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Alien Anthropology Philosophy

UFOs: physics, logic, possibility

The “Laws of Physics” as we know them may be just one (relatively) self-consistent cross-section, constellation or “slice” through the state-space of all possible optimally-concise descriptions and mathematical (or logical) entities. We should not be so surprised to discover that there is more than one way to cut this cake, nor that other entities (or […]

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Alien Anthropology

Disentangling Bureauracy

It is fascinating to consider that an anachronistic hierarchy produces precisely the organisational inertia and systemic entropy that it itself is best oriented to negotiate (and through this to endlessly reproduce its own self-validating necessity). It is quite likely that the path of least effort and autonomously self-organising (i.e. low energy-state, minimal algorithmic complexity) systems […]

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Alien Anthropology

One Planet: a Smoke Signal in this Warming World

Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]

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Alien Anthropology

Climate Change: “Is this really how it all ends ?”

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Alien Anthropology

Digital Transformation and Cultural Bottlenecks

Organisations are information and energy-processing systems. Information and energy-processing systems are autonomously oriented (via physics, logic, mathematics) towards low energy states. This orientation or endemic systems -bias towards low energy states bridges inanimate and living systems but may be considered to have obtained a special status in living systems. The differentiator of life in this […]

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Alien Anthropology

The Violence Paradox: is this Really a More Peaceful World?

The cost of order is always going to be a certain degree, presence or manifestation of disorder. The notion of a “more peaceful world” is one in which vast numbers of (relatively) small, regional conflicts proliferate, generalisations notwithstanding. There is even, perhaps, a sense in which such distributed conflict is inevitable as a displaced information […]

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Alien Anthropology

Miracles, Magic and Advanced Technological Civilisations

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, marble, life-size, 1647-1652.   Bernini captures the dramatic moment an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of Divine love.  It was Saint Augustine who suggested that miracles do not happen in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we understand of nature.  In a similar vein, […]

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Alien Anthropology Philosophy technology

Self-Propagating Technological Metamorphosis

If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always – and perhaps […]

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Alien Anthropology

Monday mornings…

…a vast and yawning abyss of commuter futility only partially masked by the endless distraction of engorging ourselves on information artefacts, channels, opinions, fiction and repetition. It is as though we can not even savour our loneliness and feelings of dispossession or pointlessness at all of this cyclical and directionless repetition. The cognitive landscape of […]

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Alien Anthropology

The empty frames and abstract worlds of words and facts blind us…

Words are those windows and apertures upon the world that in naming and framing facts themselves become things, entities, artefacts in the endlessly oscillating hyper-inflation of logical and referential, representational space. It is as though the glass pane of abstraction through which we see becomes opaque with the carried meanings (and burdens) of its own […]

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Alien Anthropology

On deep dives and dumbing it down…

I am the living entropy of embodied experience and a philosophical longing for truth, intelligence, wisdom and beauty. As are you. The requirements for popular communication and subjective comprehension of this world act like a vast and ponderous anchor and dead weight on our collective aptitude to save ourselves, from ourselves. We must unevitably bear […]

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Alien Anthropology

Non-sense

Just what would you think if it came to pass that everything that you thought was you was not and everything else was inside out? Like that light that strikes the back of your eye, doubly inverted before it renders a representation and (dis)simulation of reality inside the effervescent neuroelectrical enigma of you – that […]