Art ends up being the place of contention between all real philosophy, and here because it can happen largely unnoticed to the majority of its consumers. All positions can, in principle, be advanced through art. Censors can impose costs but, nobody is capable of abhorring the life of an artist as much as an artist.

The question of what a symbol is, and theories of truth, and the question of potentia and patterns of human growth in sensible meaning being innate to symbols, or humans, or both… well, at it’s root it’s just a handful of issues negated or not negated, right side up or upside down, and with ‘issues’ at core ‘structures’. Let’s take Tarski: “The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is, in fact, white”. But this ignores semiotics more or less entirely, it ignores that the conscious experience is not just an unbounded stack of correspondence between symbols and the environment but the entanglement of proximate things, by isomorphism or by statistical frequency of co-presence or by consequence or causal primacy; by any of these things, snow or “snow” become entangled in conscious experiences.

The sentence “quale are semantics” is true if and only if…?

Anymore, I can’t deliberately structure my writing. I remember what flourishes it takes to make it sufficiently pretentious and the basics of aiming at real things, but these days I simply take it on blind and quite likely unjustifiable faith that the temporal proximity of any notions to each other in my life necessitates conjoining them.

D2 is a Sega Dreamcast survival horror game. You play as a mostly mute woman who survives a plane crash only to find herself surrounded by alien monsters that spread through infection, and thus ambiguously by other human survivors.

Additional metaphysical or schizophrenically appealing ideas come in through a sorcerer, the voice of mother earth herself, an esoteric religious practitioner, “shadow the final destroyer”, and winged humans. The main character periodically teleports when the plot needs her to survive something otherwise excessive or commute over an improbable distance.

So, uh, what is meaning? Well there is semantics as is normally understood, the flesh over the skeleton of grammar, and there is “meaning” as in “conjoined feelings about”.

Keeping in mind that I have no justification for my assertions anymore, I assert that this second sense of meaning is itself flesh over the skeleton of grammar, but with flesh in this case being whatever the fundamental substrate of consciousness is: so that the grammar of awareness is computation of some sort, I guess, but also unified within a field. Field = flesh.

So art then becomes where self-conscious semantics meet merely conscious or even pre-conscious semantics. Each symbol like either a a direct mirror into an already existing complex of feelings, or scaffolding for new complexes of feeling to build upon, or infertile soil for one or all complexes…

Subjectivity then is something like competition or coexistence within the combinatorics of symbolism, to try to affix one’s preferred meaning to the proper range of symbols. People call each other nihilists and insane over such differences, and heretic, and blasphemer and much else.

D2 has the sense of having the structure on top of which meaning goes but also of it’s intended meaning being accessible either only from the culture it was produced within or even more narrowly from the specific minds it was produced within.

The character of Kimberly Fox, met immediately, is a very good character. She has understandable past trauma, and develops as a person over time. She develops by applying the structure of new relationships to previous relationships: that’s meaningful learning, learning that adds additional meaning to one’s life.

This game is very broad thematically, ultimately about nothing less than life itself. Life being evolved, and meaning being selected for by it’s own microcosmically nested selection pressures, up to and including the foundational one of death, we have to conclude that selection pressure selects for meaning, that competition between different meanings selects for most adaptive meaning, in promoting reproduction and preventing annihilation.

I’m quite certain there are many caveats to this. It becomes less true as group selection becomes possible on the basis of the mere manipulation of symbols. So Einstein making nukes possible is probably a violation, one he spent the rest of his life trying to fill with his politics and public charity. Nothing surprising, anyone involved in such things will speak of it themselves, anyone taking note of it will take note out loud.

Philip K Dick, Crowley (Liber 777), kolmogorov complexity as a tree to be climbed (automatically being climbed by the universe, of which we are part), the i ching as base 64 in binary (but neither big endian nor little endian), Shinto’s Misogi (triune birth through a ritual of washing), the precise combinatorics of the measurements of the ark of the covenant, the precise combinatorics of biblical exegesis.

What is a schizophrenia? Broadly meaningless, in terms of intersubjectivity: the mechanisms of meaning escaping to a far branch of the possibility of meaning in a particular world. A schizophrenic is both a scout in semantics and a surveyor: meaning is mechanical. Shared meaning is, in the absence of advanced understanding of mechanics, meaning useful for coordination, meaning which allows the making of like cause towards.

D2: This is another game which made early use of loss of ability into a poetic gameplay mechanic during a final boss encounter: life triumphs over death even from within death. The perennial nature of life makes death a comma, not a period.

They keep trying to give me art. I have been struck by the flaming sword twice. I don’t want art. I want promises to be fulfilled.