This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
Tag: life
The Fall
What we most often fail to acknowledge is that this focal node and yawning abyss of pluripotent significance and semiotic elasticity that we experience as “Self” is in fact the doubly-inflected presence of an absence, the exponentiated self-replication of an entirely abstract self-representational void. Other than that we could hardly grow or evolve and become […]
The Gospel of Emptiness
Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate – (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else “does” (or […]
We lonely atoms…
…and these, all of these bodies, these artefacts and inscriptions that were once dust will once again be dust. These that were once lonely atoms drifting in all of cosmic space and time will once again be set free to wander. Many, many trillions of years from now even atoms will devolve into a slowly-dissasembling […]
The Emptiness of Art
The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]
What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the […]
How strange it is that we should all spend our lives in pursuit of some idealised goal of perfect self-abstraction, of well-defined subjectivity and psychological closure when everything we learn on this journey of life informs us that this is in fact impossible. We learn by entrainment and enculturation that we should abhor and shum […]
Defining Intelligence
The intransigent difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently concise, compelling, universally agreed-upon and resilient definition of intelligence sits somewhere on the same geometric arc or architecture of axiomatic assertion as does complexity and, indeed, life. If epistemological closure is demonstrably (ref. paradoxes of self-containment, among other things) impossible, intelligence both can and can not (!) be […]
Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of non-trivially sophisticated algorithms is sufficient reason for:• the autonomously adaptive, complex information strategies of life; and,• the intractably problematic and recursively non-terminating information transcription of cancer.
I just read an interesting (partial) article/concept/book on life, the universe and everything from biologist Robert Lanza: “Biocentrism: A New Theory of the Universe“. I am not entirely convinced that the author is not just substituting one mystery and suite of questions with another. For instance – the role of the conscious observer in “creating” […]
Is Consciousness Everywhere?
It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed “everywhere”. It is not that what we are is anything radically […]
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]