Tag: meaning

Categories
Philosophy

Free Fire: Nonexistence of Self

You do not exist. Not, at least beyond that very limited aggregate of abstractions, words, images, ideas and narrative (or cultural) conventions within which you find yourself embedded and as a transient expression of. It is a little-known fact that from within any non-trivially sophisticated system of ordered symbols, logic and (inevitably, also) psychology and […]

Categories
culture

Should We Stop Making Stupid People Famous ?

There is a well-known meme which features a photograph of a notoriously unintelligent celebrity – take your pick, there are certainly plenty to choose from – with the accompanying text: “stop making stupid people famous.” The thing is – stupid people might actually be the perfect candidates for celebrity. These lucky (or – if we […]

Categories
Philosophy

On not knowing the names of things (and other absences)…

It is not just what is said that matters, but also – the way in which it is said, the nuance, the poetry and the subtlety. This is the second-order semantics of meaning and style in communication and thought. It is not enough to simply know the names of things, the measures and to collect […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Knowing Nothing: A Consolation of Philosophy

In seeking truth and meaning I find that I must return again and again to the endless mysteries of emptiness, negation and nothingness. It is clear that any assumption of the existence of meaning (or meaningfulness) is of a different order of existence than is an equivalent assertion regarding truth. Notwithstanding that both of these […]

Categories
culture

Reflective Subjectivity

I wonder what she is reading.  It may be the eternal burden of a reflective mind to be unable to simply accept reality at face value, to question what lies beneath, to investigate what hidden meanings or purposes might exist or dwell below or behind the superficial appearances of things.  At least she is not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beauty and Impossibility

Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Culture, Cognition, Meaning

Culture, like meaning, is not found in one single place but is distributed across the entire surface of our shared cognition and the proliferating multiplicity of artefact, image and a logic of sequential algorithm and rationalised procedure that informs our experience. The self-evident fact that we are unable to unambiguously or unproblematically define or agree […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The empty frames and abstract worlds of words and facts blind us…

Words are those windows and apertures upon the world that in naming and framing facts themselves become things, entities, artefacts in the endlessly oscillating hyper-inflation of logical and referential, representational space. It is as though the glass pane of abstraction through which we see becomes opaque with the carried meanings (and burdens) of its own […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

FOMO

Fear of missing out is much deeper and more challenging than the superficiality with which it is commonly portrayed. At some level we are all aware that we have very little effect on this world, that despite our starring role in the narrative theatre of our own life – we have almost no influence or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

The Reflexive Isolation of this Digital Life

The more technology connects us, the more it isolates us and the more these tools of information and communication allow us to define ourselves and our lives, the more uncertain they leave as to who we are and what (if any) purpose we have in life.  We do not use information technology so much as […]

Categories
information

Emptiness of Words

Words are the atoms of our minds; their meanings are like those mirrors that in discovering that their reflected superficial image was always an enigmatic uncertainty and impossible recombinatory constellation of borrowed energy, endlessly fade into some kind of dusty emptiness or purposeless entropy and vacuum.  Our minds, also… and letting go is never easy.

Categories
Psychology

Emotionally Random

I wonder at times if all of our emotional lives are little more than random fluctuations and transient, effervescent flickering candle flames in the chaos of our minds and of this, our shared world. Somewhere between the volatile, if probabilistically determinate, entropy of physiological or cognitive reflex and those diverse rationales and causes we retrospectively […]