Tag: art of violence
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How to Re-define Violence
I’ve lamented multiple times about how poor our language is when it comes to describing violence. People will say that soldiers killing each other in battle is “murder,” that a man walking toward a police officer with knife in hand “wasn’t doing anything,” that “silence is violence,” or that abortion is “child sacrifice” (in child…
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The Anti-Social Religion
I’m just now finishing Deacon’s The Symbolic Species and have to comment on what he says near the end. First, note that Deacon’s theory of language rests on a set of hypotheses: 1. Humans evolved symbolic language due to some limited set of external, ecological stimuli, such as better group coordination for resources, assisting in…
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Testing the Simulation Hypothesis with the ROBA Hypothesis
Elon Musk recently joked that the reason that the James Webb telescope experienced delays because the computers were busy trying to render what the planets looked like, since the programmers who created the simulation we’re currently living in failed to anticipate that we humans would have been able to see these stars. It’s a fun…
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Self-Reinforcing Kinship Mesh Networks Enforced by ROBA
Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) is one of the more thorough kinship books written during the late 19th century. It’s worth noting his work because he appears to have been at the cutting of a science of kinship that has basically faded from popular memory. Morgan had previously done enormous legwork in his Systems of…
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The Copernican Oracle
Frans de Waal’s book Mama’s Last Hug (2019) is so far very good. It’s good not because I agree with him, but because he has the balls to take his viewpoint to its logical conclusions. Which is: if humans are just animals as he claims, then to attempt to differentiate ourselves is to engage in…
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Mass Media Parsing Schemes
A mentor asked me a good question regarding my last post: If interacting with AI as though it is human is detrimental to the human phenotype (per my Unoptimized-Merge hypothesis), isn’t that the same with mass media in general, or financial markets, which have always functioned as sort of massive neuron networks. I would argue…
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When Recycled Plastic Is Your Language
CES always has a theme. Back when I attended for the first and last time in 2019, the theme was VR, but now, 5 years later, I only know 2 or 3 people who have a VR headset. This year, it’s AI and robotics. It’s going to have a bigger future than VR, because almost…
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Research Recap for the Art of Violence in 2023
Below is a summary of my research in 2023 for my ongoing Art of Violence project. Total Pages Read: 21,575 Average pp/week: 413 Average pp/day: 59 # of Books Completed: 59 Avg. length of books completed: 336 pages (Note that many of those books’ pages were read in 2022 and weren’t added to the 2023…
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – A Stuntman’s Take
Many spoilers ahead. Robert Pirsig’s first book tells of the author’s cross-country motorcycle journey with his son Chris in the 70s. Their companions are a couple of technophobes who maintain their motorcycle despire their intense dislike of technological society. They’re the kind who just want to get away from “it all.” This “it all” fuels…
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The Blood-Ritual Spectrum – A Solution to Unchecked Violence
Ritual combat wasn’t an arbitrary invention by our ancestors. It served a valuable purpose, in all its forms.