Categories
Philosophy

Absent Meaning

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Empty

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Conflict

(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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Emotional Experience

The greatest physical pain a person can ever feel is quite probably bounded by suffering any one of a dozen or so uniquely unpleasant ailments but the greatest emotional pain is almost singularly attributable to the suffering of others. Emotional experience is the essence of compassion and peace of mind but it is a subjective […]

Categories
Philosophy

Tales of Entropy and Time

Words are essentially meaningless components that recombine in meaningful ways. Meaning is a function of evolving referential networks. Global system self-referentiality sustains this soliton-like adaptive shockwave that language, culture and technology embodies. Meaning is anchored in meaninglessness, and other such recursive tales of entropy and time…

Categories
Philosophy

The Meaning of (a) Life

An impassioned defence of anti-materialist ontology as addressed to the indeterminacy of provable, definable or unchanging values and the meaning of (a) life. The enigma infusing materialism must forever remain that of the partiality and incompleteness of any aspiration to construct (and reduce) knowledge in regards to the demonstrable facts with which the world presents […]

Categories
Philosophy

Leveraging the Limits of Knowledge in Language and Technology

The languages and technologies with which we engage the downstream consequences of our own technical (as linguistic and communications) productivity are as unable to capture, explain and bound the accelerating metamorphosis of technological #change as is that electromechanical juggernaut (itself and also) unable to provide the linearity and closure that is forever spruiks as its […]

Categories
Philosophy

What does AI mean for us all?

An interesting thing about Artificial lntelligence so rapidly acquiring such an eloquent aptitude to mimic, engage and constructively deceive us is that this ensemble of technologies do not in any comprehensive sense actually understand us – we and our intricately stochastic behaviours are merely so many numbers and statistical (as probabilistic) relationships or correlations and […]

Categories
Philosophy

When Words Fail

When words finally fail us, we might have actually found something worthwhile to say.

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Immortality?

Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaningless Reflection

There’s an argument to be made for the notion that the contents of our minds are really nothing more than the reflective internalisation of all that froth and bubble we experience from other people. In such a world in which the contents of each mind are little more that the reverberating reflection of all the […]