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Alien Anthropology

Disinformation: Gullibility and Executive Malfunction

As a general observation: notice the many ways that psychological and ideological belief systems adopted and asserted by any particular person or tribe need have no particular anchor in reality. All belief systems possess this essentially tautological interior architecture of interdependent symbolic relationships which can so easily be entirely dissociated from demonstrable facts.  This is […]

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Alien Anthropology

Fake News, revisited…

Fake news (as disinformation) is real, it is not new, it is used against all of us in every place and context or belief system and it is successful precisely because it exploits preexisting, foundational psychological symmetries and insecurities which have never been maturely or adequately analysed, assessed, addressed and neutralised. This is of the […]

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Alien Anthropology

Anthropocene Dissimulation: Logic, Life and Robots

How curious that at precisely the (Anthropocene) moment in which the living biosphere and almost all of its diverse inhabitants find themselves threatened or constrained and diminished apace, we produce replicas and robotic golems that quite dramatically dissimulate that they do not in fact possess that life or indefinable (unprovable, logically) living fact that we […]

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Alien Anthropology

Pandemic Resurgence

Meanwhile, the pandemic is starting to take off (again) here in Australia, spreading rapidly… …history is always implicitly interesting but is generally best seen from a safe distance.

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Alien Anthropology

Big Buddha

It’s a big Buddha. I can’t help but wonder if the whole point of emotional non-attachment has been lost on some people. The more we attach ourselves to ideas of things, people, places – the more internally fragmented we ourselves become. We are all to some extent trapped by our own behavioural reflexes and the […]

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Alien Anthropology

Ignoring Global Catastrophic Risk

Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]

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Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Laws are Tautologies

Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic  assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]

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Alien Anthropology

Endless Possibility

So, here’s the thing: most people don’t want to wonder about the deep mysteries of existence – not because it takes a lot of effort to disassemble the reality we perceive of as ourselves, as others and the world. Quite the opposite – most of us try to avoid questioning the truth of the reality […]

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Alien Anthropology

On Orwell

The persistent value in literature such as Eric Blair‘s seems, to me, to be substantively – if counter-intuitively – abstracted from the political filter through which it may (or may not) be interpreted. While we seem collectively unable (or unwilling) – and much to my own chagrin – to just “get beyond” and “get over” […]

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Alien Anthropology

Endless Wars

I can’t help but wonder if one day, and in the same way that trench warfare might now strike us as such incomprehensible futility and carnage, future generations will look back upon this moment and all of our own fast-spiralling technological arcs and grammars of adversarialism as not being a difference in kind so much […]

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Alien Anthropology

How, exactly, does Democracy survive?

An interesting observation is: if you consider the overall system of antithetical ideologies and jockeying competitive (self-)interests in play here, the self-defining competition between Democracy and “Other” kinds of political system seems to be a necessary component in the sustainable continuity of Democracy itself. The gestalt of the Global information-processing system lumbers and lurches along […]

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Alien Anthropology

Authoritarian Vacuum and the Chaos that Follows

Which begs the question: if individuals tend on average towards a path of least resistance and select (or become selected by) a singular – or authoritarian – narrative interpretation and filter of their world, why is it that these systems in which there is no (or at least a sudden vacuum of) overarching meta-narrative find […]