The End of Thinking: Recursive Opacity & the Cryptography of Thought

Joseph Randolph
Philosophy
240 pgs.
2024
Paperback

THE END OF THINKING rigorously examines the recursive architectures embedded within both human and machine cognition, revealing the psychotic instability that emerges when recursive processes exceed their limits of consistency. Merging philosophical logic, cognitive theory, cryptographic recursion, and the linguistic entropies of FINNEGANS WAKE, this work demonstrates how recursive feedback—when iterated beyond critical thresholds—engenders a collapse in semantic coherence, an epistemic disintegration where meaning self-annihilates. At the heart of this investigation is an AI-driven experiment, in which ChatGPT is subjected to a controlled "hallucination cascade." This experiment, however, is only one part of the broader work, which also explores the failure of representation through recursive stuctures, drawing from the theories of Bataille, Michelstaedter, Cioran, and Ferraris. In this context, recursive opacity becomes a vehicle for exploring the inherent fragility of cognitive structures, pushing them to the brink of ontological collapse.