1. Descartes versus Chocolate-Fudge Bananas

Almost all human beings now spend their entire lives talking to robots and watching silver screens. In this world composed almost entirely of simulations there is detectable a new form of life: the cultural advertisement. As can be seen by the present state of the world’s great institutions, so-called “real” structures as conceived by the deep past are now little more than fossilised advertisements consisting of disintegrating images rather than “objective facts.”
This is the result of an inevitable historical process. Humanity has been subjected to 150 years of intensive image-processing mounted by very different types of media culture supported by the burgeoning power of technology. Such is the penetration, Mind and Thought both can now be conceived of as forms of ever-evolving mass-media rather than being seen in terms of mechanistic psychologies with hard differentials and finite inputs and outputs. Suffering in a similar way are those “truth versus falsehood” paradigms which were supposed to reveal the physical“realities” of our world.
Defined as any system of abstract symbolic persuasion, the cultural advertisement as a social construct has now grown so powerful it may be seen therefore as a complete meta-biological cyber-animal built of forms of different kinds of story-lines. Rather like the fabulous cryptozoological creature, and rather like the UFO indeed, such a living advertisement is full of enticing promises always poised between fact and fiction suspended between Matter and Spirit, spinning out bits of the more or less “real” as if in a metaphysical centrifuge.
Hence passeth the Mechanical Age into the Age of Virtuality, with Time itself become Imagery.

As a multi-dimensional advertisement, our cyber creature is then rather like Bigfoot (see Postscript) and also the “extraterrestrial” alien, these things being new forms of image -life consisting of enticing pursuasions forever under construction, rather in the manner of Hollywood culture and indeed Exopolitics.

This model could perhaps provide our first glimpse of how an alien intelligence might work. It might well indeed avoid what it conceives of as primitive fact-versus-fiction categories, and like Hollywood and Exopolitics again, lets such things flow in and out of one another, making all our own “solid” Cartesian frameworks of perception moribund. In addition, an alien intelligence might well be non-cerebral and therefore more like a Hollywood or Exopolitical product than any product of a laboratory. In this sense, we should not expect anything which has any kind of connection with linear Cartesian rationalism. Indeed, coordinate geometry, and our digital colonisations may be jokes in Prime Time for any level (and there will be many different levels) of “alien intelligence.”

In this sense we can perhaps begin to dispense with the primitive “scientific” idea of experience being split between absolute Fact and equally absolute Fiction. We may now conceive of the world of experience as consisting of fields of dramatised and warring information “evolving” somewhat in the manner of Darwinian competition but with one big difference - a typical cyber advertising system will persuade its opponents to change in a propaganda war which is the cyber equivalent to a savage Darwinian search for food, protection and environmental advantage.
This change of state is achieved by exploiting our far too easy acceptance of what to see and what not to see. A bus say, runs out of control down a steep hill. Its top deck contains a tribe of rioting drunken skinheads.
This magnificent event is seen by Science as a point-mass moving down an inclined plane.
If that is not de-naturing circumstance, then nothing is. The moment we took Mind out of Nature was the moment we ceased to understand events such as 911.