AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
They are confused about what science says about form, but so is everybody else I guess.
Ref to Birhane episode that said something about the Cartesian self hanging around like a ghost...should relisten. Weird Studies/Mechanical Dollhouse
Something prophetic, it hit the zeitgeist of hyperobjects etc.
You cannot be at home in this world (as a consequence of the scientific worldview). The cheerlessness of the movie (Antarctica, and general human surliness).
A hostile, inhuman environment (universe)
Speculation on the nature of The Thing -- not a real creature, just frantic will or patterning, after Schopenhauer. "A teleology with no purpose" well duh.
This seems confused to me, they don't quite have the idea down. Or maybe they are just more horrified than I am, since I live in digital capitalism.
To Discord
So I'm listening to the episode but also puttering with chores and not paying full attention; around 23:00 Phil says something like "The Thing was waiting around to find its people", meaning the film needed time to find its audience, but I it applies equally to the creature or non-creature itself, biding its time in Antartica, which is how I heard it.
The treatment of The Thing as a kind of avatar of mindless replication was interesting. I happen to think this is an accurate picture of the universe, Richard Dawkins and Schopenhauer are basically right, but it is disturbing. It brought to mind another disturbing film, Vivarium (2019) , which also treats the subsumption of the human by inhuman replicators.