Context: The Great American Novel will not be written by a Computer It’s a great point and notwithstanding that hard-core reductionist types often enough give the piñata of John Searle’s Chinese Room a comprehensively passive aggressive thrashing with pitchforks and torches, it is an irreducible fact under the current ascendant paradigm. Semantic complexity in either […]
Tag: writing
Categories
On Writing
The greatest barrier to truly influential or eloquent prose style is that which occurs when a writer assumes (or aspires to) unique and separate – effectively isolated, discontinuous – individuation as inalienable symbolic possession of the creative art and act. Words as a living embodiment of complexity quite naturally express themselves both through (and as) […]
Categories
Irrationality is Endemic
Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]
Context: The Café Beauty, like life, is a transient thing and the experience of it brings as much suffering as it does joy – an equation perhaps weighted to the darkness more than to the light and in the inevitability of the ends we all must face, this seems a certain truth. The sense of […]
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
Categories
On Writing
All writing is experimentation. Hemingway suggested that there is no good (first draft) writing, that all the quality emerges from rewriting and while I do not doubt that there is wisdom in this – I find that words flow most smoothly as though of their own accord; the essence of an idea, a concept, an […]
Categories
Quicksilver Concepts
I appear to spend an inordinate amount of time peripatetically wandering around pondering wistful wisdoms, diverse philosophical insights and complex intuitions. Capturing or projecting mental insight and creative visualisation into written (or spoken) words is an exercise which loses a great deal in translation from the quicksilver or pure thought to the grammatical and semantic […]
There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can […]
There is no best, there is only better and it is a consequence of core psychological fallacies that we even assert or adhere to concepts and narratives of artistic, literary, ideological, political or existential completion and closure. It is always possible to creatively extend any system (or creative act of self-definition) by intuition and recursive […]
Categories
Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and […]
Categories
Missing Images on this Blog
If you find references to images which are missing, please comment on the post – I will tidy it up. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Categories
Ex Nihilo
Only nothing comes from nothing and only nothing is effortlessly produced…
