Categories
Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

Categories
Philosophy

Can our ideas love us back?

If other people must always and to some extent only ever be ideas to any of us, how can those ideas ever love us back without the whole thing devolving into intricate games of haunted, hollow and narcissistic self-deception? What, in essence, is the meta-ethical solution here? Is there one? I suspect there is, but […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mind the Gap: Science and the Unknowable

It remains as something of an intractable and enigmatic fact that all systems of description, all linguistic artefacts and logical entities must conform in some way to the basic structure of a tautology. This in itself is an interesting enough conceptual waypoint but even while we find ourselves forever gazing into the half-mirrored labyrinths of […]

Categories
Psychology

Fantasy

As objective reality is essentially an unattainable metaphysical assertion, all systems of belief and subjective identities are anchored not in fact but upon themselves.

Categories
Philosophy

On Seeking the Impossible

I know of no other way than to seek the impossible beyond ourselves in the paragon of perfect forms or infinity other than as simultaneously and endemically manifest in and as the incompleteness, doubt, undecidability and uncertainty within us. In this, we come to understand that the distance and difference by which we seek and […]

Categories
Psychology

Disentangling Love and Hate

Love is an experience and representation from inner to outer, from system to environment and from self to other. It is that direction and momentum that inversely generates and cultivates the experiencing “I” or loving person in reflexive self-definition through their relationship to that other. Imaginary hypotheses of “other” are metaphysical fictions no less than […]

Categories
Philosophy

Enigma

There is an irreducible enigma in this world. To put it more accurately: the world itself is an irreducible enigma. It is an enduring mischief cast upon our understanding that we ever and always clothe ourselves in the contingency and moving frame of reference and endless symbolic metamorphosis that our systems of belief embody. Failing […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Building Peace

Curiouser and curiouser: observe how an aspiration to coordinate or construct and administratively or diplomatically assert peace becomes itself yet another game and grammar of difference, of competition, of jockeying words, behavioural idioms, contested concepts and roles; exclusive and self-sustaining as a professional career or community of experts which, while the endeavour is nominally admirable, […]

Categories
life

Unbounded Sentience

Is philosophical truth bounded by paradigms of scientific convention or proven fact? Well, no – just as mind is not bounded by the limits of language in the way ordered or rational cognition is. Language may be the limit of my world, but it is not the limit of mind, sentience or consciousness.

Categories
Philosophy

Embracing Emptiness

Wittgenstein once remarked that when addressing mystery and that which lies beyond language (and thus – beyond cognition) we should remain silent as there is nothing useful that can be said. He was correct, but for the wrong reason. That which lies beyond language and structural or grammatical utility does not necessarily (or at least […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Ignoring Global Catastrophic Risk

Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]

Categories
culture

Silence

These marble busts at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg silently contemplate an ancient wisdom; that the metaphysical vacuum beyond ourselves and as represented by the deep mystery of Other minds is identical to that logical discontinuity and foundational uncertainty within our own minds and there is, as Wittgenstein said of these deep (but everyday) […]