Categories
environment

Deep Time and Shallow Machines

Astonishing beauty and entirely natural, expressed in the harmony and resonance of the (very) many parts with the whole. I enjoy this kind of photography because it also reminds us, much as does astrophotography, that wherever (and whenever) we look into the natural world we are staring into our own deep history. Contrast this with […]

Categories
Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

Categories
information

Breathe In: Lungs, Language, Civilisation

There is a relationship between speech and cognition. There is also a relationship between written language and intelligibility. The longer and more convoluted a sentence, the harder it becomes to understand. The harder the sentence is to understand, the less likely it will self-replicate through artefacts, entities and systems of communication. What this means is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Exopolitical Enigmas of Human Language

Context: If We Make Contact With Aliens The Biggest Danger Will Be Our Politicians, Say Scientists Yes. It is quite true that the communication systems endemic to our species have had a catastrophic tendency to percolate precisely the wrong kinds of self-interested personalities into positions of power. While it is not always the case that […]

Categories
history

Ukraine: Standing Against Rabid Vampires of Imperialist Oppression

Putin’s ideological psychosis seeks to bring a new totalitarian darkness upon the world. Many people in countries distant from Europe do not realise that Ukraine is holding back the hordes of hell for all of us. Ukraine can not, must not, will not fail here because this is much more than a regional war, it […]

Categories
history

Totalitarian Psychosis

The totalitarian enigma is that of a psychotic state. The threat of nuclear war is invoked because they have no intellectual or moral substance to and justication for their ideological arguments to support either internal political oppression or external imperalistic aggression. The argument from apocalypse is an act of insanity and even if it is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

When the Music’s Over

When it is all said and done, this current and potentially Globally catastrophic war, I wonder what will remain? A broken landscape of human suffering as sown seeds for generations of hatred and retribution yet to come? A barren and scarred planetary desert of radioactive futility? A humbled humanity that yet again sailed far too […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology technology

Technological Competition

That our failures and our successes are intimately entangled applies as much at nascent planetary technological civilisation level as at any other. Interesting, also, to conjecture that our greatest failures (in microcosm and at scale) are generally in and of a partisan adversarialism that as reflexive psychological and existential compulsion cycles and oscillates through this […]

Categories
environment

Climate Emergency

The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]

Categories
technology

Broken Machines

I’ve spent a long time now down the rabbit hole of technology, science and the conceptual ecosystems that accompany them. The extent to which these devices and machines are fundamentally not fault tolerant is for diverse, yet related, reasons of psychological and commercial self-interest quite widely unreported. The narratives of mechanical or computational ascendance rarely […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Triumph of Human Stupidity

There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

The Strategic Void of Technological Juggernauts

Context: Quantum computers are on the path to solving bigger problems for BMW, LG and others I am curious as to the strategy and/or lack of one here. Quantum Computing finds itself well-placed to negotiate a range of mathematically intricate issues that have commercial applications. Just as with the explosively radiative speciation of AI, the […]