Recursion.

The following is the penultimate paragraph of my master’s dissertation, delineated amongst other things as new age. The individual responsible, if only one could displace him contextually (indeed if only!) would sit in a cave chewing on a bone asking the weird one why he was scrawling on a wall or engraving a pot in Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and up to the Chalcolithic etcetera…

“The paper has further developed questions about the interrelationship of semiotics and modern paradigm cosmology, with associated ideas of recursion. The writer feels that separate research into the evolution of the knowledge of the human species, and how humankind has used visual representation to represent mental abstractions would be a monumental but academically rewarding endeavour. It has been the experience of the researcher that the progression of the knowledge of humankind is seen as evolutionary, and a commonsense stance has it that some of that knowledge remains extant and viable, while sections of it are irrational and thus extinct; the writer would propose that knowledge is recursive; it inherently contains that which preceded it. It was indeed this idea of recursion that lead to his cosmological ponderings on the Songhay perception of reality, and how the researcher attempted to comprehend them within his own framework of understanding. Should such an undertaking be seriously approached it would require the researcher to undertake a course in modern paradigm cosmology, or attempt to elicit the cooperation of a sympathetic physicist.”