}∅{ The Full Set

The Full-ness of a Body This is not what I intend to write on the Subject of Infinity, but it is a projective chain of thoughts. It is a tracing of a yet un-consolidated line of interpretation. Fido the Yak presents a symbol/concept which – and I’m not sure of its origin or complete meaning – […]

Spinoza’s Notion of Inside and Outside: What is a Passion?

There is a primacy of inside and outside in the philosophy of Spinoza that provokes powerful lines of thought that reach far into the future of systems theory and autopoietic conceptions of Life, not to mention a general pragmatism of how to define an individual in the world, whether it be as a political or […]

Conjoined Semiosis: A “Nerve Language” of Bodies

The Polyvalent and Cross-tongued At times with an idea it is best to come up to a phenomena and embrace it as exemplary, a way of showing to others the heart of what you mean, and something of this comes through in the example of Conjoined Twins. I was discussing with my wife the nature […]

Keller’s “Water” and Anarchic Hand Syndrome

The Mystery of Language Above is the pump at which Helen Keller learned her first word, “water” (signed). The account of which is here: Helen had until now not yet fully understood the meaning of words. When Anne led her to the water pump on 5 April 1887, all that was about to change. As […]

The “Corporeal Equation” of 1:3: What Makes A Body for Spinoza?

If a Body Catch a Body Comin’ Through the Rye I have always been fascinated by Spinoza’s defintion of a body as found in the Second Part of the Ethics. Not because it reflected some proto-physics, but because it allowed a radical revisioning of what defined boundaries between persons, and between persons and things. What […]

Spinoza’s Circle and the Interior

Some Ruminations on Spinoza’s “Simplest” Thought A single figure keeps returning to me as I contemplate Spinoza’s optical concepts and metaphysics, in view of the prevailing Cartesian science of the age, that elementary figure that Spinoza provides to help explain how he conceives of the reality of the modes, even the modes of ideas for non-existent things, in relationship […]

Davidson’s Triangulation and the Swarm

Quorum Sensing wiki; microbiology bites These bacteria certainly are not “triangulating” in any conscious sense (that is, as Davidson sees it: not conceptually reading states of the world through an assumed causal relationship of the beliefs of others to the same world); but they are affectively reponding to a shared environment, and their communally shared excited states probably […]

Spinoza’s Idea as Information

  E2p13 The correspondent of the information contituting the human Mind is the Body, or a certain mode of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else. A brief thought, which I constantly have imagined that needs to be said, but I have yet to say it fully to myself, and not to others. Is there […]

Wittgenstein, The Structuring of the Ego, and Autopoiesis

[the below was written to an anonymous professor of Wittgenstein, who recommended the reading of A. H. Almaas, a self-styled spiritual teacher, on the nature of the Ego and its relationship to Autopoietic theory (which I hold interest in). What develops is a brief address of Almaas’ appropriation of Autpoiesis to examine the nature of the Ego, when […]