Belief systems are intricate webs of shared understanding. They anchor even the most fiercely independent or introspective identities of adversarially partisan tribalism within a vast, self-entangled tapestry of cultural and linguistic relationships. This network, this communal dance of meaning and experience, shapes our sense of self. We strive to forge an identity that feels wholly […]
Understanding agency is deeply problematised by the languages with which we aspire to do so. We find ourselves haggling over meanings and inferential teleologies within a system of semantic encoding (in language) that, as complex adaptive system, maintains and sustains its tenured continuity in its environment as a function of the impossibility of isolating meaning, […]
To claim, to reclaim, to assert ownership or self-determination, in almost any conceivable constellation of semantics and implicature, is simultaneously an act of submission, concession and referential, relational displacement in, through and as language. Technology functions quite similarly in that every aspirational act and assertion of communication and control is only ever rendered intelligible and […]
The definitions of words. The definition (or description) of a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a document, a corpus. At the “atomic” level of words, each definition and interpreted meaning is inflated and rendered intelligibly sensible as a function of dependency. All words being defined in terms of other words, and as Bertrand Russell reflects […]
We are the mockingbirds, compulsively copying the copies and idiomatic machinery of our shared times and places, of our competitive or collaborative systems of belief. We don’t copy things, we reflexively copy their encoding mechanisms. Each and every coding error breeds further evolutionary metamorphosis. This indicates our critical dependency upon, and endless invocation of, productive […]
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 […]
I wonder if a reflex to identify the where and the how of consciousness might not necessarily, if inadvertently, render the what inaccessibly unintelligible. Distributed (as emergent) system properties inhabit their transmission media in a counter-intuitive way. Yes – where, how and what are all different perspectives on the same abstract conceptual entity but the […]
The value of a joke as surprise and stochastic, staccato salience in the otherwise smooth flow of narrative experience is a function of the semiotic entropy (as existential) displacement that it both embodies and reveals. Significance and meaning are stored externally to a symbol, globally-distributed in and as the networked “latent space” of all other […]
On a topic of philosophy, language and communication: seek what is absent to understand what is present. System unity (and meaning) is a member of this inverse set and once we understand that logical absence is simply a different kind of presence, we edge a little closer to constructively disassembling a bona fide enigma of […]
Signs (like words, information, communication systems and the dependent subjectivities that so vigorously self-propagate through them) are intrinsically meaningless. Meaning and value are relational properties of communication systems such that complex dependencies render isolated nodes (or words, even persons) with a subtle kind of productive futility. Not so problematic from the interior referential perspective of […]
(My own) unnecessarily grandiose and/or unsubstantiated generalisations notwithstanding, the effervescing efflorescence of meaningless communications system noise is a core function and mechanism of sociotechnical self-regulation at the “global”, Gestalt or planetary civilisation scale. An ocean of entropy and dissipative recombinatorial turbulence self-validates the organisational teleologies, such as they are, that already exist. The primary mechanism […]
Meaning is a distributed, relational property in both language and technology. The essence of a word, a technology or a person is rarely if ever entirely self-contained but acquires significance as a function of where it exists in regards to all other instances of the same (or similar) kinds of thing. A technology is never […]
Daedelus Kite 