Every mind is like this: patterns, faces, surfaces and dreams. We recombine these things in different ways and while we might all arrive in different places and by different paths or idioms of cultural and linguistic orientation – it is fundamentally the same process that we are all engaged in. We all spend our lives […]
Tag: mind
Communication is not Consciousness
An interesting article: A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind Mind is certainly built around nested hierarchies, but the general structures built here (in this article) are too dependent upon loosely unverified correlation and analogy; “X implies Y, so then Z”, where X is unsubstantiated. The structural constraints of communication and narrative cognition derive from, are […]
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) […]
Mind, Information and Entropy
It is not surprising that the symbolic abstractions and mental worlds of homo sapiens arrive at incompleteness and negation but “deficiency” is a word perhaps altogether too easily attributed affective, emotional qualities. The indefinite extensibility of (both) logical and material systems, and each in their own ways invoking parameters and probabilities unique to their own […]
Reality Inversion: The Emptiness in Art
“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]
Unsettling Reflections
In the mirror of this world, we are not in every instance comfortable with that which reflects back at us because we know that, deep down and at some precognitive and primordial level, all of the good and all of the bad and everything in between is really just at some level a reflection of […]
What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are […]
Quicksilver Concepts
I appear to spend an inordinate amount of time peripatetically wandering around pondering wistful wisdoms, diverse philosophical insights and complex intuitions. Capturing or projecting mental insight and creative visualisation into written (or spoken) words is an exercise which loses a great deal in translation from the quicksilver or pure thought to the grammatical and semantic […]
The form and flow of this life and logical information space we inhabit is as much a matter of what we are not as what we are; we are manifestations and expressions of that life beyond us as much as that within. There exists a particular narrow focus of abstract pattern or cognitive extension that […]
If there is one thing of any value to learn about the ways that the forms of our lives exist, it is that there is no single, simple or final answer. All of logic, all of knowledge and all of reality finds itself riven by that mysterious discontinuity and self-inflection that, in encountering itself as […]
When we close our eyes…
This is what we all see when we close our eyes and look deep inside. It is imperfect, discontinuous, fractured and incomplete. This is also why it is beautiful. The world is a broken symmetry and imperfect self-reflection and this is exactly why there is diversity, complexity, creativity and life. Some things can only manifest […]
Who Made Who?
It is an interesting thought that while we all appear to possess some degree of free will and self-determination, and beyond the intractable differences of a diversity of philosopical (and, let’s face it – political) thought on the matter, much of our mental lives are shaped and patterned by the contexts that we find ourselves […]