Categories
cybernetics

Noise

The atmosphere of American politics now resembles a dense fog of ideological noise. What registers as outrage, conviction or disgust is less the product of reasoned belief than the mechanics of replication: the simplest, most virulent signals race ahead of nuance. Words once tethered to meaning drift as tokens in a saturated field, their resonance […]

Categories
language

Semantics Follows Frequency: Language in the Spectral Domain

When people speak about language, they often imagine that meaning sits inside words like a substance carried in a vessel. If only we could replace “false” words with “true” ones, communication would repair itself. The history of both linguistics and information theory shows something else: semantics does not precede use. It follows frequency. From signals […]

Categories
Philosophy

Semantic Mysteries

Semantics is a fascinating mystery that is haunted by, yet enigmatically accelerates towards, a vacuum composed of the circularly generative absence of its own semantic closure. (It becomes a complex, hollow and counter-intuitively meaningless tautology.) “Language” is itself simply another word, hollow and haunted by an underlying relational semantics that forever displaces meaning, identity and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

Categories
Philosophy

Living through Language

Do we live through words or do words live through us ?