Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
Aesthetics is not only about the appraisal and critical assessment of beauty in art or any other form. It is also an analysis of sensory experience, of perception. Perception is directly related to assessments of beauty, of symmetry and of value and inflates our experience with judgements – both known and unknown, recognised and unacknowledged. […]
A friend recommended Herman Hesse’s book Demian to me. I finished this book just now, sitting in my garden in the sun and spring breeze, accompanied only by birdsong and the distant hum and buzz of traffic that seems to me to be endlessly heading somewhere but never, ever quite arriving. Perhaps they would cease […]
Disinformation is a mirrored labyrinth that no one can escape, but escaping – like truth – was never really the most important thing. A point worth noting is: these technologically-mediated information systems possess characteristics of what is known as “emergent complexity”. The form and flow of information and energy across (and as) these systems leverage […]
The greatest mystery of mathematics is, to me, that all of these patterns and logical systems appear to almost (and autonomously) seek higher-dimensional self-representations. In category theory or combinatorics we can relatively simply determine and demonstrate the way a set of properties or relationships seeks something of an implicit, intrinsic and endemic higher-dimensional geometry. The […]
All politics is an antithesis to human potential and – beyond a limited facility to produce useful organisational patterns towards sustainable organisational continuity – where it is applied to matters of spirituality or any other metaphysical entity or system of belief, it is merely a demonstration of our ability to (and fascination with) our aptitude […]
How curious that at precisely the (Anthropocene) moment in which the living biosphere and almost all of its diverse inhabitants find themselves threatened or constrained and diminished apace, we produce replicas and robotic golems that quite dramatically dissimulate that they do not in fact possess that life or indefinable (unprovable, logically) living fact that we […]
Einstein couldn’t quite close the loop on his unified field theory. One reading of a hybrid montage of Algorithmic Information Theory, Kolmogorov Complexity and the (Incompleteness) consequences of logical self-containment in any self-describing system suggests that we may end up with more attractive offices (or desktops) and blackboards but that we, too, will all end […]
There is a certain philosophical psychology of loneliness in which we might come to understand that every act of self-definition and individuation is always already the construction of that difference and distance by which we also inadvertently traumatise and emotionally isolate ourselves from each other. In orienting ourselves as “the type of person who would […]
The art of the concept (as Philosophy) is one which, perhaps, largely sits outside the grammatical and behavioural constraints of non-trivially sophisticated (i.e. complex) organisational or corporate systems, and for all that it remains as plausibly unintelligible to those systems as it simultaneously embodies inestimable value for them. It is in many ways not that […]
What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
Daedelus Kite 