Context: How Bill Gates’ company TerraPower is building next-generation nuclear power As a general observation, *anything* which measures safety as “analyzed by deaths per unit of electricity generated” is a worry – it is a normative expectation of inevitable fatality. The technical solution described is interesting and certainly shifts the hazards and juggles the entropy […]
Tag: environment
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Sustainable Food Systems
Context: Working More Systemically Towards Sustainable Food Systems: A Co-Inquiry Process A critical issue at the heart of this issue is that we lack a comprehensive, resilient and adaptive systems ontology upon which to build the structural, organisational and sociotechnical or cognitive/intelligent and technological systems we actually require. It is one thing to identify a […]
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Disentangling Love and Hate
Love is an experience and representation from inner to outer, from system to environment and from self to other. It is that direction and momentum that inversely generates and cultivates the experiencing “I” or loving person in reflexive self-definition through their relationship to that other. Imaginary hypotheses of “other” are metaphysical fictions no less than […]
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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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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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Unity
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 […]
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Global Systems
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 […]
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Environmental Mismanagement
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 […]
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Policy trumps biodiversity, again.
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) […]
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Climate Change: When the wind blows…
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 […]
