Categories
Alien Anthropology

Instagram Influencers

Human beings copy each other, it provides a modest respite from implicit psychological insecurities. They copy each other copying each other because they are tribal creatures and for all this aspirational social or cultural identity construction – they are all so easily led, swept away by trends and peer pressure or commercial desperation. After a […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Desire Deceives and Fertile, Breeds

…the beauty of this art is also the beauty of our minds and the myriad ways that pattern and concept so sweetly, seductively deceive us all. How easily our eyes, our minds, are fooled and how fast an impulse is invoked by the simplest of strokes and a surrender to sweet and wilful projection. We […]

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Philosophy

Enigma: Cartography of Self

The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now – thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it’s logical complement of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Entropy Binds

To what extent does a procedural (i.e. temporal) experience of cognition, language, culture and technology bias us towards linear problem-solving and reductionist explanation? The aggregate sum of all (multithreaded) organisational heuristics may itself be a non-linear and adaptively dynamic system as a fact but from an individual thread of experience (within that gestalt), planning, problem-solving […]

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Philosophy

Natural Indifference

The profound symmetry and unacknowledged beauty of the natural world does not begin or end at some intangible boundary of human difference.  Even our messy cities and the aggregate technological fracture, rupture and overtly discontinuous contemporary lives we lead exist on a direct spectrum in, from and as a broader “natural” world. It may just […]

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Philosophy

The Fall

What we most often fail to acknowledge is that this focal node and yawning abyss of pluripotent significance and semiotic elasticity that we experience as “Self” is in fact the doubly-inflected presence of an absence, the exponentiated self-replication of an entirely abstract self-representational void. Other than that we could hardly grow or evolve and become […]

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culture

The Gospel of Emptiness

Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate – (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else “does” (or […]

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 […]

Categories
narrative

Curiouser and Curiouser: The Complex Emptiness of (Self and) Words

The curiousity of narrative is precisely the (very) many degrees of freedom available to the hyper-inflating interior spaces of language and an associated conceptual eloquence of psychologically-resonant teleology implicit to story-telling. The resonance derives from the ways that language and narrative reflexively shape experience, perception, culture and cognition. The degrees of freedom highlight the logical […]

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culture

Psychology of Taboos

The curious thing about the psychology of taboos is that (generally speaking) the more a thing is prohibited, the more psychological currency and cultural value it (inversely) acquires, and – consequently – the more the associated behaviours self-propagate.  We might identify this counterintuitive displacement of value, meaning and fascination (or attention) as semiotic elasticity.

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systems

Information, Influence and Dissonance: the Utility of Fakes and Errors in System Self-Propagation

Information systems, viewed from a gestalt/holistic perspective, possess many properties we might otherwise recognise as self-propagation, “emergence” or self-organisation. The presence of values attributed semantic (or logical) properties of truth or falsity at a level of cognition or language may be purely incidental. From a Global Systems perspective, information systems autonomously pursue the optimal means […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Necessity of Cognitive Bias

I honestly wonder sometimes if we make sense of the world or if the world makes sense of (and through) us; it is most certainly true that the information patterns of this world inhabit our minds just as much as we inhabit them. Cognitive biases, for instance, are those endemic psychological faux pas through which […]