Memia on Sunday 8-May-2022: A higher toll🦠🪦// reparation preparation🇺🇦// sailing close to quantum woo⚛️// an initiation to Game B🅱️// Infomocracy🗳️// everything everywhere all at once🥋🎆🤯💯
An ultra-marathon, not a sprint
Kia ora,
Welcome to Memia on Sunday - I’m taking a break from editorialising this weekend, need to catchup on on my work backlog and get my slides finished for my presentation at #TMG22 this week. So just a collection of weekend exploring links below that have caught in my net this week.
Enjoy your Sunday.
ngā mihi
Ben
Weekend exploring
🇺🇦Reparation preparation
With estimates now emerging that the cost of rebuilding postwar Ukraine will reach towards US$500Bn and beyond, attention is starting to turn to establishing a reparations process. Director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory Law School Laurie R. Blank writes lucidly on the key legal issues and process required:
Establishing a Reparations Process
Sourcing the Funds for Reparations
Reparations to Whom?
Reparations for What?
“Beyond individual criminal accountability, however, it is equally important to highlight Russia’s state responsibility and establish mechanisms to transfer and disperse the vast sums of money necessary to rebuild Ukraine, and to compensate Ukraine and individual Ukrainians for the horrific attacks, grievous loss of life, and extensive destruction the Russian war has wrought.“
🦠🪦A higher toll
The WHO released updated data indicating that excess deaths during the two years of Covid-19 pandemic so far is closer to 15 million people worldwide - far exceeding the reported deaths of ~5 million directly due to COVID-19.
10 countries accounted for 68 percent of the excess deaths: India, Russia, Indonesia, the US, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Egypt, and Iran.
Puts China’s ongoing strict Covid-zero policy in a different perspective.
Meanwhile Covid case rates in Aotearoa remain stubbornly flat - as schools went back this week, many without masking policies and we move into winter, this continues to look like an ultra-marathon, not a sprint…
⚛️Sailing close to quantum woo
“Anesthesiologist and Quantum Consciousness Theorist and Researcher“ Stuart Hameroff is a long-time co-author and collaborator with British mathematician / physicist Roger Penrose, who is famous for arguing controversially that consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules in the brain: the Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction) theory.
A new article by Hameroff has been doing the rounds this week: Consciousness is the collapse of the wave function.
“According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function takes place when a conscious observer is involved. But according to Roger Penrose, it’s the other way around. Instead of consciousness causing the collapse, Penrose suggested that wavefunctions collapse spontaneously and in the process give rise to consciousness. Despite the strangeness of this hypothesis, recent experimental results suggest that such a process takes place within microtubules in the brain. This could mean that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, arising first in primitive bio-structures, in individual neurons, cascading upwards to networks of neurons”
(However, many in the physics and neuroscience community continue to be very sceptical of the quantum consciousness theory - in particular physicist Max Tegmark’s 1999 paper on the topic calculated that the time scale of neuron firing and excitations in microtubules is slower than the quantum decoherence time by a factor of at least 10 billion, concluding that:
“cognitive processes should be thought of as a classical rather than quantum system.”
Regular Memia readers Rob England and Andrew Leckie provide some meta-analysis:
Either way an intriguing hypothesis to explore more deeply.
🅱️An initiation to Game B
It looks like you are playing Game A. Would you like to play Game B?
Continuing my exploration of the Liminal Web, I’ve been diving into the literature on Game B:
“Game B is the infinite game where the purpose is to continue playing. Game A is the finite game where the purpose is to win.”
Here’s a recent video introducing the main (pretty damn abstract) concepts of Game B. Starts off well, then goes a bit, like, 2 dimensional Nintendo circa 1999… a little while until it goes mainstream, fair to say.
🗳️Infomocracy
Following on from my Wednesday piece on Benevolent Tech Oligarchy, thanks to Aimee Whitcroft for putting me on to Malka Older’s 2016 sci-fi novel Infomocracy. From the book cover notes:
“It's been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line.
With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?”
Here’s a review from NPR:
Devouring right now.
🥋🎆🤯💯Everything everywhere all at once
Go see this at the cinema. My mind is still exploding from its joyous inventiveness, laugh out loud humour, multiverse metaphysics, tenderness, kung fu, talking rocks and costumes. One of the greatest films ever made without a doubt.
🎹Hania Rani in concert
In a previous life (and perhaps, who knows, a future one) I spent a *lot* of time playing improvisational piano.
This week my YouTube algo threw up this awesome performance from Polish keyboardist and composer Hania Rani at the recent ARTE Concert Piano Day concert recorded a couple of weeks ago at the Sorbonne University in Paris. 47 minutes of textural, atmospheric keyboard-led meditation, an amazingly talented musician.
Weekenders
A couple of laughs on the way out:
Remember those mournfully swaying Kiwifruit on the PM’s recent trip to Japan? Well they’re back, with a vengeance!
And I couldn’t stop laughing out loud watching this.
See you again on Wednesday!
ngā mihi
Ben
Thanks for sharing Hania Rani! The piece “Buka” is so atmospheric. Just made my Sunday. Similar to Deep House, rhythmic and repetitive bass lines from which melodies travel up and down the synchronous structure.