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 […]
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 […]
The world and everything in it constitutes a single, unified and mischievously indefinable information and energy-processing system. This is in essence a computational system but is distinguished from computers by the fact that it does not possess quite the same properties of mechanical or algorithmic and rules-based limitation that a computer demonstrates (as both weakness […]
There are quite a number of critically important things in this world which remain spectacularly and enduringly conspicuous by their absence. Central among these we might place everyday idioms of wishful thinking such as peace, love, freedom and environmental sustainability. What unifies all of these things is that the ways that manifest in this world […]
It is interesting that people are so easily swept up and away by tides of gossip and associated qualitative judgements of authors or speakers and influential personalities when the substance of their assertions, the meaning and significance of their position in relation to the facts is so much more important. The arguments around – and […]
Context: Eradicating black rats on Palmyra Atoll uncovers eye-opening indirect effects A perspicacity and intelligence sufficient to the task of successfully and conscientiously managing our natural environment is quite positively anathema to administrative bureaucracies. There is in this a microcosm of a certain functional or instrumental narrowing of representation and behavioural engagement which institutional interdictions […]
Context: ‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial Notice how the frame of reference represented by this (or for that matter – any) belief system is so easily detached from the reality and unassailable facts upon which it actually and constitutively depends for sustainable continuity and existence. Systems […]
On discovering that the Government of my country is putting policy (and thus ideology) before environment and refusing to sign a leader’s pledge on biodiversity: Australia joins US, China and Russia in refusing to sign leaders’ pledge on biodiversity The sophistication required here is at a level of complexity that almost entirely invalidates existing (institutional) […]
Climate Change is accelerating. Human organisational systems are already quite fragile (as an inverse yet direct measure of psychological, cultural and political immaturity) and will find themselves bearing the burden of an entropy they are poorly-prepared to negotiate. Expect dramatic and sometimes spontaneously self-organising conflicts, turbulence and political upheavals which will sweep away millions of […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
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 […]
Context: The climate change clues hidden in art history The endemic representational ambiguity of art is an inevitable source of doubt in regards to veracity in a context of deriving Climate facts through the artefacts of Art History. A useful comparison of contemporary artistic reflections of environment and climate must always – and perhaps necessarily […]
