Categories
Complexity

Economics, Beyond Politics ?

We are still collectively attempting to build economic perpetual-motion engines of constant growth when the tools for building resilient emergent complexities into a potentially organic financial ecosystem already exist within our shared scientific and technical, conceptual vocabularies…

Categories
Science

Justifying Imagination in Science

What can an education system starved of funds really do in the realms of blue-sky thinking and grand academic omphaloskepsis ?

Categories
Philosophy physics

Goldilocks and the Two Anthropic Principles

The belief that our own existence in the Universe is in some sense probable or even inevitable is known as the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle comes in two flavours: weak and strong…

Categories
communication systems

Information: Mass & Self-Gravitation

Information storage is delayed communication. The capability to reliably record information creates a repository into which the simultaneously recursive and reflexive functions of language and communication can refer. Language is an incomplete logical system of self-reference…

Categories
Complexity narrative Philosophy

The Value of a Complex Text

I was recently reading some of David Hume‘s opinions on the values of keeping philosophical explanations as brief and to the point as possible. He criticises overly convoluted and unnecessarily esoteric language as demonstrating poor mastery of the topic being communicated. Hume believes it possible to explain essential truths and philosophical revelations without resorting to […]

Categories
AI Complexity Futurism Philosophy

Ray Kurzweil: Electric Dreams

The documentary “Transcendent Man” is an interesting reflection on Ray Kurzweil and his intriguing instantiation of a technological evangelism which envisions a Rapture-like technological singularity in which humanity will attain pseudo-omniscience and near-immortal longevity. The documentary itself is well balanced and also portrays a number of intellectual antagonists to Kurzweil’s utopian prophesies of a Genetic, […]

Categories
Philosophy spacetime

Rationalising the Temporal

Is the experience of time merely a biological curiosity or psychological artefact, a happy accident of life as an aggregate of structural coincidences at a particular nexus and scale of physics and chemistry ?

Categories
imagination physics spacetime

A Universe of Infinite Spacetime

Context: What is the shape of the Universe ? Cosmologists believe that they have successfully measured the curvature of the large scale structure of the Universe and that it has returned a result of zero.  To understand curvature in this context – consider a triangle on a flat sheet of paper: its angles always add […]

Categories
Science

Why Life Exists

The notion that life just naturally “falls out” of physics as a more or less inevitable consequence of the symmetries and physical parameters of nature is quite beautiful. It also implies a Universe absolutely overflowing with unimaginably many expressions of life and potentially exotic configurations of living matter. More information after the jump: http://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12?IR=T

Categories
Complexity culture technology

Go with the Flow: the Illusion of Choice ?

I wonder sometimes if all this digital media and virtual space we share is really something other than what it seems. We perceive a rich tapestry of choice and self-expression, a veritable cornucopia of tittilation, education and ideological assertion. It may actually be much simpler at base, that we are all following simple rules in […]