Categories
Philosophy

Should we Pause Artificial Intelligence?

Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conflict as Communication

It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]

Categories
Philosophy

Technological Immortality?

Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]

Categories
Philosophy

Healing Circles

The circle is and has always been a strong symbol of community, of culture, and of equality. When a person engages in the experience and living tapestry of shared value and responsibility that this geometry represents, the literal (or symbolic) circle of communication represents an optimal solution for equitable outcomes and adaptive growth. The Great […]

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
environment

Highway to Hell

The climate crisis is pretty much beyond salvaging now. Serial failures of governance, collaboration, intellect and co.passion have led us to the brink. All of this alongside the fact that a number of imperialist dictators around the world never learnt the first less of power (that potential conflict is both more effective and cost efficient […]

Categories
politics

Political Chaos

Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]

Categories
freedom

On the Freedom of Women in Iran

The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]

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
Alien Anthropology

Nuclear Blackmail is an Imperialist’s Zugzwang

Ideological psychosis is quite real and plausibly only persists and serially, cyclically reoccurs in political systems because it represents the amplification (and inadvertent self-validation) of potential psychological fallibilities in every human mind. Putin’s pathological obsessions are part Machiavellian opportunist, part ignorant misanthrope, part kleptocratic mobster but I think the kernel core of his position on […]