No one owns anything (or anyone!), in any ultimate sense. Deal with it. 🙂
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Value, Meaning, Truth
Tag: meaning
Categories
Selfless Identity
Identity is not a fixed entity but represents a shifting construct and constellation of relationally-networked facts, orbiting in some sense around an inherent emptiness—an enigmatic absence that defines rather than diminishes. In this space, identity and meaning emerge as relational, shaped by the dynamic interplay between self and other. Language, too, becomes part of this […]
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Communicative Simplicity
Communication becomes less ambiguous and more streamlined or efficient when content aligns with dominant (as ascendant) probability distributions. This invokes communicative simplicity as a reciprocal deficit of comprehension. In this way, assurance of significance is plagued by the plausible inevitability of a proliferation of largely meaningless content.
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Does AI understand anything?
Is “does the AI understand meaning?” an inadvertently deceptive question? We are intent on chasing and catching butterflies with a jar made out of butterflies! Yes, that may just have to be the nature of any expansive philosophy of language but the least we might do is to acknowledge the core intractability of seeking explanatory […]
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AI, Meaning, Absence
Words acquire meaning from adaptively relational dependency and entanglement with other words and definitions in whichever language, mind or culture they inhabit. Extrapolating this to sentences (and beyond, to narrative and ideology or any other linguistically-mediated system of belief), the combinatorial complexity of referential dependencies quickly becomes effectively unintelligible. A useful mnemonic and metaphor is […]
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Imperfect Communication
Meaning is contested but not because we explicitly or necessarily choose this particular path. If meaning and cultural or political and psychological significance was not subject to ambiguity and confusion, deception and misdirection in the ways it generally is, the adaptive system of bartered value and utility we build around and as language would be […]
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Death, Life and other Symbols
I wonder about what we lose when we die. While the cultural transmission medium and distributed super-organism of embodied human being is as dependent upon transient existence and experience as it is upon the literal apoptosis of imminent dissolution, none of this renders mortality in any sense intelligible from within the mixed salad of words […]
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Omniscience
A provocative hypothesis emerges from the rapid evolution of technology: the phenomenon we’re witnessing in accelerated technological speciation (and convergence) is not localized but rather a distributed systemic property. We generally think to localize the essence of Artificial Intelligence within distinct nodes or points. This localization serves a practical purpose, enabling us to dissect and […]
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3 critiques of logical positivism
Verification Principle Limitations:Logical positivism asserts that a statement is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified or is analytically true. Critics argue that this verification principle is itself neither empirically verifiable nor analytically true, thus rendering it self-defeating. This critique challenges the positivists’ demarcation criterion for meaningful statements Reductionism and Oversimplification:Critics contend that logical […]
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Certain Uncertainty in Science
In the quest to comprehend the vast tapestry of reality, we find ourselves at a crossroads of opposites and contradictions. It is as if the very fabric of existence hinges on a delicate balance, a critical dependence upon its opposite. This interplay of contrasts isn’t merely a linguistic construct or a byproduct of our cognitive […]
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Belief
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 […]
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Inexplicable Me
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, […]
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