Post Einsteinian Cosmology

• Mythos and Utopia

  Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of

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• The Coming Discontinuity

  At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not. —Ezra Klein What makes discontinuity discontinuous

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• Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

  I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it

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• Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

  In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes– I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when

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• Is Magic a Thing?

  I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted

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• The Coming Discontinuity: A Theological Reflection through the Sensibility of a Progressive Catholic

  I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end. 

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• Christopher Nolan, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Unconscious

  [I haven't had a chance to see Interstellar yet, but Nolan's work has always interested me, and I'm reposting a piece I wrote in 2010 about Tarkovski's Solaris, his response to Kubrick's 2001, which I saw for the first time around the time I first saw Nolan's Inception. I think the post makes sense even

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• The Silicon Valley Flood

  The culture of Silicon Valley today sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum and exhibits the elemental qualities of water. Water will always find its way, it will find the unseen cracks, and find ways through obstacles and even tear them down, as a tiny leak can bring down a mighty dam. Water is an amazing

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• Sacramental Semiotics

  For what does elemental matter–the microscopic stuff of stars, planets and DNA molecules–look like in a post-Einsteinian universe? The first thing to say, I suppose, is that matter is bound or condensed energy, captured from the torrential, buzzing flow set loose by the big bang. Just as water moves through a whirlpool and simultaneously creates

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• The “Lost” Sensibility

  Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it: Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's

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