse encoding systems is (and are) foundationally and intractably unable to provide that closure and certainty that we are (yet) able to emulate or simulate from inside it. This is the source of a […]
It is a philosophical as much as a psychological enigma. Yes, we might define freedom as the absence of fear but any definition by counterfactual (or negation) is always and already intimately shaped by – and anchored upon – an inadvertent dependence on that which it asserts that it is not. In the above sense, […]
Context: Quick thoughts on GPT3 An aptitude to compose text artefacts without enduring, substantive (or perhaps any) comprehension forms the basis of many of our journeys through educational institutions. In a sense – blind rule-shuffling in context is what is requested of many if not most students in any standardised learning environment. Competency is measured […]
Language lies to us about its ability to facilitate communication. Anything beyond the most trivial of instances of description and communication carries enormous degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is both the strength and the weakness of symbolic language, but ultimately – language itself benefits most. Human minds are bound by an acquired linguistic intuition […]
There are no final, complete or self-contained answers. Language, for one, and as much as cognition itself, is not oriented towards closure. It is like a genetic code that acquires optimal, sustainable continuity through the counter-intuitive utility and value that incompleteness and uncertainty brings. Without the random mutation that logical or physical necessity creates, the […]
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