“If only plants could speak. From extraordinary flowers to intricate leaf patterns, we admire their expressivity every day… without once wondering what they can teach us about self-expression. Take the plunge into the silent yet endlessly creative vegetal world, and discover a Nietzsche decidedly less conquering and nihilistic than what we’re used to.”
Disclaimer: This video essay is based on Nietzche’s published writings as well as non-canonical texts (ie his Unpublished Fragments).
Academic works that provided inspiration for this video were notably Vanessa Lemm’s article “What we can learn from Plants about the Creation of Values” and Gary Shapiro’s “Earth’s garden happiness: Nietzsche’s Geoaesthetics of the Anthropocene”, both published in the Nietzsche-Studien and freely accessible here:
timespace coordinates: the holographic universe (or one of its beta versions)
One of this year’s most ambitious documentaries just out of Sundance. Definitely a must see. I will be drumming the same tune as other reviewers when saying that indeed it is gripping, courageous in its portrayal of inner/outer worlds, incredibly audacious in tackling the new mystagogue-gamer-philosopher-entrepreneur-shooter-zoomer-doomer-loner-continuum. After Room 237 we find Asher as disposed to accepts all the wildest theoretical and philosophical speculative claims at their face value. Nowadays, altough the experiential dump sounds hollow, the performative dumpster is there for everyone’s diving. From its most excessive (and consequently numb) the LIFE INTENSE: A modern Obsession (book by Tristan Garcia) to the “how does it feel to be a…”(fill in the dotted line with whatever lies at your heart) experience is omnipresent, defining almost what all the locked-in quarantined brains intensely dream about. How can we preserve what experience makes important to us in a world where everything of importance is transformed into an illusion and disqualified (dismissed as either folk psychology or irrational atavism filling up a growing listicle of cognitive fallacies etc)?
As easy as it is to acknowledged a truly post-cinematic drive (in the sense of how Steven Shaviro has coined and helped defined this new post-cinematic affect) overlapping and overflowing canonical cinema, jumping platforms as easily as exchanging genres, juggling low or high brow (William Blake, silent era Jesus movies, various hi rez action games, various real and crafty mutating glitches and uncanny 3D CGI scenes) is never an easy task. A torrential rain of multiple movie edits from various PKD-based Scifi’s or VR +false memory +replicant dreaming classics (Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner) feed into a mental & cultural & pop theoretical swirl pool sucking everyone into The Matrix Gospel & Simulation Theory. A Glitch manifests tremendous amounts of leaky weird realism – at a time when reality turns out to be much weirder than ur run-of-the-mill safety valve fiction. Yet there is some major absence in the midst of this plenty. Please read so u can accuse me of higher expectations or being just a pedantic bore.
In spite of its eagerness to not ignore and to include, I find A Glitch in the Matrix lacks something important – especially when it comes so close to pointing out why Philip K Dick’s imaginary worlds are so important – insisting on their inherent mood, or the way they give us a feel of futures inaccessible and improbable or follow characters into closed private odd worlds we always get trapped into. Maybe because of all this, I find it peculiar that its grasp ends where it ends and its digital dragnet is pretty mono. Maybe mono is key to the movie – to actualize and show too much of the trappings of sporting a white, male, 40+ and hetero “dude” subjectivity. Shortly: too much effort, too much computing power to make us (presumably different others) feel how it feels to be an isolating-isolated, self-sufficient, solipsistic and fairly desperate funny-sad-scary Euro-American roleplayer (i wonder how does this – diverge or converge with what Adam Curtis tries to unwind again and again in his documentaries using other means & stylistic choices – this time our current emotional, atomized inner prison mental-block-freeze).
Also there is more to simulation theory during algo-capitalism than the risk of actually being in one. There is also the deep kind of theoretical affinity of such a theory including the holographic universe to larger trends towards higher abstraction and financialization. The “real subsumption” of labour under capital and disruptive strategies that seems to favor the 1% or at least the long hand of Big Tech. There is more to the whimsical affirmation of Elon Musk about the possibility that everybody living right now is part of a simulated world – and the proliferation of self-serving stsrtupedelusions actually proffered by actual CEOs and real bosses. There is a difference there. Thus, a simple A Glitch in the Matrix syllogism might mean that although some can afford computing power (and fossil fuel to burn) to run the simulation, everybody else can be dealt with in alt deleted terms or stay at the receiving end of just ‘poor data, let her/his itchy glitch stick permanently’. Something that post-cyberpunk already made clear (Noir by K W Jetter comes to mind): we still leave in a very patchy wetware world – where exploitation intensifies, and where the lack of coordinated public health measures have aggravated & incubated COVID-19. Where fixing and debugging is simply not an option for the needy & those who simply can’t afford.
Asher was always interested in fanboys, in paraeidolia, in intensely jarring otakus and fandom effects, in relating to a very peculiar type of obsessive individual and an inner worlds inhabitant that has stopped being just nerdilicious trivia hoarder & seeker. What is important is that he is not being judgmental, he is not trivializing, nor pathologizing, in fact non- neurotypicality (even if unmentioned) seems to be one of the strengths of the documentary. Another one is exposing this underlying fear of the moderns – as W James said once: their biggest fear is just the fear to be duped.
Yet when all is said and rendered and screenshot, I wonder about the much larger non-actualized virtual world out there, virtualities as sensed and explored by many Balkan, African, Asian, South American, hell Oceanian gamers, freaks, blerds, more ways that do not suffer from the same starting point or set & setting or how does that relate these (monads?!) to the specific situation over there. I understand the need to document a timeless time, our time, to document a timeless frozen place: the room you are in (which has a very precise shape, furniture, lightening even in games). I feel there is reason to expand focus and dwell more on the aesthetic choices (call them permanent mood boards) of how various geographic ‘otherings’, imaginings and cultural zones (say largely abandoned factories, farms etc from the disaffected, post-industrial Eastern Europe now used for Leningrad siege Lazer tag) or literally larger areas of the planet (the Global South) are and have been portrayed or simulated in present or future settings (just one example: the filter of dusty, dun, yellowish, burned look in movies and games playing in Iraq, South East Asia, etc). Outside of a Mexican -other, A Glitch in the Matrix has very few to show and that’s significant. A more truly globalized, wider realization of virtual cosmopolitics and “virtualisation” is severely needed imho.
Same issue I have with the (not only) philosophical temporal flattening – or peculiar insensivity for certain shifts (i repeat for a documentary that celebrates such sensitivity for how does it feel to be locked in). Ok, you will say philosophy is only tangential to the doc, but I think it is key, since various personal philosophies and self-made cosmologies are being recorded, corroded, animated, discussed and described in this documentary & taken very seriously. In fact I would even add – expanding on a pet idea i have been thinking and writing about since some years- what i call “scavenger cosmologies” is quite central to the whole monadic Matrix-worldview of the documentary. A Glitch in the Matrix is not under-theorized, it does not suffer from lack of theoretical positions. It basically cuts trough the whole history of Western (Greek & Judeo-Christian) philosophy, and cannot help itself but visit BIG commonplaces such as Plato’s Cave myth as ultimate source of the virtual and cinematic experience. Yet when it makes all these wider (if impossible to ignore) generalizations it looses I think touch with the feel and bumpiness of historical and temporal dimensions.
Ok, now u can say it is just a perfunctory info-tainment introductory level dive into mind matters. I say it is not, since it dwells with care & a lot of attention to these histories. Nevertheless, how such important things get transmitted, changed and how they differ from period to period gets lost. To take one example – how such platonic or historical neoplatonism got transmitted is left for others to ponder, but as some philosopher said, statues u can remake (simulate?) but antique minds u cannot. The Greeks of Renaissance are not the Greeks of the Golden Age of Pericles. The Greeks of Classicism are not the Greeks or Renaissance and so on. All these instances of virtualisation are time-based, suffering the modulation transmission noise and alteration ebbing towards different ends and forms of receptivity. Virtualisation is specific and has a pathway that has some relevance and importance. I would argue (with respect to Asher and the effort of his team as well as the various well-chosen guests invited to back up his vision) that Descartes 1600s story about the demon simulating and duping him differs from the group sit-in flickering lights of the (V-th c BP) cave myth fire in significant ways. I am not just trying to reintroduce some technological determinism here but only to see how such experiences might differ and make a difference. In Science and the Modern World (1925) which I reread recently, Whitehead makes a point to emphasize how this sensibility to thinking moods, expressions and subtle differences is a key advantage for philosophy (catching the particular flavor of thinking at a particular time juncture, a certain school take on a concept, of not loosing sight of how abstractions abstract from the where and whom). Lets just say that in Descartes’s case “experience” as such was virtualized (or disjointed or ‘bifurcated’) in a very modern way, completely detached from the outer or inclusive cavernous drama of Greek natural elemental forces, Promethean fires and looming shadows. As many point out – cartesian inner feeling is really an intensely privatized ‘illusion’ in a very peculiar way. In it we encounter a very particular divisive I (Decartes “I”) colored by very specific internal doubts, something that does not even have a larger inside or outside. His is own dissected interiority, as we understand it, colored by a jumble of qualia, of a disordered play of sensations: heat, coldness, of various sense inputs that can only be verified by consciousness – only by his cogito.
His involvement with physiological sciences (even if he mostly understood ghe body and head pneumatically in terms of physics: heart as a pump, pineal gland as pouch) where sense perception takes precedence is torn by a particular kind of perceptive inaccuracy reflected by his chosen enumeration. This is quite specific to Descartes in tandem with a rise of plethora of scientific evidence based now not on human perception and subjective verification but on ever more refined instruments & constant external testing of an objective world. Don’t want to get into more detail just making sure there’s no confusion here.
Also, as much as we need a tribute to PKD (Philip K Dick) his incredible inheritance and wild SF contributions still to be cherished, repeatedly filmed and enjoyed everywhere and all around, I again feel this focus (a hangover from the prophetic accolades, the drag of his celeb predictive powers?!) on his 1970s Cold War paranoia era multiverse takes precedence over how this might differ from other times and places. If we take PKD seriously and enjoy his multiverse hypothesis to the max – then where are some of the other Earths, authors or virtual believers that do not stick to the US or Euro-US Western block template? I ask where is for example Stanislaw Lem? A contemporary (and one might say one of his most ardent Eastern block admirers), Lem (otherwise a big skeptic of larger trends within US sci-fi) is also an explorer of various ‘other’ imaginary worlds, of brain-in-vat impossible isolation tanks and even Cold War Futurologic excess. It would have been so nice to contrast the Cold War MK Ultra LSD-tinged paranoia of PKD to the Lem diving into not just personal hells and broken paradises, larger sentient planetary oceans talk. The impossible to comprehend alien intelligence, closer to a planetary consciousnesses it act in mysterious ways, reshaping, amplifying or selectively embodying their visitors, countering them with their own dreams of unsettling (getting them out of their selves) space exploration passion. Outside of this caveats highly recommeded!
Artwork by Von Sholly based on the works of Dr. Timothy Leary. Script by Leary, Von Sholly, and George Dicaprio. Timothy Leary on space migration, increasing intelligence and life extension. (goodreads)
Groundhog Day is a 1993 American fantasy comedy film directed by Harold Ramis. It stars Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, and Chris Elliott. Murray portrays Phil Connors, a cynical TV weatherman covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, who becomes trapped in a time loop forcing him to relive February2 repeatedly.
In the years since its release, the film has grown in esteem and is often considered to be among the greatest films of the 1990s and one of the greatest comedy films of all time. The film has been analyzed as a religious allegory by Buddhists, Christians, and Jews, who each see a deeper philosophical meaning in the film’s story. (wiki)
An exquisite bas-relief of Bodhisattva (probably Padmapani or Avalokiteshvara) adorning the outer wall of Candi Plaosan Lor southern main temple. A fine example of the 9th century classical Javanese Buddhist Sailendran art, Plaosan, Klaten Regency, Central Java.
I got a free copy of this book for an honest review. I already had the occasion to read a few related articles and essays by Thomas Moynihan in sumrevija.si and Palladium Mag. This review expands on those early first observations. Only later have I found out how they fit into a book of a much grander scope.
Its purpose is none other than redefining modernity and even reason as reason to ensure that thinking will not cease to exist in the future. All this in the light of something that has never before dawned on human minds: that the universe can well do without those very minds. One risks being overlooked when arriving on the crest of such an expanding body of collapse studies or end of the world as “growth industry”(Claire Colebrook), with scientists moving the Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight and ongoing “slow violence”(Rob Nixon) of 6th mass extinction blending into nearly omnipresent barrage of media apocalypticism. Yet, I believe X-Risk cuts like no other trough all of the recent secular/post-secular eschatological confusions, separating the threat of exterminism from prepper talk. Once and for all witnessing the end of one’s (or another’s) world is not the same as experiencing extinction nor is it establishing a presumptive final date of expiration. Thomas Moynihan’s book should be able to dispel all the lingering hesitation about what Big Filters to chose from (take ur pick from gray goo nano planetary meltdown to superintelligent AIs using our entire biomass as computronium fodder) by inviting us to step down from the giants upon whose shoulders we supposedly stand, and get a frisson as they succumb to ‘infinitarian paralysis’ (Nick Bostrom quoted by TM) and kamikaze theories about biospheres and entire worlds that keep on bursting like soda bubbles.
“The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. Engraving by James Macaulay, 1880”
Clearly this book was written by someone who enjoys collecting all these ruinous and delightfully abhorrent mental cataclysms, a necessary feat at the very moment when we might desperately cling to old certitudes in the throes of apocalyptic theology, in spite of the daily facts that remind us that we’ve jumped off the cliff a while ago. Here comes a 21st c historical perspective on the long XX century of dreaming up wild galactic-scale visions about the present via the far future and across cosmic silences, not ignoring both the divergences and the ongoing dialogue btw Mutually Assured Destructive partners, a worthwhile recuperative effort especially in light of recent New Cold War fears.
“Design for a space habitat by Tsiolkosky”
With a strong impetus from the cosmist undercurrent (what Zizek used to call the “biocosmist heresy”) the Former East or ex-Soviet Bloc futurological contributions from ‘actually existing socialism’ that previously got short writ, astronomers Nikolai Kardashev and Iosif Shklovsky finally get their due. I don’t want to give the false impression this book is just a collection of daring visions and whimsical cosmological fallacies – it accomplishes the prodigious feat of channeling all these disparate resources about endangered futures trough the lens of rapidly expanding (since ~mid 90s explosion) astrobiological (or xenobiological as it was called) exoplanetary knowledge. The conceptual break criss-crossing a historical (diachronic) backdrop rich in brazen technological solutions and initial responses to ever more darkly looming existential threats – takes us to precedents and first inklings of the idea that there might be something deeply wrong with entrusting the universe the mission to bring us back once we disappear. While examplflifying this novelty, X-Risk nevertheless eagerly recognizes the pioneering work of Milan M. Ćirković, Toby Ord, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Sir Martin Rees that contributed to the establishment of a new academic discipline. At the same time, there is so much more to be said about a wider search of Non-Western forecasting institutions and X-Risks mediation with examples from the Global South let’s say, or Chinese Society for Futures Studies (CSFS)established in 1979 China with the role of “to serve the long-term planning and the modernization construction of the country, and to serve the progress of mankind.” or 1970s Romania’s Laboratory for Prospective Research (later CIMSVD Institute) and their Tofflerian romances.
Numerous mini chapters with memorable titles like “Bubbles of Cosmic Nonchalance”, “Eternalism and Its Discontents”, “Worst of All Possible Worlds”, “Tadpole Hedonists and Fatal Flower-Arrangers”, “Shitting on the Morning Star or the Uses and Abuses of History” remind me that we should cherish all the thinkers that know how to tickle the hyper-modulated nerve of maximally distracted 21st reading. Clearly one of the best ways to do it – is to zoom-in on hopelessly (till now) and shamefully lost metaphysical constructions (Stanislaw Lem once called upon the singular powers of Sci-Fi to peddle such disreputable – but oh so intriguing metaphysical beasts). X-Risk is full with the decadent splendor of abstruse, smothered in their cradle natural philosophies, full of enormities with blusterous cosmic (and comic) reach.
“Henry de la Beche’s lampooning of Lyell’s resurrecting necrofauna, entitled ‘Awful Changes’, drawn in 1830”
Adjoining are excellent B&W images peppering the text from a draft of dela Beche ‘Awful Changes’ with Professor Icthyosaurus lecturing the necrofauna, woodcuts of Tambora’s eruption provoking the Year Without a Summer and unwittingly creating the perfect conditions for Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus at Diodati Villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, including some well-chosen portraits of Eduard von Hartmann (“looking omnicidal”) and F.W.J. Schelling (“in his old age and cosmic wisdom”) or biologist Oka Asajirō (“considering omnicidal degeneration, decadence, and debauchery”).
“Bernard de Fontenelle’s cosmic theatre of throning plenitudes, 1686”
Whatever we might still think about giants of Continental philosophy (with either waning extinctionist credentials or pretty shaky perennialist positions), their Appetite For Destruction seems to have been fed by a very tenacious metaphysical Principle – the undead Principle of Plenitude. Years ago i read a fresh Romanian translation of The Great Chain of Being: Study of an Idea (1936) by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, where the Principle of Plenitude gets ample exposition.
1579 drawing of the Great Chain of Being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana
This and Alexandre Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) potentially changed our understanding of how such cosmic modelling and reordering got us to where we are now. The Great Chain of Being is one of those books that will never let any figureheads of Scientific, Literary and Philosophical canon rest in peace. It unwinds the living history of Scala Naturae, patiently uncovering the seams that bound innumerable taxonomical schemes almost till Linnaeus or Darwin & Wallace, the glue that kept everything in place in grand preordained hierarchies.
“Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), looking omnicidal”
X-Risk newness consist in striking a definitive last blow at this chain constricting the way Life on Earth and the supralunar realms were imagined under the grip of Plenitude, finally to be ruined after the idea of extinction had sunk in. X-Risk widens the non sequiturs and gaps of the eternalist principle of Plentitude, or the endurance of value in a universe that appeared biased in our favor (take ur pick: Weak or Strong Anthropic Principle) as much part of philosophical and theological clusters as for Leibniz’s theodicy, under-girding his whole “best of the best worlds” on the same inherent overestimation and smugness about ultimate default safety nets. One may wonder if – Schumpeter’s gale –schöpferische Zerstörung or creative destruction that animates capitalism blows hard on the same wind of teleologic justification for destruction and ensuing cosmic renewal that made J. G. Fichte remark “All death in nature is birth, and precisely in dying does the augmentation of life visibly appear”(The Vocation of Man – quoted by T Moynihan).
“F. W. J. Schelling, in his old age and cosmic wisdom”
While Whitehead is not present in any visible way, I somehow felt his mathematical approach to philosophical aporias useful in this altogether different context. In the unsuspecting way he discovers an age-old problem while rotating certitudes around almost like a Rubik cube, unceremoniously fitting parts that have been kept apart since ages, lightly addressing hampering axioms that constrain all subsequent chains of reasoning or their given solutions, restricting all flights of speculative endeavor. He does not try to eliminate or weed out the audacious brambles and thickets of reason. X-Risk also finds immense scope in detailing and following up on all the consequences of setting these finitudes free, in order to establishing what grounding beliefs subtend and unite all thinkers, no matter their school, language, methods or their particular apocalyptic flavor. What Thomas Moynihan in both rich detail and systematic search brings forth example after illuminating and frankly hilarious example from the most quirky, whimsical to the brightest of feverish minds – is their nearly complete naivete in regard to humanity’s cosmic no-rerun show. Up to a certain point, nobody seems to get that once they are out they are out. It is really gloriously and darkly funny to try and go back to the Encyclopedistes, or to the most pre-critical Philosophers as well as later SETI searches for humanoid aliens and see why so much of this intellectual bravado went so wonderfully askew. Only Marquis de Sade stands apace – but here he is on its own in many ways as he actively promotes extinction. This might also partially explain why reactions to the actual disappearance of the Dodo species (and others) in Mauritius or why Dodo-populated planets seemed possible to Bernard de Fontenelle (in retrospect), or why the dramatic realization of ultimate extinction came so late (possible clue: the Plurality of World aka Multiverse – Many Worlds theory sadly also fails the sensitivity-to-extinction litmus test).
“William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, engraving of the Orion Nebula, as described by De Quincey. You can almost make out the skull De Quincey imagined the nebula forming. From An Account of the Obesrvations of the Great Nebula in Orion, Made at Birr Castle, with the 3-Feet and 6-Feet Telescopes, between 1848 and 1867, WIth a Drawing of the Nebula, 1868.”
This brings me to a possible consequence of this book imho – the way it counters the sort of abundance craze – Plenitude – as an expression of ontological excess, an ontology that seems to stumble on examples of non-experience or absence, or tends to avoid what might be called the wasteland of missing ‘windows of opportunity’ or singular encounters. An unrecognized dearth that might isolate such abundance on ‘lucky’ rafts drifting the void of space or forever lost in the gulfs between ‘island universes’. In some way Plenitude tangles as well with Cornucopian versions of ecological or eco-critical thinking. A cornucopian might have the same obliviousness to man-made disasters or to how everything runs its course if left alone (ex: neo-Malthusian COVID herd immunity or man-made conflicts that seem to help nature replenish itself). Thus, the faltering and lazy logic of non-interventionism runs amok and abstains specifically when worst comes to worst. What seems to be an increasingly growing problem of our times, not only disarray and suspicion about what is to be done, is a retreat from directed collective action coupled with nonchalant stand-back attitude. One cannot fully abandon excess – since austerity seems to be allied with the worst of capitalism nowadays, imposing all manners of punishing restrictions and well-targeted scarcity on those who anyway feel the brunt of a very bad deal. Technological post-scaricity Pays de Cockaygne’s is far indeed almost because it felt possible to the most prosperous and wasteful boomer generation, children of plenty and man-made extinction (mostly atomic) fears. It is easy to trumpet austerity on a planet where waste-disposal is being rerouted to second or third world and efficiency has become ever pressing and depressing. Before recognizing extinction as a fact of history and evolution, past or future, as this baroque abundance of literary, scientific and philosophical examples makes clear, it became a sheer impossibility to see something else besides basically bursting, agglomerated, populous celestial spheres.
Emblem XLII by Michael Maier woodcut from Atalanta Fugiens, Frankfurt 1618.
If this cornucopian view of ‘nature’ (here terrestrial thus inclusive of humans) where all new continents and all worlds & all planets are as full as the old rivers, fields or standing forests becomes a thing of the past, even at fault for being completely exploitative, genocidal and predatory, what lies at the other end? Future Orchidelirium might not be such a bad habit after all, only and only if it does not become a botanical hunter’s dream bioprospecting after the rare and valued. Otherwise ‘Herschel’s Garden’ might resemble the good old lawns. Embracing full artificiality and artistry we might still learn from pop cultural ET galactic horticulturalists as Ralo Mayer already explored in his E.T.E. Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies performance lecture. With the waning of plentiful plenitude and strategically retreating from it, even if unaffected by extinction ideas and the radical realization of irreversible disappearance – extreme environments and desert communities where the anorganic was abundant (sun and sand in the excess) also birthed say Dune’s Fremen, the Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz, crypto-communist Essenes or mothers of the desert or fathers of the wasteland in the Eastern cenobitic tradition (with whom at least presumably we could exchange apocalyptic or messianic pleasantries) could help along by entertaining ideas of infertility, of absence, of no return and a growing emptiness that resonates far better with the vast expanse of suddenly available exoplanetary (external ‘nature’ unaffected by humans) desolation.
A clearly applied and directed Pessimism is essential nowadays for any collective, distributed & planned action to take place. Scientifically grounded 21st c Pessimism has somehow remade itself and at the same time remade the entire cannon of Western thought by emboldening us to abandon all complacent thoughts about unswerving teleology insuring reserved-seats for the human species in this universe, while never abandoning the need to secure its further existence. The mind- argument, the rarity and preservation of so-called “sophonts”, of reason endowed entities as threatened species in a mindless (or valueless) universe is one of the strongest arguments of why we should try and change course and think about securing the chance of future generations to exist and prosper (X-Risk being a staunch supporter of Enlightenment values and universality if fragility of reason). Panpsychism or cosmopsychism etc as understood and popularized noways (by Philip Goff for one in his Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousnesses 2019) elaborates on a parallel history of “what matter is in contrast to what it does” – an alternative entertained by Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington, arriving at quite opposite conclusions to extinction thinking from what I gather. I am on very thin ice here – but I wonder how consciousnesses and experience as the medium of reality itself squares out with extinctionism at this very precise historical juncture. As such, any extended, immanent non-human consciousnesses inherent at completely different scales (gradients, levels, degrees, substrates of organization etc) – might be also confronted with this ultimate task i.e. having to probe its foreseeable disappearance and thinning out further ahead.
After reading X-Risk, one may finally breathe again relieved because one is not left to suck in another of the private an frankly boring musings and philanthropic escape plans of company founders attending to their favorite Sci-Fi fears (Superintelligences transforming everyone into Paperclips etc), that seem to ignore and completely circumvent the bountiful historical examples of past and present – of extinctions that go on without a bang, of non-spectacular threats no less important to human and more-than-human existence here on planet Earth (divestment from fossil fuels or the present retreat from long-term planning in spite of Green New Deal and Extinction Rebellion).
Why is the genome of a salamander forty times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution–and human society–really works.
Good Enough offers a vigorous critique of the quasi-monopoly that Darwin’s concept of natural selection has on our idea of the natural world. Darwinism excels in accounting for the evolution of traits, but it does not explain their excess in size and number. Many traits far exceed the optimal configuration to do the job, and yet the maintenance of this extra baggage does not prevent species from thriving for millions of years. Milo aims to give the messy side of nature its due–to stand up for the wasteful and inefficient organisms that nevertheless survive and multiply.
But he does not stop at the border between evolutionary theory and its social consequences. He argues provocatively that the theory of evolution through natural selection has acquired the trappings of an ethical system. Optimization, competitiveness, and innovation have become the watchwords of Western societies, yet their role in human lives–as in the rest of nature–is dangerously overrated. Imperfection is not just good enough: it may at times be essential to survival.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (Italian, Milan or Caravaggio 1571–1610 Porto Ercole) The Musicians, ca. 1595 Oil on canvas; 36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in. (92.1 x 118.4 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1952 (52.81) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/435844
In keeping with Caravaggio’s use of contemporary dress for his Biblical figures, Jarman intentionally includes several anachronisms in the film that do not fit with Caravaggio’s life in the 16th century. In one scene, Caravaggio is in a bar lit with electric lights. Another character is seen using an electronic calculator. Car horns are heard honking outside Caravaggio’s studio etc. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 