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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 […]

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business Philosophy

Business Systems, “Best Practice” and Self-propagating Bureaucracy

Questions could (and should) be asked of the extent to which systems, architectures, models and programs can be (and are) produced for the primary self-interest of the organisations which provide those solutions. Bureaucracies and (all of) their diverse hierarchical predecessors, for instance, are classically-versed in the dark arts of creating systems and mechanisms that generate […]

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Philosophy

The Strangest Thing: A Labyrinth of Words and Meanings

It is the strangest thing. Words are sounds, symbols and patterns of electrical energy inside brains. They are abstractions, generated from the shared world of our experience but not fundamentally dependent upon it. The words we use invoke the thoughts and concepts or images with which we think and understand the world we share. The […]

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Alien Anthropology

Geopolitical Exasperation

Exasperation is a condition of annoyance, irritation and frustration. It is a word that is perhaps best used where feelings of futility or powerlessness are also significant contextual factors. My own persistent experience of exasperation has been in professional and intellectual contexts. The central focus of my angst and frustration is that of being unable […]

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AI

Can there be Conscious Machines?

A philosophical perspective: I accept that conscious machines are plausible, but I have trouble believing that the diverse algorithmic and networked approaches under development are anything beyond sophisticated, limited, mechanical or incomplete axiomatic models.  It provides reflexive psychological comfort to assert (and believe) that the hard problem of consciousness is explicable via a reductive algebra […]

Categories
culture narrative Psychology

The Psychological Vacuum of Games

I am for my own reasons holding out against complete personal digital metamorphosis and still receive a large percentage of my news media through television, regardless that the electromagnetic signal itself is digitally-encoded. An advantage that I derive from television news is that, unlike the overtly digital communications channels of social media and YouTube, the […]

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Alien Anthropology

Zentropy 0

The constructive entropy of Self is a recursively self-gravitating nexus and node or focal point of patterned complexity. This Self is not your possession so – there is no justification for an individualist or ego-driven narrative. Self is not a possession of the world you inhabit -entailing that socialist agendas are similarly fallacious. The history […]

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Alien Anthropology

Continuity of Civilisation

What we more often fail to observe or acknowledge about the generally messy and entropic state of international relations and an apparent inevitability of internecine conflict is that, as a whole, human civilisation is autonomously calculating and computing the optimal means and methods for self-propagation and systemic continuity.  Homeostasis is not engendered through aspiration towards […]

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Alien Anthropology

Broken Machines

The image in the mirror of the world is that limited comprehension and linear system by which we might successfully (or at least partially) render our own selves. Taking our own projected image and anachronistic mechanical logic of causal intent or purpose as being a self-evident and unquestionable intuition of the way the world functions, […]

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culture

Evolving Organisational and Conceptual Systems

A fascinating feature of contemporary organisational systems, and at all scales of magnitude, is the various ways in which they subscribe to a simplistic mechanical and linear model of ontology and operation. It is as though, while everyone and everywhere is more than happy to commercially and politically exploit the Post-Newtonian and Post-Industrial Revolution technologies […]

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Alien Anthropology

Intuition, Computation and the Plausible Continuity of Human Civilisation

Intuitions are the common solutions or theorems of our everyday life. Going with a “gut feeling” is, however, very likely unrelated to the complex of neurons that actually exist in your gut. It is perhaps more of an insight into the patterns and symmetries of information and energy within (and as) which we exist. An […]

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Alien Anthropology

A War Within

It is a commonplace wisdom of strategic thought that no plan ever survives first contact with an enemy. It is true that this is a consequence of the irredeemable nature of complexity and chaos in material and psychological systems, but there is much more to it than this. What is to be said when that […]