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 […]
You are not your self, your own possession and private labyrinth of interior significance and reflective surfaces. Neither are you in any sense, shape or form “owned” or prescriptively and unambiguously defined by any external realm or anchor of reflexive cultural necessity. You, and I, and the whole world are not the endpoints or causal […]
It is not just what is said that matters, but also – the way in which it is said, the nuance, the poetry and the subtlety. This is the second-order semantics of meaning and style in communication and thought. It is not enough to simply know the names of things, the measures and to collect […]
“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]
Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel. A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay […]
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 […]
The constructive entropy of Self is a recursively self-gravitating nexus and node or focal point of patterned complexity. This Self is not your possession so – there is no justification for an individualist or ego-driven narrative. Self is not a possession of the world you inhabit -entailing that socialist agendas are similarly fallacious. The history […]
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, […]
Only nothing comes from nothing and only nothing is effortlessly produced…
The core experience and sense or perception of self is real, but the self is not.
Daedelus Kite 