Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

The Australian microbiologist and éminence grise Frank Fenner claims that humanity will be extinct within 100 years and that the process is impossible to reverse or avoid. Frank Fenner (95) is a professor emeritus microbiology at the National University of Australia and an important member of the Royal Society of London, the prestigious British academy for sciences. His work has won many prices, foremost his research done to extinguish the smallpox virus. He is, to keep it short, an intelligent man.

On what basis does Frank Fenner think humanity will be extinct so soon? What’s his line of logic, what’s the evidence? He claims that humanity as a whole will suffer the same faith as the inhabitants of Easter Island. When that island was discovered back in 1772 the explorers found a small population of people at constant war with each other over a limited number of resources. The island had once been a true civilisation, but had degraded into an eternal war-zone once the resources proved to be insufficient to support everyone.

As humanity keeps on growing and growing and its resources shrink fast its not hard to see where Professor Fenner gets his idea from. He joins a long line of intelligent doomsday thinkers, some of whom I am suspecting of having popularity motives for being such (as is the case with Zizek and his pseudo hip end time phenomenon book) – I don’t think any reasonable person could refuse to admit the chance of this development is high, but let’s for one moment look at the only thing that CAN save us: science. For the last 10000 years we should have learned at least one thing: it is never politics that progresses humanity, it is science, art and culture that do.

Now, we do have a giant resource problem that will quickly worsen. The biggest problem is metals. All those mobile phones, all those laptops, they are all impossible without the use of rare metals and those metals are running out. Forget about the Oil crisis. Don’t even believe all those websites that claim some giant oil crisis is coming for more than 1 nanosecond: the solution to the oil problem has been found. Giant bio-farms with bacteria that produce oil constantly. Its possible and they are working on it. But you cant do that with metals. Those run out. And the ecological system does too. There is one very strange and hopeful development that, if implemented, would save humanity from its bleak future.

Its photosynthesis combined with microbiology. I have seen an interview with a eminent Dutch microbiologist who at this moment is creating fish that can live from sunlight. Yes, its possible and he did succeed in doing so. He claims that within 8 years he will be able to make humans that do not need to eat any more but can simply live from sunlight. The implications of such a development are enormous. Think about it: what resources would we need if no one needs to eat any more?

As to the scientific side, its a question of making the skin of even just the hair have photosynthetic qualities by mingling it with the right plant DNA.

So, ironically, in the future we might all be LITERALLY green. If we want to survive. These are strange times, aren’t they? The risks are enormous, but hopefully with some right decisions we will actually be able to overcome this rather infantile stage of self destruction.

In another new development at what seems to be the latest rage, companies firing employees over tweets or status updates, let me for a moment pontificate about the philosophical consequences of these new developments. If you haven’t heard the person fired in this case was CNN reporter Octavia Nasr and her crime was expressing a condolence for some Muslim cleric that passed away. I wont go into that as to an intelligent reader its already obvious that the whole ‘might is right’ policies regarding these definitions are so absurd that it even becomes kind of unphilosophical to keep talking about them, let us instead ponder about what the consequences of this sort of policy are for humanity in the long term.

A ‘tweet’ or a ‘status update’ is not an official publication. It is a quick thought you pen down to a network of supposed ‘friends’. We have learned now that such ‘quick thoughts’ are enough reason to lose your job. I can think of circumstances where such would even be somewhat justified, but in this case the expressing of condolences seems to me perfectly legal.

But what are the real ramifications here? Isn’t it that companies through these media now have large control over our thoughts? How much time will it take before companies can fire employees not because of what they express but because of what they think? If you think that idea is far away, you are not very up to date about the developments in human-computer interfaces.

It is very well possible to create an interface that directly links the brain to the computer. Such interfaces have already been build. Think about the enormous implications of that, especially if the computer learns to execute commands of the brain. You could simply think of a book and the computer would write it at the speed of your thoughts. You could visualise a website and the computer builds in in 3 nanoseconds.

Think also of the enormous dangers: viruses now do not only destroy your computer but can also directly effect your brain. You could be remotely controlled without even knowing it. And: in a company where everyone is hooked up to such a brain-computer device the employer could simply fire you for thinking something.

We are not far from that point at all if we fire people for a quick thought via a tweet or status update. I am all for responsibility and I don’t think an employee can make official publications that would seriously downgrade his company, but that is not what we are discussing here. We are talking here about giant corporations that think they have the right to determine what you can and cant say in your private life, not about the company but about a political matter. Think about it. That is very serious and very wrong.

The lesson, for now, seems to be mostly not to add your employer to your list of ‘friends’, but unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. There’s always people who will rat you out, and show your tweet to your employer anyway. No, the solution here, especially in sight of the enormous risks of interface developments, is new legislation about what governments, companies and other institutions can do with our personal lives. There are too many unguarded and unthoughtful and very very risky scientific developments going on at the moment, and without some serious monitoring we will all live to see the day that we regret not having acted now against the dangers these developments imply.

Martijn Benders

Martijn Benders is a philosopher and a member of Novo Universalis, a centralist Think-tank that aims to help humanity evolve.

The Russian architect agency Alice.ru plans to build an underground ecological city in an abandoned mine in Siberia. Underground cities might be the cities of the future especially in colder areas. They are much easier to heat and can potentially be heated by the warmth of the earth itself.

Click here for the larger picture

But there are some huge obstacles to the idea. One is the immense effort of the digging and support of the city. Another is water management. A third one is earthquakes, which are even far more dangerous to underground cities than to normal cities. No one wants to be squeezed between two earth platters.

Then there is the problem of fresh air, and the problem of lack of sunlight and thus lack of Vitamin D. To live ones life only in artificial light is not healthy. There’s a challenge: could it be somehow possible to invent a light source that is not artificial but completely mimics the qualities of real sunlight?

I am doubtful about the entire news item now, since I was unable to trace any architecture agency in Russia named ‘Alice’. So it probably a hogwash story. Nice stuff to think about though and nice imagery, wherever it came from!

Or could the Russians really plan to go underground, perhaps as a counter-move to the illustrious ‘rocket shield plan’ of the US which got even more ridiculous by now because they now claim to only install short and middle range rockets – check the fly-path of a missile from Iran to Europe and see if it somehow crosses Poland…

Spies? Russian spies in the US? Aren’t spies relics of the Cold war? Are there actually people out there trying to find information you could easily find on the internet? Apparently not. The US arrested 10 people yesterday who are accused of being spies.

Now, two of those spies lived together as a happy couple for years, doing the stuff spies do: normalising. Being as normal as possible. Being as American as possible. Their names? Richard and Cynthia Murphy.

Richard and Cynthia Murphy. That sounds almost like my neighbours. Will they still fit into the court seats after Americanizing for years? And as taking a whole range of psychiatric drugs is considered ‘normal’ nowadays we can safely assume they have been swallowing pills like crazy, just to appear normal. They must have been cheating on each other too, just to prevent standing out from the crowd.

Maybe they are not spies but the real Americans, while all the other ones are the spies. Are they on facebook? Hell yes! You cant normalise without having a facebook profile. Let’s see. Here’s Richard Murphy:

Richard Murphy

He’s kind of handsome, so Cynthia should better watch out. He looks like a young sturdy de Niro.
We also read that Richard Murphy has been renovating homes in the exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles for years.

Now where’s Cynthia? Well, here:

Cynthia Murphy

Hmmm. Who is the Cynthia? The left one seems rather ‘Americanized’. Or the right one, who is pretending to have studied and pretends to have an American mom?

This is definitely book material. The long romance between the girl who pretends to have an all american mom and the guy who pretends to be renovating homes in the rich areas of Los Angeles. As if we all dont know people do not renovate their homes there, they simply throw it away and buy a new one. We dont buy it, Russian Richard!

See what I mean? Facebook is the perfect tool for would-be-spies and cheap romantic novel writers.

Yesterday there were two items appearing in the Dutch news almost simultaneously: the famous Dutch television host Paul de Leeuw ‘would not be put in court’ for putting the following tweet on twitter when the marriage of Swedish crown-princess Victoria took place:

‘Are you also secretly waiting for the moment a black Saab crashes itself into some sort of monument? Not that I wish for it to happen, but at least something would happen then!’

The OM, the ‘National Prosecutors Office’ (website) the next day said Paul the Leeuw would not be sued for making this tweet on Twitter. Would not be sued? Can you be sued for just saying something, an innocent joke? What the hell has the National Prosecutors Office to do with an innocent tweet? Don’t these people have anything better to do? Are we supposed to feel better now that we know they actually investigate tweets, to see if they can be legally sued? The guy made a joke, for christ sake.

Then, simultanously, this item appears in the dutch news. Dutch Broadcasting Network ‘TROS’ fires Cornald Maas for putting the following tweet online:

‘What nice export products we Dutch have, Sieneke, Joran van der Sloot and the PVV’

Cornald Maas was working for the TROS as a commentator and he also commentated the Eurovision songfestival for the Netherlands. So this guy is FIRED for making a joke on twitter? What is wrong with these people?

Isn’t it obvious that social media are becoming increasingly more dangerous and narrow minded. Yesterday I took a peek at a fake facebook account i created after not having looked there for about two months. Now every post you make there says ‘flag’ under it, so you could be nicely reported for anything you could possibly say.

I am actually glad they threw me out of facebook. It is becoming a very narrow minded instrument of moralistic social control and twitter doesnt seem any better judging by these news items. Think about it, I am a well known dutch author, and they simply deleted all my work ‘because someone complained’ and they wouldnt even tell me what the reason was for deleting my profile!

I dont want weird government agencies to gloat over my family pictures, thank you very much. I dont want ‘prosecutor agencies’ weighing every joke and remark I make on the scale of their legal apparatus. Having such agencies controlling everything you say in your own home is RIDICULOUS and UNACCEPTABLE. Yes, I articulate that, because people somehow seem to start to think this is all normal.

My book was one of the bestly reviewed books of 2008. I was nominated for the Buddingh price and won two other poetry awards. It means nothing to facebook: it simply deletes all my work, all my poems, all my thoughts, because some monkey had some moralistic issue with something I wrote. And they wouldnt even tell me what it was. There was no chance of appeal, nothing. Justice doesn’t exist in their world, just low-brow moralism.

That seems exactly the road we are on: a road that leads to a world where low-brow moralism of the most stupid sort rules and justice is simply a thing of the past. Too complicated, too nuanced, to much maintenance costs.

Facebook and Twitter increasinly are becoming control instruments. I actually started to develop a new social environment, called ‘Soulsat’, because I do like the technology, I just dont like the morons who happen to control it. I will try to get it online in the coming months.

The article (dutch) about Cornald Maas

The article about Paul de Leeuw

Tashi Dhondup is a Tibetan poet and musician that has been sentenced to 10 years of hard labour by the Chinese government. His crime? Writing songs. Tashi wrote popular songs against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. In protofascist states such is considered a crime.

He is by no means the only tibetan writer or artist that has got arrested recently. Reports indicate that the last three months the chinese government has arrested more than 50 writers, poets and musicians. People who were arrested in the middle of the night and taken away, because they wrote poems, songs or made artworks the autorities disapprove of.

China has become the dark underbelly of our capitalist system. They produce almost anything we use in the western world. That makes us responsible for its policies, in a sense, because we have at many levels been economically and politically merged with their system. Slavoj Zizek once said that China proves Capitalism can very well function without democracy and that this is the biggest danger that lies ahead of us. He may very well be right: except that I believe this is already kind of ‘old news’, in the sense that most democracies in the west have become like show trials. The ‘double standards’ people complain about are actually preconditions without which the system wouldnt work.

What can we do to free Tashi Dhondup? I am afraid not a whole lot. We could send mails to the Chinese Embassy or just spread this story around. I have great symphaty for the Tibetan people, who have been the most spirited and warm people I have ever met in my travels. So yes, I am amongst those that keeps saying ‘Free Tibet Now’.

Join Free Tibet

The idea that Jesus died on a cross is probably a wrong interpretation of Biblical texts. That’s what a Swedish scientist concludes after studying historic texts. Theologian Gunnar Samuelsson of the Göteborg University claims that Jesus never got crucified but instead was hanged unto a pole.

The scientist claims there is no literature that explicitly mentions the crucifiction. In the Bible they write only about the ‘staurus’ Jesus had to carry up the Golgotha mountain, a word which a lot of historians have translated as ‘cross’ but which should be much accurately translated as ‘pole’, the Swedish scientist suggests.

Roman, Greek and Hebrewe literature suggests that executions where people were nailed unto a cross have not been existant in the ancient days of the roman empire at all, says Samuelsson. Hanging prisoners unto a pole, however, was quite common in those days.

Samuelsson thinks the image of Jesus on a cross exists because of the imagination of ancient artists that were made long, long after his death.

‘There are simply no description of Jesus or anyone else in that time being crucified’ Samuelsson says, ‘the whole thing is based upon imagination and myth’.

Samuelsson vermoedt dat het beeld van Jezus aan het kruis is ontstaan door artistieke afbeeldingen die veel later zijn gemaakt.

Will Mel Gibsson remake his rather kitschy torture episode ‘Passion of the Christ’ now? Maybe a bit less dramatic, with a pole instead of a cross? Beyong doubt lack of nails and blood wouldnt fare well with hollywood audiences. And what about all these people wearing crosses around their necks, will they now be replaced with poles? Are we going to hear ‘He poled for your sins’ now when we get lectured?

These are exciting times!

A poll of 1,000 pregnant women for the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists found that many pregnant women often wear high heels or stilleto type shoes nowadays. And since 7 out of 10 pregnant women complain about swollen ankles, swollen feet and arch and heel pain there seems a significant link between both.

The same survey also suggests half of those polled actually feel pressure to keep looking like the celebrities while pregnant.

It’s hard to think of a more silly line of logic. Here we have women who are potentially ruining their entire feet by putting heavy weight on its muscle and bone structure in the vain hope they still look like some celebrity while being pregnant.

What kind of person wants to look like a celebrity anyway? Especially when one is pregnant. This should be called the ‘silly ego syndrome’. In my opinion all current psychological and psychiatrical diseases should be scrapped out of the shrinks handbooks, all pills destroyed, because all these people suffer from one disease only: the silly ego syndrome.

The silly ego syndrome

What is the silly ego syndrome, you ask Dr Benders? Well wanting to risk your childs health (because you could fall and injure yourself and the baby) just because you think someone else might be tricked into thinking you are a celebrity (don’t these people get it – being cool is not about being worried what others think!) certainly classifies as having a very silly ego.

Everyone who has a silly ego has the silly ego syndrome.

Ok, so how do i know if I have the silly ego syndrome?

You probably do, I know very few sane people.

Right so how can we actually cure the silly ego syndrome?

I have seen no one that got cured of this horrible disease yet. In fact it has just been discovered, today, by me through sheer mental observation. I just might compose a special CD people can listen to with music specially devoted to cure the silly ego syndrome, but I’m afraid Phil Collins and Bono already did so abundantly.

So what advice do you have to offer Dr Benders?

Get real.

Interactive is interactive

I dreamt
that I could get a nice new car
or no a weird new car
or no a new unknown car
for free, or better said
500 bucks a month
and just a half year
said the salesman
in my dream.

And what happens
after that half year
with the new unknown car
I asked him. ‘After a half
year you pay normally’
he said and I asked
what happens if you can’t
‘you can sell it and
we simply call it even’
the salesman who had
just a narrative function
in my dream said.

In my dream
I saw advertisements of others
that sold the same new unknown car
for a quite normal price.

And I thought: yes. That’s a good action.
That’s a very good new unknown action.

In the future we will
live our daily life in a world
that is completely free
of advertisements.

Martijn Benders, 20-06-2010

Last monday I tried to tune into a television channel – something I dont do a lot nowadays but I wanted to catch the dutch world championship soccer game. I was totally flabbergasted when it turned out I had to watch a game of soccer with my head in a locust cloud. A locust cloud? Yes, that’s exactly what a few thousand ‘Vuvuzela’s', the african horn that got popular at soccer games, sounds like. If its this bad in front of my TV, what the hell will the soccer players have to hear on the field? No wonder about every game so far ends in 0-0.

I think noise pollution is one of the most awkward types of pollution. That’s because you cant really escape from noise. With visuals you cna just not pay attention to part of your screen, but with noise you can just completely turn the thing off to get rid of it.

Now, what sort of idiots would enjoy ruining a sports game with one of the most unmusical instruments ever invented? What evil african shaman has thought up this plan to sabotage the world cup and terrorize soccer enthusiasts world-wide with a stinging nest of sheer noise?

Well, this guy is one:

And this guy:

And here’s another bounty hunting construction worker, this time with a vuvuzela instead of a sword:

Isn’t it about time we introduce or rather mandate use of the Vuvuzela in parlements? Seems an instrument much more useful in politics than sports. I wouldnt mind sticking my head in a locust swarm when I’m watching something called a ‘political debate’. Either that, or force politicians to wear soundproof burka’s.
That’s another one of my ideas that unfortunately didnt get implemented worldwide yet. It really WOULD solve most of our problems!