Essays | www.metaphoreal.com

Error message

Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type int in element_children() (line 6542 of /home4/vanderbl/public_html/includes/common.inc).

Deprecated function: implode(): Passing glue string after array is deprecated. Swap the parameters in drupal_get_feeds() (line 394 of /home4/vanderbl/public_html/includes/common.inc).

Marcel Duchamp's Game of Alchemy

The Metachoria, Chapter Three: The Oz Factor, the Quantum Zeno Effect, Holomovement, and the Brain

A Perverse Horology

Are living beings no more than machines? What's the basis for such an absurd equation?

The Metachoria, Chapter One: Don't Confuse me with the Facts!

...in which physicalists' protests against accepting the reality of anomalous experiences demonstrates not a world succumbing to anti-science (as they'd have you believe), but rather their own desperation at the Newtonian worldview's obsolescence--which is steadily proceeding from within physics itself. In other words, the grounds for explaining people's anomalous experiences expands by the day, contains elements that are "magical" yet scientifically tractable--and the arch-skeptics don't like it. Perhaps the most common example of this reality-rupture is the UFO, which we'll examine in depth.

The Metachoria, Chapter Two: Why the Greys?

"UFOnauts" used to come in all flavors: space-suited dwarves, hairy gremlins, robed monks, silvery giants, glowing balls and humanoids, tall blond "Nordics," "Asians," "Mediterraneans"--then suddenly in the mid-1980s witnesses started mostly reporting the skinny lightbulb-headed cyborgs called the greys. What the hell happened? Here I look into the history of the alien abduction, examine the history of its elements, and possibly why the grey bastards monopolized a perfectly entertaining form of theater with their supposed genetic machinations.

How the Internet Hacks Us

Sims, All the Way Down?

Nick Bostrom's Simulated Universe argument gives Descartes's evil demon a headache--apparently, he, too, is a simulation in Rene's imagination.

Substrate-Neutrality, Nanotech, and ET

We've been conditioned to expect ET to fly around in our airspace in a celestial chariot and, further, be curious about our species...But what if one race in our galaxy learned millions of years ago to hack photon-streams, interstellar dust and gas, or even the "zero-point" field to wend their way in space to our planet as inchoate energy forms that could mimic any lifeform? Could we even know it? What if their "mothership" probe could become an aggressively-symmetrical tree? A strange meteor? A weird patch of fog or cloud in the sky that appears and disappears? A quivering blade of grass? The octopus?

A stream in current AI research could point in this direction as a solution to Fermi's paradox...

1973-74: THE WEIRDOS CONNECT

In 1973-74, guys named Lilly, Leary, Wilson, Geller and Dick get into Sirius trouble with the Earth's Cosmic Coincidence Center...

Hello, Ray, do you read me? Do you read me, Ray?

Through two free miracles, Google futurist Ray Kurzweil gets his wish to live for untold centuries! Let's see where it takes him. And us.

Error message

Pages