The general assertion of significance and meaning as belonging to symbols (of Self, of nation, of Other, of flag or tribal, ideological and cultural association) is a direct and inverse consequence of a foundationally incomplete psychological identity; itself being little more than the symbolic or communications system and technological hyper-extension of a general principle of […]
We do not use language, it uses us and its greatest trick is to easily persuade us otherwise. Language defines or prescribes personality in ways which few of us are prepared to admit. The different patterns and structures of cognition implicit to any linguistic pattern of communication must inevitably shape and influence the overall ways […]
The question is surely as to a definition of meaning. As Russell remarked in “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions – ergo and by way of endemic circularity there is no anchor or Archimedes Point upon which to hang notions of a “most meaningful” life. All meaning is […]
All meanings are by spoken or unspoken convention, by agreement and – being that every word or mind and context is foundationally dynamic – exist as saliences in distributed fields of communication. In the first few pages of “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell raises an irreducible spectre (or is it an angel?) of circularity […]
Perhaps it is not words that are our vessels and messengers so much as it is we who are in fact the empty vessels through which words and patterned symmetries of endless entropy-as-information flows, it is not our intentions that are written upon this world so much as it is this world that writes itself […]
What is life but a long string of melancholy pearls upon which we paint our purposes and interpretations that like the minds that carry them are all just so many dusty Autumnal leaves in time, shackled to an emptiness and eternity that is unknowing and blind, disregarding of our hopes and aspirations, our dreams. We […]
Meaning is an associative property. We define terms in reference to other terms and then those definitions tend by a trick of the (circularly recursive or holographic) light to assume standalone substance and significance but at the base there is nothing, no foundation or ontological anchor upon which to secure our languages, our selves and […]
The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
Meaning is just a game we play with words; a mere symbolic manipulation of the intrinsic curvature and self-inflected logical spaces of language, information and complexity that we inhabit and that – equally, if not more so – inhabit us. If we were for even a moment able to cast aside the base psychological narcissism […]
Meaning is really just a game we play with words in language and there is no ultimate value or meaning beyond an experience of living and life that always and already transcends the limited clockwork constraints and limits or axioms and grammars of language. Language may be the limit of our worlds but it does […]
We assert aspirations to self-control, to self-determination and free will through the multiplicity of options and variables or combinatorial dimensions and degrees of freedom available to us but even as we assert control, it slips away. There are logical enigmas in rationality, in psychology and in the effervescent, autonomously self-propagating information systems that we inhabit […]
We (all) often forget that every single thing any of us does is so stupendously unlikely in such a vast and ultimately meaningless Cosmos that every act, every thought and every artefact or consequence is of monumental significance. We corral these wonders into the small, everyday concepts and containers of art and objects we can […]
Daedelus Kite 