Sunday, September 7, 2025
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Monday, September 1, 2025
Sunday, August 31, 2025
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Undoing the Concept of Reality as a Construction / EZE, 2025
Human beings show up with behavior ready-to-hand. And while use of language is a behavior, the capacity to use language is not the same as the capacity to communicate, which is also a behavior.
Behavior often elicits a response, but behavior is not in itself a means of communication whether or not we interpret it as a noun or not. We simply tend to align action with communication as a metaphor, which makes [all] action a form of signaling.
Perhaps signaling is the pervasive metaphor of our present-day technology, indeed of our world, as we have the capacity to make sense of signals and thereby give them meaning.
But behavior is often noise, a signal that distorts other signals.
Signal and noise constitute communication theory, but too, we might re-do communication theory as a theory of signaling.
Indeed, we are prone to think of behavior as communicative, but breathing, eating, drinking, ... , however ritualized, however socially constructed, have no immediate dependency on language or on our ability to communicate what they are as such. Whether or not we give these gerunds language, we do them. But our doing them often becomes a context for a discussion about influence, namely, the influence of thought, of language, of various other types of behavior on these behaviors.
Essentially, within the dualism made by the distinction between thought and action, when we take the linguistic turn, we make reality a construction of thought, thought which is made manifest through language, ... .
But foregoing the linguistic turn, on the level of behavior, with no dualism in play, we speak yet of influence, and reality at this level is not a construction so much as an interplay.
Directionally, when we assume the primacy of our use of language, which is, after all, a type of behavior, rather than the primacy of behavior itself, we live under the influence of an assumed need for language and of constructions thereof.
Note: Though agreed that reality is not entirely a social construct, the use of behavior is intended to give a general basis of action, but it is not used to imply a distinction between the subjective and the objective, whatever such a distinction might entail.
The use of behavior, here, rather, is close to the behavior defined by this sort of behavior analysis, and behavior analysis generally plays well in relation to social constructionism.
Which phrase fits the situation better?
We are our language.
We are our behavior.
For example, we speak of the influence of social media on behavior. A problem most immediate here is that our behavior on social media is still a behavior of a sort.
On this level too, we need not discuss the influence of social media on behavior as we might just as well discuss the impact of our behavior on some other behavior. For example, the influence of action on thought.
The following questions concern our ability to escape influence as well as our power to influence:
Do we live within socially constructed realities? Yes. Do we have the capacity to escape socially constructed realities? Yes and No. Do socially constructed realities constitute our world entirely? No, ... our world has gaps, gaps often of the asemic sort.
Related Themes
ma, fūdo / EZE, 2025
On Between-ness
Fūdo
Sriharsa
Watsuji Tetsurō
Augustin Berque
On Difference
Galleries / Sites (from Cece Chapman)
Friday, August 29, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
A Near Asemic Switch-Logic: The Rose / EZE, 2025
A speculation on a development from Imagism to Asemic Writing.
The credo for Imagism is the primacy of the image.
Does this primacy illicit a kind of cliché-breaking in the image-narrative pattern, which then renders the conventional logic asemic or nearly so?
See also: Trope, Tropes and Archetypes and Clichés
For example, take this lyric in "The Rose": Some say love, it is a razor / That leaves your soul to bleed. This lyric breaks the trope ~ cliché by substituting soul for heart, which, in turn, risks making itself asemic, i.e., without meaning or more to the point, dysfunctional in its normal form as communication.
Indeed, the expected noun (image)-verb (action), your heart to bleed, makes more sense than the given noun-verb, your soul to bleed, a phrase which defies the usual sense of what a soul does.
But notice too how the rupture of the image-narrative flow in "The Rose" is not altogether unlike the rupture forced by the verb-lacking juxtaposition of images in "In a Station of the Metro"?
Continuity as a Logical Imperative
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Monday, August 18, 2025
Asemics as the "The Hole Story" / EZE, 2025
"The Hole Story" by Cecil Touchon
Hermeneutics
...
...
...
Mathematical Analysis
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Machine Learning and Topology
A Survey of Topological Methods
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Notes:
A hole is an in-between-ness.
In-between-ness is a gap in the whole, a gap not on the edge(s).
In-between-ness is a lack in the parts, a gap on the edges that meet to form the whole.
Asemics too is an in-between-ness.
...
An Asemic Geometry of In-Between-Ness
...
Sunday, August 17, 2025
fulu as asemics (from Cece Chapman) / EZE, 2025
Fulu looks to be a kind of spirit writing (Fuji).
Indeed, Wikipedia now defines fulu as "asemic Taoist magic symbols and incantations".
Works of fulu look to have (or to have had) semantic content, but over time, the need for semantic content may have fallen out, leaving works of fulu asemic.
Per the Wikipedia, here is the narrative at play in this de-semantic process:
... scholars of Taoism such as James Robson and Gil Raz have claimed that the incomprehensibility of written forms is central to the talisman's perceived authority and efficacy, and is one of talismanic script's defining features.
During the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420), it was already considered unnecessary for users of Taoist talismans to be able to decipher the writing on them in order for them to be considered efficacious. Ge Hong noted in his Baopuzi that as long as the inscription was authentic, successful use of the talisman did not depend on whether the user was able to decipher its script. By this time, the talisman's illegibility had already become a sign that they were of divine authority and held supernatural provenance. (from Dominic Steavu)
An aside for Hegelians: ... , note the Hegelian dialectics at play here, with Aufhebung operative, but ... .
~~~
A Reflection:
Tortoise Shell Markings in the Dragon Bones Series
by Cece Chapman and Jeff Crouch (2020)
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A Cecil Touchon Project
~~~
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...
...
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Saturday, August 9, 2025
Thought without Words / EZE, 2025
Linguistic Turn
History of the Linguistic Turn
Pragmatic Twist of the Linguistic Turn
Language of Thought
On the Language of Thought (Stanford)
Language !~ Thought
Language and Thought Are Not the Same (NIH)
On Interoperability
Note: This argument looks to be extensible--
that is, a means for making relationships beyond language itself.
On Cormac McCarthy
On the Bodily
Deep Ecology (Arguments for Signaling We Usually Ignore ... )
While Deep Ecology (earth.org) itself is often associated with radical theory and/or with radical politics, Deep Ecology, the Substack publication, generally concerns brilliant observations loosely coupled with conjectures concerning our inter-relatedness as/with beings in nature.
Indeed, the overarching theme for Deep Ecology (Wikipedia) is environmentalism or environmental philosophy.
Deep Ecology holds a general thesis that we are evolutionary beings, and as such, we may have abilities that beings in our evolutionary path also have. We have, in other words, shared capacity with nature. And we have, so the argument goes, not so much lost this capacity as suppressed/ignored/forgotten it. The imperative: We need to look to nature to find this capacity again. Hence, the brilliant observations.
How well this thesis works is one matter, but the purpose of citing Deep Ecology is not to criticize its argument so much as exploit a few aspects of it.
The argument Deep Ecology makes in this post (Feeling It) posits a conception of feeling as pre-linguistic. It also asserts how we are trained, so to speak, to ignore feelings that so arise, feelings that arise without the supplement of a near immediate interpretation, an interpretation which requires language.
More so, we are also wont to avoid unfounded conjecture. Indeed, as presented in this post (Feeling It), we might be inclined to link an ill feeling in the morning, a premonition, to a friend found injured in the afternoon, but we force ourselves to forgo this unwarranted reasoning.
And, of course, being so trained, we do not ask ourselves why such a feeling might have come to be at all. We ignore it as superstition/coincidence. Deep Ecology, meanwhile, conjectures that such feeling might be a hidden capacity.
And otherwise being mindful of the beauty of the poetics, we take this argument to imply that thought happens without language.
Related: Hyper Normal Stimuli
Related: Genetic Learning
Related: Phylogeny Manifold
Related: Ecological Neuroscience
~~~
On a Cecil Touchon Project
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One Next Step
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Friday, August 8, 2025
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
Sunday, August 3, 2025
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Friday, August 1, 2025
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Asemic Consequence / EZE, 2025
By Definition / Of Definition
A Stochastic of Meaning
By Any Other Name
Gambling versus Prediction Markets
Value
Monday, July 28, 2025
Sunday, July 27, 2025
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