We do not simply hear songs, speech and culture. Their repetition teaches us how to hear what comes next, while every new encounter quietly changes the pattern that taught us.
Tag: language
We are not outside the world we are trying to understand. We are (all) implicated in its disorders, participants in its reproduction, and responsible for what happens next.
Why Deception Is Irreducible in Communication
Categories
The Essence of Language
Language, like all communication systems, holds together not despite displacement, delay and uncertainty, but because of them.
A rigged game constrains probabilities; it does not determine every outcome.
This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.
When religious language does more work for political identity than religious ethics do for moral conduct, God becomes useful in ways we should all probably question.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
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Belief as Harmonic Structure
Belief is harmonic structure: the recurrent pattern of timing, relation and probability through which language, meaning and experience take form.
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What Does Education Do?
Education stabilises knowledge long enough to transmit it, even as the machinery through which knowledge is produced and interpreted accelerates the movement of the epistemic attractor itself.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
