“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, May 2, 2011

Inconsistencies


A fair summary of my passions over the last five years would be that I've become fascinated with phenomena that are inconsistent:

Evolving lifeforms whose existence generates Zeno style paradoxes at every stage, such that a rabbit is a non-rabbit (in Brassier's terminology) or in my terminology a strange stranger.

Buddha Nature, an entity that is devoid of all characteristics (empty) yet manifests in determinate ways such as compassion, wisdom and so on.

OOO objects, which are simultaneously withdrawn and entangled in a sensual (interobjective) ether.

Interconnectedness, which implies a not-all set of things without center or edge, strangely less than the sum of its parts.

Cantor sets that contain infinite points and infinite no-points.

Irony, in particular Romantic irony, which is an aesthetic version of the Liar paradox.

Gödel's Incompleteness, which states that for a theory to be true, it cannot prove every statement that it can generate.

Musical forms that are within a non-rigid, non-thin boundary between music and not-music (“non-music”).

Yep, I think that just about covers it.

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

Here's a little non-rigid jamming on "Amazing Grace."