We do not pilot this vehicle of civilisation anywhere near so much as it pilots us and it is as a relatively unremarkable consequence of human vanity that we remain on the whole almost entirely unable to perceive this.
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Tag: civilisation
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Lost between worlds…
I have spent most of my life somewhat lost between two worlds. On the one side, a world of social existence, historical contingency and the endlessly accelerating rat race of attempting to conform to a changing rule-set and framework of normative assumptions that changes much faster than anyone can ever safely (or sanely) adapt. On […]
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Is the Cosmos intelligent?
Context: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? It is a concept on the higher end of a modified Kardashev scale that sufficiently advanced technological intelligence may be indistinguishable from nature itself; effectively – a parallel of the conjecture (in the article linked above) that “life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear […]
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Peace is Freedom from Self
There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]
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Christmas Eve, 2020
Christmas Eve: a lonely walk around my neighbourhood where I captured these glorious sunflowers basking in the last rays of one of those long slow Summer’s afternoons that seem to sidestep evening and slide straight into night. It’s been a spectacularly difficult year for everyone and while I can’t see this changing at scale in […]
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Future of Humanity
Context: The Future of Life Institute The endemic and omnipresent enlightened self-interest of human psychology is generally such that, while we may already and for the most part possess the technical and cognitive or linguistic and technological tools necessary to architect our own freedom and a shared, peaceful and sustainable future – we are so […]
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Half sunk a shattered visage lies…
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
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Civilisation Collapse
You really have to wonder if senescence and potential (or probable and plausibly inevitable) catastrophic collapse is as necessary in this context as is the endless production of entropy as a corollary of complexity. Any specific system (or system of systems) can only ever maintain sustainable continuity through the offset and displacement of its own internal […]
Civilisation is as easily unwound as it is woven and when the unweaving overtakes the making, when the diffuse entropy and structural disassembly outpaces the aggregate capacity for humanity to innovate fast enough, the world falls apart. It will take profound humanity, compassion and intellect to resolve the darker futures we are facing and being […]
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Other forms of life in the Universe…
Context: A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say Fascinating article above, discussing the logical (i.e. hypothetical) presence of life and intelligence inside stars. We are of course blinded by our own intimate familiarity with a form of life that we ourselves take for granted as normative or necessary and […]
The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]
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Things fall apart…
Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]
Daedelus Kite 