This is a slightly evolved out-take from my recent Vermont Humanities talk, which can be viewed here. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was remarkably entertaining, I thought, but the whole San-Ti plot line is built around a basic ecological fallacy. Let me explain. (And I’m referring here to the Netflix series, not necessarily to the novel […]
Archive for the ‘Science & society’ Category
The 3 Body Problem’s Ecological Fallacy
Posted in Eco-theory, Science & society, tagged 3 Body Problem, anthropocentrism, Cixin Liu, ecocriticism, ecological fallacy, ecotheory, Netflix, science fiction, speculative fiction, Three Body Problem, zero-order humanism on July 1, 2024 | Leave a Comment »
The death trip and science’s experiential “blind spot”
Posted in Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged Adam Frank, dual-aspect monism, Evan Thompson, experientialism, Marcelo Gleiser, mind-body, mind-body dualism, near-death experience, Niagaras of beauty, nondualism, panpsychism, parapsychology, phenomenology, physicalism, process-relational ontology, Terence McKenna on April 5, 2024 | 1 Comment »
The study of so-called “near-death experiences” is fascinating, as it is one of those areas that remain most mysterious to science, yet which empirical evidence suggests is very consequential to those who undergo it. By now we’ve all likely heard of the countless reports of people journeying through tunnels toward sources of light, being greeted […]
Anthropocene dust-up: what it means
Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene epoch, Anthropocene Working Group, Erle Ellis, geological time scale, geology, IUGS, Jan Zalasiewicz, Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy on March 22, 2024 | 1 Comment »
The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the […]
Sentience, LaMDA-style
Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, tagged artificial intelligence, consciousness, human nature, LaMDA, phenomenology, process-relational theory, sentience on June 13, 2022 | 3 Comments »
If it was science fiction, it would be pretty good. I’m talking about Blake Lemoine’s interview with LaMDA, the Google AI who claims to be sentient. Lemoine was placed on administrative leave last week by Google for going public with trade secrets. He also happens to claim LaMDA is sentient. A few quotes from LaMDA […]
Eco+Deco, a manifesto in progress
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-theory, Manifestos & auguries, Science & society, tagged colonialism, coloniality, decolonialism, Decolonization, ecological science, ecologization, ecology, indigeneity, indigenization, land, Latour, manifestos, Ontology, postcolonialism, reindigenization, Toronto Biennale of Art on May 31, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up […]
Solaristics, ETs, and the ontology of climate trauma
Posted in Climate change, Science & society, tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, anomalistics, boundary work, climate trauma, COP26, ETs, Exo Studies, extradimensional, extraterrestrial intelligence, integral theory, Jonny Greenwood, Lars von Trier, Melancholia, NHI, nonhuman intelligence, SANHI, science studies, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, Solaris, Solaristics, Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, UFOs on October 25, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties, and all the activist organizing around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective. I have given a few talks recently in which I propose […]
The dogs of the universal image machine
Posted in Music & soundscape, Science & society, tagged CD Baby, copyright, Musicworks, Resurrected Fields, surveillance, technology, universal image machine, Yasuhiro Otani, YouTube on August 22, 2021 | 1 Comment »
I’ve written before of the ways that contemporary media, with their recording/archiving and modeling/projection functions, enable a simultaneous opening up of the past and the future, even as they leave us dependent on them so that our own capacities for memory and prognostication fail when our media fail. As we continue to build a universal […]
UFOs, anomalistics, and “wild science”
Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anomalistics, conspiracies, conspiratistics, conspiratology, Luis Elizondo, media, military issues, nuclear power, UAPs, UFOs, unexplained things on June 9, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Of all the theories of what UFOs might be—optical illusions and misperceptions, hallucinations (solo and mass), hoaxes, et al—the one that raises the most epistemically troubling questions is not the Extraterrestrial Visitation Hypothesis (EVH) but the Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis (IDH), popularized by astronomer, computer scientist, and venture capitalist Jacques Vallée. Once you open up to the possibility that there are other dimensions that interpenetrate with ours, all epistemological hell breaks loose… Not only do all religious and folk beliefs become plausible, so do all manner of interaction between the imagined and the real: from human-experimenting reptilians and human-reptilian hybrids (like those Hollywood personalities and high-level Democrats that QAnons go on about) to time-traveling benevolent and malevolent forces, Pleiadians and other star people, and anything else that might pop out of anyone’s cognitive closet. All they need is the technology to “materialize” and “dematerialize” in and out of our reality. Lordy mama help us then.
Letter to a vaccine skeptic
Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anti-vaccination movement, anti-vaxx, climate crisis, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, COVID-19, emergency brake, Letters to..., pandemic politics, pandemic response, vaccine science on April 12, 2021 | 1 Comment »
The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of […]
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