The infinite is an idea we return to not because it resolves questions, but because it resists resolution. We surround it with language, belief, argument, and ritual, attempting to stabilise what cannot be fixed. There are no receipts for the purchase. Any infinity exceeds its description, regardless of how carefully the conceptual scaffolding is constructed. […]
He lived in a shotgun shack by the sea, patched with tin and leaning under the wind. The tide was his only clock, the gulls his only critics. He fished enough to eat, carried crates at the dock when it was needed, and spent his nights hunched over scraps of paper, writing lines that never […]
Consciousness is (in Lao Tzu’s sense) the hole in the wheel that makes it useful. It is the conspicuously absent (but mischievously omnipresent) ontological unity, the counter-intuitively hollow yet binding property and inarticulable metaphysics of the manifest antinomy of logical system self-containment.
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 […]
Among other things, language structurally and cognitively (as much as culturally) predisposes us through its endemic decomposability towards disconnection and discontinuity as a mechanism through which it then sustainably and adaptively self-propagates. We are broken in and as an evolving communications system that requires this disconnect to assure the recurrence of a persistent source of […]
It strikes me as fascinating that the most significant things we ever experience in our lives are quite impossible to describe with language. Emotional life and other experiences occur at a level prior to language or ordered cognition. When we try to explain it, all we ever do is see our own descriptions reflected back […]
An analytical framework, as much as its denizens, loves nothing so much as a murder mystery to solve and short of the wars and (other) international intrigues that often lead to all manner of unjust killings, the forensic science of unexplained death plays a special role in cultural and media reflexivity. I do not suggest […]
The mystery of the void is that the absence beyond knowledge is indistinguishable (and arguably identical) to that within. Our embodied experience of life and knowing then become less the container of a mystery and more that other mystery that is itself simply an island of transience amongst all this unknowing. There is a tradition […]
I wonder if we whisper little doubts to ourselves as ways of staying alive. Entertaining certainties is reassuring but leads to complacency and this, in turn, can lead to catastrophe. It is worth remembering that the definitions and identities we inhabit are only as bounded and certain as are the languages with which we inflate […]
Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]
Context: — The Transcripts of an AI That a Google Engineer Claims Is Sentient Are Pretty Wild — A (prospectively Zen) Buddhist psychology in which the core of conscious experience is rendered as a discontinuously generative absence seems to be a much richer vein of sentience to mine than that of endlessly throwing larger and […]
Sometimes the most mysterious and/or significant mystery may be that there is none, that nothing exists where he (or we) expect to find something. Notwithstanding that “nothing” and ontological absence is not, as a function of mischievous logic as much as of the semantic tesseract of language, as reductively simple as it appears to be […]
Daedelus Kite 