Language has long been treated as a neutral tool of representation, but theorists have shown that it is nothing of the sort. Saussure revealed that meaning arises only in the difference between signs, not from a fixed relation to reality (Saussure, 1916). Wittgenstein emphasised use over essence: words gain their sense within forms of life, […]
The further we push description, the more it drifts from the thing described. What begins as a gesture to bring the world close becomes, over time, a mechanism of distance. The machinery of representation translates immediacy into abstraction, and the cost is intimacy itself. To know through description is also to estrange: the signal replaces […]
Fourier showed that any irregular signal, however jagged or complex, could be decomposed into a sum of simple oscillations. This discovery was not just about sines and cosines but about the universality of repetition as a hidden language of change. From radio to medical imaging to data compression, the world runs on this principle: that […]
Holism is a wonderful word because it resists the temptation to treat language as closed self-reflection. Meaning does not reside in solitary fragments but arises through the whole, parsed and divided against itself. The whole is never intact in presentation: it is displaced, deferred, broken into instances that bear the trace of what they are […]
In 1947, B.F. Skinner conducted a simple experiment with pigeons. Grain was released into a food tray at timed intervals, independent of the birds’ behavior. Yet the pigeons developed elaborate rituals: some turned three times, others bobbed their heads or flapped their wings. They came to believe that their peculiar movements summoned the reward. The […]
In topology, the concept of cobordism describes a seemingly simple idea: when two shapes can be seen as the boundary of a single, higher-dimensional surface, they are connected—not just spatially, but structurally. For instance, two separate circles may both sit on the edge of a cylinder. The circles are 1-dimensional, the cylinder is 2-dimensional, and […]
Mathematics is powerful not because it captures the world, but because it captures a way of speaking about the world—an internally consistent, symbolic shorthand for logical necessity. The danger arises when this shorthand, born of abstraction and reduction, is mistaken for the thing itself. We begin to force the world into the constraints of the […]
I wonder if we should be more concerned that fake news (as mis- and disinformation) exists, or that reality is so easily decoupled from our descriptions of it. It says quite a lot about the tautological dynamics of communication systems (of belief) that they are generally and only ever referentially anchored upon themselves.
I dare say that wherever humanity does or does not find itself in regards to hyper-accelerating tech ological metamorphosis, this destination (or waypoint) will only ever be the most probable as manifest constellation of all possible artefacts, entities and systems in the world. I study holism. Ironically, you come to see it everywhere.
Art is not an externality. Abstractive visualisation is significant for gaining intuitions regarding many relational and topological spaces, networked systems, causal flows and (even, for elaborating) assertions of causality, intent and purpose in mind and/or nature. It is not a matter of art OR science, which as a logical relationship approximates and resolves to some […]
It seems quite petty and inadequate to aspire to “simply” solve just one of the world’s complex problems. Let’s solve them all, simultaneously. What is the one thing that every thing shares? What essence or abstraction binds the world together in some way as “reality” or intelligibility and experience? While it may be possible that […]
When science encounters the unexplained it tends only to see reflected back those concepts that self-validate the assumptions by (and through) which this well-ordered system of knowledge persists. The absence of unambiguous evidence is also the kind of thing we might expect when encountering any intelligence that is seeking for whatever reasons to obscure its […]
Daedelus Kite 