But this article kinda opens the possibility of world war taking place entirely in the data/communications realm.

Brilliant

The reason is that, encountering life's most challenging experiences (which are always human in their origin), these novels are like a preset pattern of meditation by which one can find the ground.

"Finding our intrinsic values is no trivial task, but something that forces us to stare into the core of our humanity."

I think it misses a critical topical conclusion which is that "intrinsic values" means little or nothing to many, and many folks are fairly incapable of competently doing the kind of contemplative meditating required to arrive at some set of rules like that, and so they look to others.

And here's the crux of the missed point:

To really resonate with our intrinsic values, we need to drop the myth that a rational economic system exists, and build one with the value of present and future human life explicitly built in.

We already have a massive framework for understanding individual intrinsic values in terms of the sanctity of human life and that's the great mystery religions that have birth to our modern age. What's needed now is a planetary ethos where intrinsic human value is put in the proper context of the ecological reality of the biological and geological systems and processes that sustain us. Building that culture requires myth and magic, but also is an intensely rational project. There is really no way around it, and any philosophical text intended to shift the cultural landscape is incomplete without it.

I think one can only call science news boring if one clings to merely the old idea of science as a simple methodology for validating laws/truth of reality rather than appreciating that Science is the institution of cultural realism and the modern religion to which we all subscribe, so much so that we take it for granted. This is the problem with "science news", is that it's news performed under the presumption that the methodology of scientific practice needs to be more explicit for it to be effective news. This is only true for folks who accept superficial obeisance towards science as significant equivalence for factuality.

The consumer culture and consequent wealth of things, especially images and meditated simulcra, really only echo the naive American soul in a wasteland of it's own making. All cultural realities are fundamentally ecological. We fill our lives with artificial realities so liberally because we are born into a culture that took massive wealth of natural resources and the experiences they provide for granted. As they vanish, we fill the gap with artificial things and experiences.

It's a dangerous game with potentially grave and unexpected consequences, and we have played it before many times on a much smaller scale: hunting food sources to extinction, turning rich farmland into desert, etc.

It seems that the collective human psyche it's unable to reflect accurately on the consequences of it's own actions with respect to our fundamental biogenic foundation.

Take for example the flooding of our nights with artificial blue spectrum light pollution. In evolutionary terms, this is a new event. For billions of years nights have been uniformly mostly dark with a regularly variating moon glow. Suddenly we change all that and dark nights are a thing of the past. Nevermind the massive affect on a whole ecosystems, nevermind studies that show a severe affect on the human psychological health, status quo says lighting up the night is normal, good, and safe.

And there are shootings at schools and terrible crime and massive loss of insect life and songbirds dying off and these quite extraordinary changes to the continuity of our bio systems and our lifestyles, and yet we don't see the connection. We blame the media or Donald Trump or the 1%. We don't see the problem as something we have direct control over. We blame our institutions or leaders or gods or what have you, anything but ourselves, and anything to avoid changing our lifestyles and behaviors.

So imo things really are falling apart, just not the things we think.

I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we can safely assess what is or isn't conscious.

Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, bacteria, and all living things display some level of consciousness.

And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a biological organism ourselves.

It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these definitions is correct!

What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, such that the inherent assumptions made in building our scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we do understand must be all there is.

That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the institution of scientific realism.

So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate!