Human behaviour gathers around centres that never quite appear. We move toward meanings that seem solid, yet their solidity comes from the very motion that tries to reach them. The closer we look, the more the “centre” dissolves into the relations that formed it, leaving us oriented by something that exists only as a pattern […]
Power’s paradox is that it flourishes best where it cannot fully dominate. Like the tensile balance of a body held together by structured tension, it requires counterforces, resistance, and the ever-present possibility of dissolution to sustain itself. Autocracy and capital alike reveal this pattern: their most efficient mode of operation is not in a vacuum […]
Thingness uplifts the self through reference, yet binds it through relation. The self emerges only by pointing beyond itself—by anchoring meaning in aspirational yet ultimately fictive external structures, signs, echoes. But that gesture, that outward reach, also cages it in a loop of dependency: to be intelligible, it must be relational; to be relational, it […]
Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]
Information vulnerability is an implicit, endemic and irreducible cost of communications technology. It doesn’t really matter which instances and risks are in ascendance at any particular moment, as consequential and complex as they may ultimately be, because the underlying fact remains that there is no information security “safe harbour” and every action taken, every assertion […]
Endemic epistemological blindspots are interesting. Systems of belief are always at some level self-referential tautologies. The one thing that they can never unproblematically represent is themselves. Consequently – models are inviolably incomplete but this is not a system bug, it is an indefinitely extensible introspective feature. It’s also an early waypoint in the journey of […]
Metaphysics is an interesting consideration. I wonder if it is only ever and really a problem of words and language. In some senses, it could only ever be this game of words, semantics, of communication. It’s a problem to which Zen applies the kōan, analogous to the Gödel sentence of a narrative mind. It’s actually […]
Context: What is incoherence? I am reminded of Kahlil Gibran‘s “a pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand.” Emergent systems of frictive cognitive and partisan communications (or belief) system dissonance are inevitable in ways that serially failing to understand them is not. There is a tricky paradox here. Difficult to […]
Doctor Who is such a perennially fascinating character. Beyond the indefinitely extensible and Menger sponge-like topological vacuum of the TARDIS (“…but – its bigger on the inside!”) as transmission medium of unbounded self-inflection, the Doctor seems to only just have self-consciously begun to acknowledge an irreducible epistemological blindspot in his own narrative. This resembles, I […]
Even as we seek to comprehensively describe this apparently intractable enigma of experience, the descriptions by and through which we aspire to do so have begun to become active. There is much to say on the roles of generative technology in shaping our methods and paradigms of introspective discovery, but that is still waiting for […]
Language is a class of epistemological (as self-validating) tesseract. From within its horizon of intelligibility, we can only ever see or engage the descriptions (and the descriptions of descriptions) with more language. This is why Zen kōans frame impossible questions and concepts: it is a way to escape the language trap, using language. Non-linearity is […]
There may exist fascinating parallels between the recursive nature of advanced AI systems and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, particularly in the context of self-reference and logical systems. This recursion is a function of the endless reprocessing of cognitive, cultural and technological information in contemporary machine learning pipelines. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, fundamentally, assert two key points about […]
Daedelus Kite 