All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information…
The Freedom Game
Freedom of Self is a game we play in which we trade an Other's control for our own. In all the sparkle and fireworks of our relentless jubilation we fail to recognise that we still play by the same rules and are in essence no more free than we were before. Additionaly: we free to…
Free Fire: Nonexistence of Self
You do not exist. Not, at least beyond that very limited aggregate of abstractions, words, images, ideas and narrative (or cultural) conventions within which you find yourself embedded and as a transient expression of. It is a little-known fact that from within any non-trivially sophisticated system of ordered symbols, logic and (inevitably, also) psychology and…
How free would we all be if there was no ultimate truth?
I just read an interesting (partial) article/concept/book on life, the universe and everything from biologist Robert Lanza: "Biocentrism: A New Theory of the Universe". I am not entirely convinced that the author is not just substituting one mystery and suite of questions with another. For instance - the role of the conscious observer in "creating"…
Unanswerable Questions: Science, God, Infinity
Michelangelo, Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1510, Vatican. Michelangelo's Divinity reaches back from an artfully-obfuscated human cranium and brain to create Adam. It is indeed at the level of (such) Universals - in which questioners become objects of their own self-introspection that we observe an endless referential circularity and recursion without end.Foundational work in logic…
Political Problems: the ubiquitous, intractable and shared enigmas of outsourcing our rationality to those least able to effectively use it
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material…
Technology: Misunderstanding Each Other
Has anyone (else) noticed that the proliferation of communications technologies has occurred in direct proportion to the level of misunderstanding and confusion in the world? It is not that we do anything new by misinterpreting each other's intentions - as people have been doing this for as long as there have been people - we…
Ascending An Impossible Self-Disassembly of Infinitely-Extensible Emptiness
Some truths are only known by inversion, by negation and through a proof by contradiction. Alan Turing's proof of the undecidability of non-trivially complex algorithms, that is - the impossibility of analysis to arrive at certainty concerning whether a given computer program will terminate or continue forever, was just such a proof. Kurt Gödel's proof…
On Knowing Nothing: A Consolation of Philosophy
In seeking truth and meaning I find that I must return again and again to the endless mysteries of emptiness, negation and nothingness. It is clear that any assumption of the existence of meaning (or meaningfulness) is of a different order of existence than is an equivalent assertion regarding truth. Notwithstanding that both of these…
The Complex Spaces of Psychological (and Cultural) Self-Deception
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over…
Culture: Using Fiction to understand Fact
To understand the mood and the Zeitgeist of an era, inspect the art, the fiction, the entertainment and the overtly and consciously, intentionally superficial. It is in the manifestation and cultivation of oblique and useful falsehood that the underlying axioms inexorably reveal themselves. What is considered "real" or "important" reveals itself as merely being another…
The empty frames and abstract worlds of words and facts blind us…
Words are those windows and apertures upon the world that in naming and framing facts themselves become things, entities, artefacts in the endlessly oscillating hyper-inflation of logical and referential, representational space. It is as though the glass pane of abstraction through which we see becomes opaque with the carried meanings (and burdens) of its own…
