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Philosophy

Digital Sand Mandala

Compassion, Entropy, and the Limits of Logical Systems A pattern drawn in code is no different from one drawn in sand—only its decay differs in rhythm. The digital, for all its permanence, is no less impermanent. Every transmission is a temporary suspension of noise, every system a slow yielding to entropy. There is no final […]

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Philosophy

Penny Drop (Mind the Gap)

Satori is a sudden flash of awareness in Zen—when the mind drops its search and reality hits all at once. It’s not gradual learning; it’s rupture. A system encountering what it can’t compute. Like the halting problem, it marks the point where cognition can’t tell if it should continue, yet cannot stop. Gödel’s incompleteness hums […]

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cybernetics

Unveiling the Recursive Unity of Interdependent Systems through Non-Orientable Topology

Introduction In exploring the depths of complex systems and theoretical topology, I have uncovered a useful insight into the nature of self-containment and dynamic equilibrium. This chapter delves into the intricate relationships between interdependent systems that recursively contain each other, forming a unified whole whose essence is distributed across the entire surface of the system. […]

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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 […]

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Philosophy

Consciousness

Consciousness is (in Lao Tzu’s sense) the hole in the wheel that makes it useful. It is the conspicuously absent (but mischievously omnipresent) ontological unity, the counter-intuitively hollow yet binding property and inarticulable metaphysics of the manifest antinomy of logical system self-containment.

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Philosophy

Global Systemic Discontinuity

Imagine navigating a vast, intricate landscape where every path intertwines, yet no single route offers a complete journey. This is the realm of (a) global systemic discontinuity, a concept that transcends traditional logic and has the potential to reshape our understanding of complex systems. Envision this discontinuity not as a singular, isolated anomaly but as […]

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Philosophy

On Unknowing

The mystery of the void is that the absence beyond knowledge is indistinguishable (and arguably identical) to that within. Our embodied experience of life and knowing then become less the container of a mystery and more that other mystery that is itself simply an island of transience amongst all this unknowing. There is a tradition […]

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Philosophy

Identity

The strangest thing about being a person and having an identity is that none of those concepts and labels or phrases and idioms we build our selves around actually belong to us. To be a person, an individual, an identifiable difference as distinct from all the background colour and noise of whichever time and place […]

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Alien Anthropology

Whispering Doubts and Paradox

I wonder if we whisper little doubts to ourselves as ways of staying alive. Entertaining certainties is reassuring but leads to complacency and this, in turn, can lead to catastrophe. It is worth remembering that the definitions and identities we inhabit are only as bounded and certain as are the languages with which we inflate […]

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Philosophy

Dialects of Emptiness

I’m pretty sure that all we ever do is generate fragmentary dialects of pre-existing languages, codes, behavioual patterns and conceptual relationships or symmetries. These are ordered structures and complex (adaptive) systems of information and reference that maximally self-propagate and replicate themselves through us as their primary transmission medium, just as they are also our binding […]

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Philosophy

The Deception of Duration

It occurs to me that the impression of stasis and insignificant (as non-living) dynamical properties in, of or as inorganic or inanimate objects and entities is really only a matter of the foundational deceptions that limited scope and range in time and space afflict upon us. If we were to perceive a mountain, a galaxy, […]

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Philosophy

Borderless Boundaries

Our all too human instinct and reflex is for the construction of system boundaries, gradients of definition, of adaptive frameworks of differentiation and models as metrics of distance and duration. In what ways is the drawing of lines, grids, matrices, referential networks and complex symmetries upon the shifting sands of experience as memory actually always […]