Categories
Alien Anthropology

When the Music’s Over

When it is all said and done, this current and potentially Globally catastrophic war, I wonder what will remain? A broken landscape of human suffering as sown seeds for generations of hatred and retribution yet to come? A barren and scarred planetary desert of radioactive futility? A humbled humanity that yet again sailed far too […]

Categories
culture

Please, give peace a chance…

I can not lie, this European war is already a monumental catastrophe but it does not have to get worse. Please stop this war. No one can win. No one ever truly wins wars and even if this a truth we are all still yet to fully acknowledge, please reflect deeply upon it because it […]

Categories
Philosophy

New World, New Self

All actions, all choices, all approximation to unambiguously individuated (as subjective) self-determination tends to fade away in such an exquisitely, eloquently, interdependently entangled Cosmos. More subtly rendered: the kinds of self and other or system and environment that such a complex world as this invokes is distributed, integrated and functionally, existentially multidimensional. The reflexive boundaries […]

Categories
environment

Climate Emergency

The concept of cascading complexity in matters of Global Existential Threat is quite substantially and far beyond any contemporary regulatory aptitude or ideology and party-agnostic political will to engage it with requisite urgency and at required scale. It is simultaneously not at all political and yet suffers from an endless adversarial bickering as the articulation […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Triumph of Human Stupidity

There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]

Categories
Philosophy technology

The Strategic Void of Technological Juggernauts

Context: Quantum computers are on the path to solving bigger problems for BMW, LG and others I am curious as to the strategy and/or lack of one here. Quantum Computing finds itself well-placed to negotiate a range of mathematically intricate issues that have commercial applications. Just as with the explosively radiative speciation of AI, the […]

Categories
Philosophy

Solving Complexity

Complex systems require complex solutions and global problems require global thinking. The application of holistic analyses to complex adaptive systems obligates us to come up with solutions that are themselves complex adaptive systems. An evolutionary feedback loop is the only plausible way to align adaptive technical solutions with “real-world” volatility and uncertainty. Obtaining contextual tenure […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

All War is Civil War

How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Beating the drums of war…

We might do better not to ask how, exactly, an entire country might become a kind of prison so much as to ask why it would be a large-scale governance framework that anyone would think was worthwhile pursuing. This is indeed a world in which such large-scale incarceration occurs and as such it is a […]

Categories
environment

Toxic Air Pollution in India

In the world of diplomacy, India may be remembered for its last-minute push to downgrade coal language at this year’s climate talks. Scientific American, November 16, 2021 More children are in hospital with breathing problems as pollution levels remain dangerously high in New Delhi, doctors warned on Wednesday, and the government shut five power stations […]

Categories
environment

COP26: Word Games

Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Strangeness of Life

The strangeness of life is so close to us, so intimate that we can not see it nor recognise the novelty and peculiarity of human existence and consciousness for what it is. Like some exotic fish swimming laps in a tank of water: embedded, immersed in it’s context and oblivious to the improbability and sheer […]