The √-1 and Other Irrational Symbols
for anyone in need of some irrational tactics to discover rational alternatives.
We inherit our symbolic reality from the moment we first learn to name something. Performers in a play passed down to us that we did not write, yet with every thought we transform the script’s symbols. Someday the symbol’s original forms may no longer be recognizable. Spinning new ontologies with each new idea and new worlds with each symbol, we create the world within our skulls – yet whose world are we creating?
From the moment we first learn to speak, we inherit a script we did not choose with its words, symbols and equations so deeply embedded in our worldview we might not even see them. Freud and Jung’s psychoanalytic theories are foundational to how the human mind is seen from European and American perspectives: both men were inspired by the recent advancements in quantum mechanics to develop their theories. If you have had the privilege of seeing a therapist in the United States, Freud and Jung’s work shapes how that therapist has been taught to see your mind by the institutions that credentialed them.
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It can be tempting to imagine our skulls to be like the walls of the gallery – blank canvases to house our autonomous creations. Like the gallery wall and Plato’s cave, our minds have a circumstance that determines possible interpretations of shadows on the wall, obscuring the questions we do not ask. Are we discovering an ideal world of forms or a product of our times incapable of conceiving a world existing outside of dualism? All models are wrong, some are useful. The most dangerous model is imaging that you do not have one, for what is default was never neutral. How can you amend a model you refuse to see?
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For details of the symbols and equations used, go here.
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2025, Hand Cut Blind Embossed Rives BFK, Varying Dimensions.
