Categories
Philosophy

Transcendental Homelessness of Reflective Introspection

Loneliness begins in language. Not just in what cannot be said, but in what is said and does not arrive. A sentence needs uptake to become real. When no one receives it, the words complete their neat arc and fall back like rain on sealed glass. The echo confirms existence yet withholds communion. The world […]

Categories
communication

Reflection on Media

This is, among other things, a relatively succinct description of the (current, Global) communications system drift through combinatorial entropy into the more probable states of relatively meaningless yet optimally reconfigurable (as modular) noise. High frequency, low fidelity narrative artifacts (and all who sail in them) don’t become completely meaningless signals, but they come to share […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Redundancy of Authorial Intent in an Age of Generative AI Technologies

In the realm of artistic creation, the emergence of artificially intelligent generative technologies heralds a paradigm shift, one that both augments and, paradoxically, dilutes the essence of human creativity. As we stand on the cusp of this technological revolution, it becomes imperative to question the role and significance of authorial intent in the face of […]

Categories
life

Unread letters, like forgotten dreams…

Unread letters, like forgotten dreams acquire as much literary value in their obscurity as they do an equivalent degree of emotional gravitas. There was a time when people wrote thoughtful, reflective and intelligent letters to each other and in all the playfully-constructive ambiguities of language and meaning there sought to explore, discover and redefine themselves […]

Categories
life

Some days…

Some days it all just gets away from me. I try to value and appreciate the words and worlds of those around me but they ring so hollow and haunted that I just seem to end up clutching my own similarly fictional, if ever so slightly better-informed, reality to my chest as a treasured possession […]

Categories
literature Philosophy

Bookstore

On yesterday’s visit to garner some domestic logistics I found myself drawn, as is quite natural for me, to a local bookstore. Rapidly yet calmly and with apposite politeness I navigated my way to the psychology and philosophy section, just next to popular science and astronomy. I tend to treat the pages of these books […]

Categories
Philosophy

Murakami’s Talking Cat

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory”. – Haruki Murakami. A talking cat – clearly an absurdity but in many ways no less absurd than that any of the mad parade of human civilisation and the shared confusion and beauty of this […]

Categories
culture

Bonfire of the Humanities

It is an irony worth considering that institutionally reductive aspirations to slash-and-burn streamlining of educational curriculum align to ideological and economic worldviews which themselves are unacknowledged – if often misguided – products of a diversity and intellectual depth in human civilisation that they would unwittingly or boorishly inhibit. Short term benefits are all the rage […]

Categories
life

A Zen moment with Herman Hesse

A friend recommended Herman Hesse’s book Demian to me. I finished this book just now, sitting in my garden in the sun and spring breeze, accompanied only by birdsong and the distant hum and buzz of traffic that seems to me to be endlessly heading somewhere but never, ever quite arriving. Perhaps they would cease […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

On Orwell

The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]

Categories
Psychology

Censorship, Entropy and Mephistopheles

As a general observation on censorship, redaction and purposeful obfuscation: Information Theory indicates the extent to which strings of symbols bear useful or valuable information and this is measured by the probabilistic entropy and literal surprise of that salience. An enigma of redaction is that, while the extraction of prominent or revealing features of narrative […]

Categories
culture

Art without Affirmation

Valuable intellectual, artistic or literary creative work is not dependent upon affirmation…