Categories
Philosophy

Genetic Predestination

Context: Genetic paparazzi are right around the corner, and courts aren’t ready to confront the legal quagmire of DNA theft — I find that the unacknowledged (yet common enough) assumption that genes deterministically prescribe destiny as more or less isomorphic mappings of downstream biological development is unhelpfully shaping an already complex debate. Yes, genes shape […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Karma Suture: Sex, Genetics and Deception

The intinctual principle and hormonal drive which propels us toward coupling and copulation is simultaneously the psychological symmetry which compels us to seek unity and wholeness where there is, in fact, none. The last thing that any of us is likely to feel particularly comfortable in acknowledging is that we are all at base the […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

Language is an Operating System

Language is something of an operating system. Language also represents a self-propagating, abstract information system – much like culture or socioeconomic reality – that inhabits us just as much as we inhabit it. Human beings, technologies, artefacts and communication systems are the medium through which this linguistic entity manifests and self-replicates. The resilience of this […]

Categories
Futurism

Cognitive Eugenics

A cognitive eugenics born of genetic testing (and selection) for intelligence is almost upon us. Except – intelligence is not only a matter of genetics. Environmental influences, opportunities, sociological feedback mechanisms, the creatively adaptive development of unique cognitive methods – these are all factors in human intelligence. Cognitive eugenics – let’s call it what it […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy technology

Self-Propagating Technological Metamorphosis

If you listen very carefully you can almost hear a faint whooshing sound as the vacuum created in the wake of the products of our own creative intelligence, which having long ago outpaced us, draws us inexorably along behind it. As the accelerating juggernaut of pure and abstract technological metamorphosis has always – and perhaps […]

Categories
culture

Mind the Gap

Our systems of logistics and commuter transport derive the abstract, symbolic value and benefit of logical continuity from their function just as much as the commuters do.

Categories
culture

CRISPR Wars: The Inevitability of Technological Entropy ?

The great enigma of scientific and technological progress: for every great leap forwards there exists a concurrent potential for even greater (catastrophic) leaps backwards.

Categories
Alien Anthropology life Psychology

Self-replication, imperfect.

We are that living matter through which the logic of self-replication self-replicates; we are not the bearers or the beneficiaries of this process, we are the medium through which it (shockwave-like) passes.