A chair, being neither true nor false and present as a fact or the concept that references one, is only ever the sum over all that it is not and in this sense represents an ontological absence to the presence that inversely defines it. The artefact as teleological narrative or cognitively reflexive endpoint is in […]
Tag: reference
Are Strawberries Real?
Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]
Meaningless Fear
The thing which scares people more than anything else is not the simplest or most obvious fact that is the existential self-negation of personal (or even civilisation) death so much as it is the deeper and more profound discovery that there is an irreducible absence of meaning. This is why people so vigorously attach themselves, […]
Tautological Recursion
Bertrand Russell once remarked that all of mathematics consists of tautologies. In this sense, we are considering as logically foundational a vast, complex panoply of equivalences, equations, symmetries and relationships asserting unproblematic definitions, references, ontologies. It may be true that from within any system of reference, any conceptual schema whatsoever only acquires and maintains aspirational […]
Laws are Tautologies
Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]
On Introspection (as Reality)
Introspection is endless and is for all this – endlessly problematic.
What does an attempt to generate an artificially intelligent Theory of Mind (of the existence of intentions, experiences and inference of probable future actions) in other entities reveal about our own existential circumstances and the fundamental uncertainties of our own experience ?
Culture: Gothic Complexity
The primary purpose of cultural systems, sub-systems and sub- or counter-cultures is also their primary method. That is (and fundamentally): the replication of the process of self-replication.
Finite cross-section of infinite systems; complex iterations in a conceptual vocabulary…
Degrees of Complexity
Defining measures of complexity itself proves to be complex…