Tag: self

Categories
Philosophy

self

The self never settles because the world never settles. Your body changes. Neural chemistry fluctuates. Memory edits itself. Relationships move. Context rearranges. Words drift. Culture turns. New facts arrive, old certainties decay, and the feedback never stops. So the self is not rewritten because it is faulty, but because it is embedded in conditions that […]

Categories
Psychology

Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]

Categories
cybernetics

Uncertain Selves

The self orients itself toward abstractions it can never fully coincide with, and it is precisely this gap—the not-quite-matching—that constitutes the self. The difference is not a flaw but the inflation of the relational space within which intelligibility arises. The self is not a closed entity but the pattern of deferrals and resonances that language […]

Categories
cybernetics

Individuation

Individuation isn’t the slow refinement of a solid self; it’s the gradual recognition that the self was never there in the first place. What loops back through time is not an enduring “I,” but a process — the interplay of perception, memory, and change, tracing shapes in a field that doesn’t belong to any of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Thingness

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Lost in Translation

One’s relationship with others feels, to me, to be a subset of one’s relationship with one’s self; and vice versa. Regardless that that’s one hell of a lot of ones, Kierkegaard made the point that this introspective opening up of structure precisely is the self, the mind, our experience and the world. I only saw […]

Categories
Philosophy

Selfless Identity

Identity is not a fixed entity but represents a shifting construct and constellation of relationally-networked facts, orbiting in some sense around an inherent emptiness—an enigmatic absence that defines rather than diminishes. In this space, identity and meaning emerge as relational, shaped by the dynamic interplay between self and other. Language, too, becomes part of this […]

Categories
Philosophy

Absurdity

A thing being as equally and oppositely defined by that which it is not as much as by what it provably is (or consensually appears to be), the absence of its opposite is the simultaneous presence of its psychological, cultural and technologically-mediated self. Facilitated by conveniences of Gestalt illusion, familiar enough to student artists but […]

Categories
Philosophy

Mind the Gap

Theory of Mind represents the ingestion, curated entrainment and epistemological event horizon of an essentially inarticulable metaphysical Otherness. Much is made of commercial opportunity and/or existential threat represented by artificial intelligence. I’m not sure we should be so concerned about the potential arrival of unregulated superintelligence, if indeed this does ever occur. We will remain […]

Categories
Philosophy

Partial Selves

Humanity is, as ever, bound by our endemic fascination and obsession upon details and aesthetic narcosis in the beauty of visual and narrative abstractions. We serially fail to recognise and comprehend that it is the property of recursive self-similarity that is far more significant than any of its transient instances. Beautiful, but profoundly incomplete, we […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief

Belief systems are intricate webs of shared understanding. They anchor even the most fiercely independent or introspective identities of adversarially partisan tribalism within a vast, self-entangled tapestry of cultural and linguistic relationships. This network, this communal dance of meaning and experience, shapes our sense of self. We strive to forge an identity that feels wholly […]

Categories
Philosophy

Emotional Experience

It strikes me as fascinating that the most significant things we ever experience in our lives are quite impossible to describe with language. Emotional life and other experiences occur at a level prior to language or ordered cognition. When we try to explain it, all we ever do is see our own descriptions reflected back […]