Midweek Chill September 26th, 2018: Naturally

By Slow Train Soul.

Galactic Scale Organisms: Part Two

The previous post on this topic had worked on the assumption that there was only one civilization spreading throughout a galaxy. But Forge of God and it's sequel went further with the idea by including other possible civilizations too.

So let's take a look at the implications. As planetisms spread out into the galaxy they'll encounter exo-planetisms with different forms of life and civilization.

The possibility here is for further evolution of one or more planetisms, either via cooperation, parasitism or competition. In essence it's the creation of a galactic scale ecology which, if it can stabilize, becomes a galactism.

Just as a planetism is a planet-spanning organism a la Gaia, a galactism is a galaxy-spanning organism with very large scale "metabolisms" and homeostasis. The size of a galactism would in fact be so vast that (assuming no faster-than-light travel is possible) its equivalent of breathing or a heartbeat would last on the order of a few hundred-thousand years to millions of years.

A topic like this is rather big and has a lot of ground for speculation, with that said the post ends here but I might return to these ideas in future posts.

Midweek Chill September 19th, 2018: Counts Dukes Strays

By Mocean Worker

Musings On Galactic-Scale Organisms: Part One

What if a galaxy itself could evolve into a lifeform? A novel that asked this question was The Forge of God written by Greg Bear, and it's a pretty interesting idea.

Before talking about it though, I have to talk about something called the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis originated from the ideas of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis and the general idea is that Earth's biosphere as a whole can be considered a living organism (note: I'm not going to go over arguments for or against the hypothesis or take a specific stance as to its truth or falsehood, this post will treat it as true for the case of speculation in this post only).

The Forge of God then asks a question: if a planetary ecology is itself a living being, what role does intelligence play for it?

Planets with an ecology (and therefore alive) but no intelligence can be considered analogous to a mule, living but unable to reproduce. In the planetary organism's case it's because non-intelligent organisms tend not to have civilizations and therefore no space programs. This dooms the planetary organism (or "planetism" as referred to in the novel) to die whenever there's a catastrophe in the stellar neighborhood or when its star ages.

But what about planetisms that have developed intelligent agents? In this case the planet could reproduce by these intelligent agents colonizing and maybe terraforming planets, moons, asteroids and building various kinds of habitats. In this sense the planetism spreads throughout the star system by virtue of its "seed pods" in the form of intelligent members of civilization.

Why stop at one star system though? Spreading farther afield into the galaxy proper would ensure its survival long into the future.

RSS is here

I found an article several weeks ago by Wired.

It's Time for an RSS Revival

So I added an RSS widget to the blog (look at the sidebar). I've been quitting certain social networks due to disagreeing with their policies. So I figured I'd make it easier for people to keep up with the blog without having a social network subscription.

Apes or Termites

It's the year 1950 and a group of scientists are on their lunch break at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The scientists are discussing aliens tongue-in-cheek -partly due to a New Yorker comic- when one of the scientists asks a question: "Where are they?" The scientist who asked that question was the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and his question haunts many to this day.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, some a good deal older than our sun, and most stars probably also have planets around them. So you'd expect that there would be at least one civilization far in advance of us out there, but evidence of such is lacking. So the question "where are they?" remains stubbornly unanswered.

I've been interested in Fermi's paradox (the name this problem has) for a number of years now. I'm not going to list ideas on this post but rather focus on a particular solution which briefly appears in the Stephen Baxter novel Manifold: Space.

Upon seeing the activities of an alien species, character Reid Malenfant remarks on how they resemble termites in a colony. Reid then speculates that most space-faring aliens will probably be cooperative (termites), rather than competitive (apes, or humans) in nature.

Think about what it means to be "ape" in nature. Much of our competitive spirit goes towards activities that are often destructive. Demanding bigger and more wasteful houses to keep up with the Joneses, building more nuclear weapons and placing them ever closer to an antagonistic country as a form of chest-beating, maximizing profit by lobbying against environmental protections, etc.

It stands to reason that a species that is "termite" in nature would be less likely to destroy itself in this way. Instead of carbon belching to "stick it to the libs" when resources are running low, members of the species would probably just consume less. The idea of nationalism would make no sense to them because it's anathema to cooperation. You see what I'm getting at.

Perhaps the truly long lived civilizations in the form of these "termites" simply don't need to explosively spread out into space. They might only deign to leave their planet when their home system is due for destruction, and then only stick to one colonizable body in a new system rather than exploiting every astronomical body in it.

I sincerely hope that this isn't the answer, it bodes quite poorly for our civilization if it is.

Midweek Chill August 29th 2018: Creation du Monde

By Vangelis.

Midweek Chill August 23rd, 2018: Alive (Instro Dub)

By J Boogie's Dubtronic Science.

Midweek Chill August 16th, 2018: Abstract Noon

By Chris Winland

Midweek Chill August 8th, 2018: Airtribe Meets the Dream Ghost

By Steve Roach.

Boldly Going (Where Everyone Else Has Gone Before)...

I think I've spoken enough for now regarding the rather dour subject of the failures of transhumanism as an ideological force for good. Instead, here's a post that might be a bit more fun (for everyone but me that is): computer programming!

It might surprise the two people who read this blog, but I've been trying to learn programming for almost a decade now and yet I still suck at it. Why? Well... I'm not sure exactly why (if I had to guess it's a combination of a bad study environment, impatience and difficulty committing to things).

I started out trying to learn Python 3 way back in 2009, then one of the chapters in the book I was using was difficult and I "rested" for a few days, which in turn became weeks, which in turn became the abandonment of my studies.

I tried learning it again several times but each time things got difficult I would "rest" for so long that I ended up quitting each study by fiat.

And this isn't limited to Python either. I've tried JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Gambas, Perl, C, C++, C# and shell scripting with the same outcome.

Now I'm trying to learn programming again, so far I've been keeping at it but that's not saying much in regards to past performance.

The C language was influenced by B and BCPL, which was influenced by CPL. The C language in turn parented C++, C# and D. Maybe one day, far into the future, I'll learn programming through the latest offshoot of the C family:

I'm (obviously) the one on the bottom.

Exit Planet Transhuman?

Perhaps some of the readers here have heard of the death of John Perry Barlow. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he wrote something called "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", the Libertarian manifesto that lead to the currents in modern day Silicon Valley of "disruption" and "move fast and break things". You know, stuff that "disrupted" people's privacy and "broke" civil discourse.

One of the most incredible things about this man though is that he believed in the techno-libertarian dream to the end of his life, even as it ravaged the very medium he had fawned over.

A recent Verge article quoted the Electronic Frontier Foundation staff member Cindy Cohn: "Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter.”

"Focus on the latter", think about that prase. It's a rather vague phrase but I get the feeling from it that Barlow had decided to shut out the very thought that the web could be used for evil, or at the very least stubbornly refused to rethink his ideology as it came crashing down upon the world.

There's a word for that: willful ignorance. And it seems that some of the big-hitters of the transhumanist movement continue that legacy of willful ignorance.

An older article by Vice gives a look into the thought processes of a well known transhumanist named Zoltan Istvan. A member of a group of transhumanists floated the possibility of inequality persisting into the future.

Most of the members of the group agreed with her, but Zoltan's response was: 'The good news is that we don't have the robber barons of the 20th century ... We don't have child labor and stuff like that in America anymore, we have a lot of better rules, and I know it's not perfect but it's very hard for the Bill Gates or the Mark Zuckerberg to do anything that is so against the people ... There's no question that within the next three to five years something like the Transhumanist Bill of Rights is going to enter into the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights," he said. He did not think that government or corporations would play a role'.

There's a major bit of handwaving here: "He did not think that government or corporations would play a role". It doesn't seem to occur to him that the lack of modern robber barons and child labor (in the U.S. at least) resulted from government action, not in spite of it.

In fact he seems to ignore the fact that "the government" is employed by groups of individual people in representative democracies. Yes, there are loopholes and wealth inequality itself that small groups can take advantage of to sway democratic governments, but the heart of the idea is still sound (as evidenced -again- by the lack of robber barons and child laborers in the modern U.S.). No man is an island.

But this thought that "if we just throw more technology at everything and ignore pesky things like politics and social sciences then everything will be okay!" strikes me as a big damn problem in the transhumanist movement.

So maybe it's time to leave transhumanism behind.

It was an interesting prototype, but it's time to make something that factors in a broader view of the world and people (big hint: nobody -and this applies to Libertarians too- are ultra-rational in unregulated capitalism).

We can't stay in this cradle called transhumanism forever.

The Borg Browser

The web browsers have been assimilated, the resistance was futile.

In the closing years of the 2000s Opera and Firefox in particular had a number of built in tools and features and were fast and easy to customize.

But something seems to have happened in the intervening years between then and now.


Perhaps the best way to illustrate what's happened is to compare and contrast older versions of these browsers and the new ones.

Firefox's settings in v. 4:

in v. 6x:

Opera has suffered a similar neutering too. Here's the old version (via allaboutcookies.org), compare that to the new and "improved" version.


Of course things under the hood have changed too. Opera switched to the Blink layout engine which is also used in Chrome. Firefox still uses its own layout engine, but it's incorporated the Pocket service and tracks you. Yes you can opt out of the tracking, but only in a very unintuitive way. Mon Dieu! Firefox has jumped onto the tracking bandwagon!? Say it ain't so!

But why have browsers done this? I think there's an answer: these browsers are trying to be more like Google Chrome.

Yes, it seems like the makers of Opera and Firefox have decided that everyone wants browsers to be like Chrome. It's not like people who want to use Chrome will use it while people who don't want to use Chrome would stick to non-Chrome browsers. No, that would be too sane.

So there you have it, Google Chrome is the Borg of the web browser world and Opera and Firefox have been assimilated by it.

Transhumanism and Goliath

One week ago a post was published on Medium titled Straw-manning transhumanists for fun and profit

The opening dourly states the following:

Transhumanism is potentially unique in that adherents are more frequently portrayed in fiction as blood-sucking vampires, mad scientists, dangerous dictators or grotesque monstrosities rather than the reality — a bunch of sci-fi nerds typically on the internet or in labs.

Indeed, this is an issue, as pointed out in the article the "public face" of transhumanism (in the United States of America at least) largely consists of right-libertarian billionaires.

I disagree strongly with right-libertarian ideology (along with its cousin ideologies) and I agree with the author of the article in that they're over-representative -a Goliath, if you will- of what is in actuality an ideology with a very broad variety of strains.

But instead of bemoaning on how people think that all transhumanists are right-libertarians, we should be asking ourselves a question: what are we doing about it?

The most generalized answer is that we should expose more strains of the broader transhumanist movement to the public and make them more visible. After all, if what we say might be the future then we'd better ensure people hear it, all of it.

Postscript: for those who think transhumanism should reject politics, I encourage you to read this: Technology is NOT Enough!

Morphological freedom? But I thought...

I find it odd that the transhumanist movement as of late seems to be filled with people who hate "SJWs" -which is usually shorthand for non-binary genders.

But I'm stumped as to why this kind of thinking is a thing to begin with in the transhumanist movement. A major -if not the core- ideal of transhumanism is the transcendence of the body, mind and spirit (however the later is defined) beyond current limitations of biology, including sexuality and gender.

So the idea of non-binary gender models is absolutely something that meshes perfectly with transhumanism. However, it seems that the practitioners of transhumanism themselves have discarded the full exploration of that idea in favor of fantasizing about indestructible Terminator bodies (Schwarzenegger-style disguise optional), and Vinge forbid there be something outside of the black-and-white dichotomy.

The Alchemist

Years ago, in an introductory study of religion class our teacher had presented an image to the class.

The image above was painted by the 19th century artist Caspar David Friedrich and was entitled Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

While the image is often associated with German Romanticism there was a different interpretation of the image: the societal shock after the Second World War with the interpretation itself being akin to this:

-------------------------------------------------
We thought that scientific and technological progress alone would bring about a utopia, but instead the pinnacle of our achievements led to continent-scale warfare, genocide orders of magnitude greater in scope and totality than any previous age and the specter of nuclear war. In the painting the hiker has scaled a mountain... but there's nothing there. And now civilization has scaled incredible peaks in scientific understanding and technological ability but have found its reality falling far short of its promise.

So... now what?
------------------------------------------------

Of note: the interpretation above can be only very slightly re-worded and describe the current state of civilization as well.

We've wired up the world, connected everyone to everyone, have both made and are making great strides in the fields of computers, biological sciences (both pure and applied) and global connectivity. We thought (some still think) that science and technology alone can save us from all of our problems. But the promised utopia of a smarter, better educated and less militaristic humanity never arrived. We forgot the human element when chasing fantasies of a perfect future and now we find ourselves facing a resurgence of militant nationalism, ignorance, distrust and hatred.

So... now what?

I belive this passage from Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson might hold part of an answer:

"Very good Nirgal. Your sight has such insight. In archetypal terminologies we might call green and white the Mystic and the Scientist. Both extremely powerful figures, as you see. But what we need, if you ask me, is a combination of the two, which we call the Alchemist."

While I'm not sure mysticism is what should be aimed for, there is another ideal we could embrace, and indeed I have already alluded to it in this post: the human element.

I'm not trying to make an appeal to nature but instead the understanding that the human element is just as important in factoring into the trajectory of our collective future than technology on its own.

Why not see the good in humanity, cherish the goodness and nurture it wherever we go? Should we not all strive to be the Alchemist?

A shot in the dark

The digital age has bloomed, and it's a nightmare.

Okay that's probably too melodramatic, but you have to admit that the digital revolution that promised a bright and closely connected future for all of humanity has fallen far short of said promise.

I'm not going to go over the whole bots, cyberwarfare and swatting stuff, many people speak about it better than I ever could. No, what I'm going to talk about is free speech and the new circumstances the digital age has wrought upon it.

Before I continue, I want to bring to your attention to an article written by Zeynep Tufekci at Wired. It's an interesting article detailing how censorship is no longer the sole purview of governments or large corporations and what that implies for the digital age.

If you are unable to read the whole story then at least take this quote to heart:

"The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all."

Thus the new age of censorship, but what of free speech itself?

At the risk of being U.S.-centric (I don't think I have the liberty to talk about other nations), let's go back to the late 18th century U.S. As the Constitution was formed one of the major ideas codified by it was the idea of the freedom of peaceful expression. You could argue against or in favor of an idea or event and -provided you did so peacefully- you wouldn't be arrested or silenced by the U.S. government.

We all know the world was different back then. But let's think for a moment about how different it really was and what those differences meant for the very concept of freedom of expression (including the freedom of speech).

This was an age in which news only traveled as fast as a horse could gallop, a world where electricity -much less communications based on it- was yet to be harnessed, an age where the scope of globalization was limited by sail, carriage and foot.

What did all of this imply for the idea of free expression? It meant nobody, not even the greatest thinkers of the time, could imagine near-instantaneous communication to audiences of millions across a continent, much less the entire world. Nobody could have imagined that wealthy reactionaries could buy up large portions of the fourth-estate known as the press and control it from halfway around the planet. And certainly nobody could have conceived of sockpuppet accounts, weaponized personality profiling or web-bots that a small group of people in Macedonia could use to warp the zeitgeist of an entire country across the Atlantic.

But all of that is possible today thanks to the power of the World Wide Web, and as a result it's changed the context of free expression. Before, it was believed that one person could contribute one voice to the chorus of human rhetoric and only one voice. But with sockpuppets and web-bots it's now possible for a single person to amplify their voice to shout over all objections and concerns.

In other words: free expression today means all expression is free, but some freedom is freer than others -especially if dishonest means are used. And all of this is having a deleterious effect on civilization.

Of course pointing out a problem is easy but it's much harder to come up with solutions for it. It would require action via massive cross-disciplinary research and implementation.

Unfortunately I am just one person in a sea of 7 billion and counting.

The inaugural Post

So, the first post of this blog. What to say?

Well, one thing to get out of the way first: this blog will be political from time to time. Not only in the sense that I hate anglo-libertarianism (the term "Libertarian" originally referred to non-authoritarian socialists) or "capital-fundieism" I sometimes like to say. But it'll also be political in the sense that Nikola Danylov eloquently stated:

...technology, as a bringer of change, is about politics. Because, as my undegraduate textbook defined it, politics is about “who gets what, from whom, under what conditions, and for what purpose.”

So ultimately a blog like this will inevitably be political, such blogs are political by their very nature.

With that out of the way, I also consider myself a bright green environmentalist and somewhat of an appreciator of nature. Also a budding coder (currently learning Ruby, maybe others in the future) at the time of this writing, in addition to being a full-time Linux user.

You'll see posts about those topics and more on this blog. I hope you enjoy them!