Categories
Philosophy

Nothing

I’m of the exquisitely unpopular, largely incomprehensible and eminently unhelpful philosophical opinion that if we were able to calculate it to within a Planck’s length of its life, the sum total of all complex systems as measured along the axes of energy, information and entropy would be zero. That which remains conspicuously absent (and likely […]

Categories
Philosophy

Nothing

The presence of absence is a curious thing. From Lao Tze through to logical incompleteness as a function of the indefinite extensibility of all non-trivially sophisticated complex information and energy-processing (i.e. natural, computational) systems. What is really interesting, though, is that the absence of overarching structure and patterned grammar or organisational unity is an inverse […]

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Philosophy

The Invention of Reality as Art

Overwhelmed by a reality that serially offends and threatens us, we construct our own and there find an exquisite emptiness and existential superficiality that we can finally appreciate without transactional cost or emotional burden. In this way, the implicit masquerade of art represents a kind of freedom that we all seek but know we never […]

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Philosophy

Nothing lasts forever…

…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]

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Philosophy

Reality

Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should […]

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Philosophy

Civilisation

We call it “civilisation” as though it were truly and in any measurably definable sense a civil or even gentle presence when all we really mean by this word is that amorphous mass and unknowing ocean of shambling humanity or maddening crowd we find ourselves at any particular time and place quite inadvertently inhabiting. It […]

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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

Big Buddha

It’s a big Buddha. I can’t help but wonder if the whole point of emotional non-attachment has been lost on some people. The more we attach ourselves to ideas of things, people, places – the more internally fragmented we ourselves become. We are all to some extent trapped by our own behavioural reflexes and the […]

Categories
art

Enigma: Everything is Self-Representation but Nothing is Self

Consider how all art, all self-expression can only ever be the hyper-inflating interior surface of some compound, complex emptiness; how from nothing we have made everything (possible) and how the rich curvature and self-inflected acceleration of all thought, all culture and all reality was always (and already) the mischievous logical negation of unity, of completeness […]

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Philosophy

On Knowing Nothing: A Consolation of Philosophy

In seeking truth and meaning I find that I must return again and again to the endless mysteries of emptiness, negation and nothingness. It is clear that any assumption of the existence of meaning (or meaningfulness) is of a different order of existence than is an equivalent assertion regarding truth. Notwithstanding that both of these […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

The Symbolic Vacuum of Nothing

In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]

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communication culture Philosophy

Ex Nihilo

Only nothing comes from nothing and only nothing is effortlessly produced…