What does it mean for a thing not to exist, for it to be quite literally “conspicuous by its absence”? When a thing that is there is removed, it is clearly an absence marked by memory or by material evidence, not that memory is perhaps all that trustworthy and notwithstanding that it is an irreducible […]
A problem that I find myself returning to incessantly over the course of extended study and participatory observation in this human life and the diversity of cultural experience we all share is that of misunderstanding. The Philosophers would perhaps identify the problem as being one of Ontological Misunderstanding, of an essential mischaracterisation or ill-informed pattern […]
We inhabit the material of manifest corporeality and in equal measure – abstract patterns of information inhabit us. Which is more fundamental? There is no base, no anchor, no foundation; the imaginary spaces of information and autonomously self-propagating computational resonance are the contours through which matter and energy travels; the embodied (and reflexive, in our […]
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 […]
The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]
The strangest thing about personal identity and subjective psychological experience is that, at core, it consists solely of internalised references to an external world of images, ideas, idioms, languages and conventions. This “external” world is only ever the substantive collection and dynamic aggregate of all of those other individual nodes, similarly empty, and swimming in […]
There is absolutely and irrevocably nothing more likely to raise the hackles and turn a good conversation bad than to willingly or unwittingly call into question another person’s core belief system. Beyond this, and far outside (or is that inside?) the problematic orbits of political ideology, cultural convention and personal interpretations of the rich smorgasbord […]
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 […]
Just what would you think if it came to pass that everything that you thought was you was not and everything else was inside out? Like that light that strikes the back of your eye, doubly inverted before it renders a representation and (dis)simulation of reality inside the effervescent neuroelectrical enigma of you – that […]
In any sequence of symbols, experiences or other functional input to our various sensory apertures, the entity and events which bear the most unexpected or surprising data are those which can be said to carry the most substantive information content. In a world awash in a semiotic soup of aspirational novelty and atention-seeking advertisements, billboards, […]
It is an interesting thought that while we all appear to possess some degree of free will and self-determination, and beyond the intractable differences of a diversity of philosopical (and, let’s face it – political) thought on the matter, much of our mental lives are shaped and patterned by the contexts that we find ourselves […]
The core experience and sense or perception of self is real, but the self is not.
Daedelus Kite 