Posts Tagged ‘abstraction’

“BEFORE FORM II”

November 17, 2025

*

Impressions, Diptych: BEFORE FORM II
18″ x 48″
Oil on board
2000

Ricardo F. Morín

Nov. 17, 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

1

There are relationships in which language arrives too early.

Two minds meet, and each brings its own architecture—one built of corridors, the other of thresholds.

Nothing coheres. Nothing resolves. Yet something is exchanged.

Perhaps the only way to describe it is to refuse description.

What passes between the two is not influence, nor authority, nor instruction.

It is the faint recognition that creation does not always arise from tradition,

and tradition does not always arise from clarity.

One mind preserves structure because it fears dissolution.

The other preserves freedom because it fears enclosure.

Neither is right, neither is wrong, and neither can become the other.

If there is a lesson, it is not philosophical.

It is simply that some encounters generate form only by refusing to take one.

Some dynamics can be seen only by letting them remain unsettled.

Not a system.

Not a method.

Not an alchemical transformation.

Just the quiet knowledge that meaning does not always arrive in recognizable shapes—

and sometimes the refusal of structure

is itself the most honest form.

This is neither alchemy nor allegory.

It does not mirror academic tropes.

It does not explain itself.

It simply stands.

2

There is a place where thought has not yet chosen its weight.

Where nothing must resemble anything.

Where no lineage can be traced because the idea has not agreed to be inherited.

Two minds meet there sometimes, though neither intends to.

One arrives with tools, the other with openings.

One tries to recognize what appears; the other lets appearance undo itself.

No roles persist in that space.

No teacher, no student, no authority, no dissident.

Only the slight disturbance of something wanting to become meaning

and something else resisting the invitation.

Perhaps the exchange exists only in the refusal to define it.

Perhaps it is nothing more than two ways of seeing colliding for a moment

before each retreats to its natural distance.

There is no lesson.

No transformation.

Not even understanding—

just the faint impression that the encounter mattered

in a way that cannot be justified.

Some relationships never enter language fully.

They touch the threshold and withdraw,

leaving only a shape that refuses to become a shape.

What remains is not story, not insight, not metaphor.

Only a quiet remainder:

that something passed between two minds,

and it does not wish to be named.

3

Some encounters move like weather across the mind—arriving without intention,

passing without conclusion.

They do not teach; they do not claim.

They shift the air and leave a pressure change that takes days to understand.

Two temperaments can drift into the same moment like front and current.

One carries the weight of accumulated seasons,

the other moves with the quiet urgency of what is still forming.

Neither is stronger.

Neither is clearer.

They simply meet, and the atmosphere changes.

There is no point of balance.

No point of conflict.

Just a tremor in the air between them,

as if the room itself were listening for something that never quite becomes sound.

Thought loosens in that space.

Meanings approach, circle, and recede.

Nothing settles long enough to be named.

Nothing wants to.

Some relationships never become narrative because narrative would freeze them.

They remain suspended—felt more than understood,

remembered less as moments than as shifts in light,

like a room darkening for reasons the sky doesn’t explain.

When they part, it is not an ending.

It is a dispersal, like mist thinning at the edge of dawn.

Each carries a trace of the other’s weather,

a change in temperature that lingers long after the shapes have dissolved.

What remains is not knowledge.

Not conclusion.

Just the faint sensation that something passed through—

and continues to pass through—

quietly, insistently,

without ever agreeing to take form.

4

There are moments that never arrive fully.

Not as meaning, not as feeling—more like a faint shift,

a drift in the periphery.

Two presences cross, neither entering nor leaving.

A pressure, a thinning, a pulse without source.

Not connection, not distance—an interval that hovers.

Nothing coheres.

Nothing insists.

There is only the sense of something lightly touching thought

and withdrawing before thought can respond.

Contours don’t form here.

Edges blur as soon as they appear.

The exchange—if it can be called that—dissolves into the same air that carried it.

A pause lengthens,

not to reveal anything

but to remind that revelation is unnecessary.

This is not atmosphere; even atmosphere has structure.

It is less.

A faint impression that doesn’t land,

doesn’t settle,

doesn’t belong to either mind that felt it.

Later, one might remember a flicker—

not an idea,

not a moment—

just the residue of an approach that never closed.

No clarity follows.

No resolution.

The experience continues only as dispersal,

the way fog continues after your body has walked through it.

What remains is not being,

but the trace of something that preferred not to become one.

5

There is a place where awareness thins,

not into silence,

but into something before silence—

a faint trembling at the boundary of what the mind can hold.

Nothing shapes itself here.

Outlines gather, loosen, drift apart.

Perception moves like breath against a surface it cannot see,

feeling only its own hesitation.

Two currents brush past each other—

not touching, not avoiding—

simply passing through the same unmarked space.

No exchange takes place, only a slight alteration in texture.

The air feels different by a degree so slight

you question whether it changed at all.

Sensation approaches but does not declare itself.

It folds and unfolds at the edge of recognition,

as if deciding whether to become experience

or to recede without consequence.

Thought cannot follow it.

Emotion cannot name it.

Language reaches out but finds nothing to hold,

its grasp closing on the faint imprint of something

that prefers not to be caught.

There is no meaning here,

only the suggestion of one—

a whisper of form that vanishes when looked at directly.

What remains is the after-feel:

a soft pressure,

a disturbance without cause,

a nearness with no direction.

It lingers not as memory

but as the memory of almost remembering—

the residue of a touch

that occurred just beyond the threshold

where understanding begins.

At the edge of sensation,

nothing is known.

Yet everything feels about to become.

6

There is a quiet that does not empty the world but concentrates it—

a quiet that draws breath around itself.

Nothing is spoken, yet everything leans forward,

as if waiting for a pulse to reveal where it has always been.

The stillness is not rest.

It is tension held with care,

a subtle hum beneath awareness,

a throb the body recognizes

before the mind opens its hands to feel it.

You could call it presence,

but even that word is too heavy.

It is not being,

only the soft insistence

that something is unmistakably here.

Light moves differently in this quiet—

slower, denser,

as if thought itself thickens the air.

It is the moment before meaning,

before shape,

before the world chooses a direction.

Alive, but without calling attention to its life.

Silent, but without conceding to silence.

A current passes through,

barely perceptible,

yet carrying enough force

to rearrange everything

it does not touch.

What remains is only this:

a breath held between two states—

not message,

not impression,

just the warm gravity of being

before it becomes anything else.

7

It comes softly,

so softly you cannot tell whether it arrived

or whether you only stopped long enough to feel it.

A warmth gathers at the edge of awareness—

not heat,

but the suggestion of nearness,

like breath that barely lifts the air.

Nothing speaks,

yet something touches you

in the place where words would break it.

It moves the way light moves across closed eyes—

a tenderness that does not seek to be seen,

only to be known without knowing.

It is the quietest kind of nearness,

the kind that asks nothing

and in asking nothing

restores a part of you you did not realize

had gone dim.

It grazes the soul like a hand

that never quite touches—

a promise of contact,

a murmur of care,

a soothing traced along the inner surface

of being itself.

No message,

no direction,

only the gentle reassurance

that something in the universe

has noticed your existence

and answers with a softness

equal to your need.

A whisper,

not into the ear

but into the space behind the heart,

where feeling wakes before thought understands.

It lingers there—

a quiet pulse,

a sheltering nearness—

not holding you,

but letting you rest

as if you were held.

And then, barely,

it recedes—

not leaving,

just loosening—

like the last warmth of a hand

still felt long after it has gone.

8

It appears without approach.

Not rising, not entering—simply there.

A pulse without rhythm,

a force without weight,

life showing itself in the smallest possible gesture.

No softness here,

no harshness either—

only the unqualified fact of energy

standing in its own clarity.

It does not warm,

does not startle,

does not soothe.

It simply asserts a kind of being

that needs nothing to validate it.

Not spirit.

Not breath.

Not sensation.

Just the unmistakable surge

that accompanies existence

whenever it remembers itself.

A being unshaped by intention

moves through the moment,

neither touching nor retreating,

neither demanding nor yielding.

Its essence is activity without aim—

motion held within stillness,

potential without need for direction.

It does not call attention to itself.

It does not fade.

It does not speak.

It remains—

a clarity,

a tension,

a spark of the world’s own self-recognition

before language arrives to claim it.

Alive,

unadorned,

without echo or interpretation—

just the force that underlies all form,

manifest for an instant

in its simplest,

most unmediated state.

9

At last the force loosens.

Not fading—simply releasing its hold

on being something.

The pulse ceases to define itself.

The clarity thins.

What was formless being unravels

into the same unbounded quiet

that preceded it.

No retreat,

no vanishing,

only the simple act

of no longer remaining.

The vitality that stood so plainly

lets its edges dissolve,

not into darkness,

not into silence,

but into the untouched space

that asks nothing of it.

What stays behind

is not trace or echo

but the openness that held it—

a vastness indifferent to form,

yet origin to all form.

This is not return

because nothing was ever apart.

It is not ending

because nothing concludes.

It is the unmaking

that restores everything

to the ground of its own possibility.

Where force once stood,

there is now only the expanse

from which force arises—

the nothingness that is not absence

but the pure condition

of all that can become.

Here, being and unbeing

are the same gesture.

Life dissolves

into what has always held it.

And the dissolution is complete.


CODA

Nothing follows.

What has unfolded returns to its origin,

not as echo,

not as meaning,

but as the same quiet field

that allowed each motion to appear.

The cycle leaves no imprint.

The trace erases itself.

The movement completes by letting the world resume its stillness.

There is nothing to gather,

nothing to carry forward,

nothing to understand.

The unfolding has ended where it began—

in the openness that holds all beginnings

and requires none.

What remains is not conclusion

but the calm that arrives

when even dissolution has dissolved.

And from that calm,

if anything were ever to arise again,

it would do so without memory of having been.

“Language, Mathematics, and the Price of Artificial Intelligence”

August 19, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
(Triangulation Series)
Musica Universalis
Silk quilt streched over linen
37″ x 60″
2013-18

A geometrical construction of a dodecahedron within a Fibonacci composition, reinforced by a right-angle triangle: A meditation on the harmony of the universe, where mathematics and language converge yet never fully enclose reality.


Ricardo Morin, August 20, 2025

Abstract

This essay examines the interdependence of language and mathematics as the twin pillars of knowledge, each indispensable yet incomplete without the other. While mathematics secures precision and abstraction, language renders reasoning intelligible and shareable; together they approximate, but never fully capture, a reality richer than any formulation. The discussion situates artificial intelligence as a vivid case study of this condition. Marketed at premium cost yet marked by deficiencies in coherence, AI dramatizes what happens when mathematical power is privileged over linguistic rigor. Far from replacing human thought, such systems test our capacity to impose meaning, resist vagueness, and refine ideas. By weaving philosophical reflection with contemporary critique, the essay argues that both mathematics and language must be continually cultivated if knowledge is to progress. Their partnership does not close the gap between comprehension and reality; it keeps it open, ensuring that truth remains an unending pursuit.


Language, Mathematics, and the Price of Artificial Intelligence

Every society advances by refining its tools of thought. Two stand above all others: mathematics, which distills patterns with precision, and language, which gives form and meaning to reasoning. Neither is sufficient alone. To privilege one at the expense of the other is to weaken the very architecture of knowledge.

Artificial intelligence dramatizes both their promise and their limitations. The announcement of a $200 monthly fee for access to ChatGPT-5 is revealing. Marketed as a luxury service “for those who can afford it,” it underscores the widening gap between technological privilege and cultural necessity. Those with resources can fine-tune their productivity; those without are left behind. Yet even for the well-equipped, the question persists: what exactly is being purchased?

The machine dazzles with speed and scale, but its deficiencies are equally striking. Engineers may be virtuosos of algorithms, but grammar is not their instrument. The results are too often colloquial, vague, or lacking in rigor. To extract coherence, the user must not be a passive consumer but an editor—capable of clarifying, restructuring, and imposing meaning. The paradox is unmistakable: the tool marketed as liberation demands from its operator the very discipline it cannot supply.

This paradox reflects the larger truth about knowledge itself. Mathematics and language are both indispensable and both incomplete. Mathematics achieves abstraction but leaves its results inert unless language renders them intelligible and shareable. Language conveys thought but falters without the rigor that mathematics provides. What one secures, the other interprets.

Yet both are bound by a deeper condition: reality exceeds every formulation. Our theories—whether mathematical models or linguistic descriptions—are approximations shaped by the observer. Language cannot exhaust meaning; mathematics cannot capture finality. Knowledge is never absolute: it is a negotiation with a reality richer than any model or phrase.

Artificial intelligence lays bare this condition. It can automate structure but cannot provide wisdom; it can reproduce language but cannot guarantee meaning. Its true value lies not in replacing the thinker but in testing our capacity to resist vagueness, impose coherence, and refine thought. What is marketed as freedom may, in truth, demand greater vigilance.

To dismiss language and the humanities as secondary, or to imagine mathematics and computation as sufficient unto themselves, is to misunderstand their interdependence. These disciplines are not rivals but partners, each refining the other. AI magnifies both their strengths and their deficiencies; they remind us that progress depends on the continual refinement of both—mathematics to model reality, language to preserve its meaning.

The path of knowledge remains open-ended. Language and mathematics do not close the gap between our finite comprehension and the inexhaustible richness of reality; they keep it open. They allow us to approach truth without presuming to possess it. Artificial intelligence, as every tool of thought, shows us not the end of knowledge but its unending condition: a dialogue between what can be measured, what can be spoken, and what forever exceeds us.

*


Annotated Bibliography

  • Arendt, Hannah: The Life of the Mind. Vol. 1: Thinking. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971. (Arendt examines the act of thinking and the limits of expression, which shows how thought requires language to become shareable while never able to exhaust reality. Her work reinforces the essay’s claim that reasoning without expression cannot advance knowledge.)
  • Bender, Emily M., and Koller, Alexander: “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data.” Proceedings of ACL, 2020. (Bender and Koller argue that large language models process form without true understanding; this highlights the gulf between mathematical pattern recognition and linguistic meaning—it supports the essay’s caution that AI dazzles with form but falters in coherence.)
  • Chomsky, Noam: Language and Mind. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. (Chomsky explores the innate structures of language and their role in shaping cognition; this affirms that language conditions the possibility of thought while it still remains limited in capturing reality.)
  • Devlin, Keith: Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. Stanford: Keith Devlin, 2012. (Devlin explains how mathematical reasoning distills structure and pattern while acknowledging abstraction as approximation; this reinforces the idea that mathematics, as a safeguard of precision, cannot exhaust the world it models.)
  • Floridi, Luciano: The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. (Floridi situates digital technologies and AI within a broader history of self-understanding, which enriches the essay’s argument that mathematics and language—extended into computation—remain approximations of a reality beyond full control.)
  • Lakoff, George, and Núñez, Rafael: Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books, 2000. (Lakoff and Núñez argue that mathematics arises from metaphor and embodied cognition, which reveals how dependence on human interpretation and the affirmation that mathematical theories, as linguistic ones, remain bound to the observer.)
  • Mitchell, Melanie: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. (Mitchell provides a critical overview of AI’s capabilities and limits; it shows how the advancement of pattern recognition does not close fundamental gaps in understanding and parallels the essay’s critique of AI’s grammatical poverty.)
  • Polanyi, Michael: Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. (Polanyi emphasizes tacit knowledge and the need for articulation in validation; it echoes the view that mathematics and language refine understanding but never achieve closure.)
  • Snow, C. P.: The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [1959]. (Snow diagnoses the divide between sciences and humanities; this undergirds the essay’s call to treat language and mathematics as complementary pillars of understanding.)