Categories
Philosophy

Emergent Complexity as Logical and Material Inevitability

The emergence of structured and patterned complexity may just be an inevitable consequence of a Cosmos in which the self-replicating, iterating logical process of self-replication itself represents the simplest, low-energy (and minimal algorithmic information complexity) state of any dynamical process.

Categories
Philosophy physics

Is Consciousness Inevitable ?

The arrival of conscious observers in the Universe is not so much a miraculous surprise as a probabilistic inevitability hard-coded into the symmetries and logic of matter and physics.

Categories
Complexity Philosophy physics

Logical Depth

The temporal linearity and arrow of time upon which progressive iterations of information or energy-processing depend, or at least that the procedural operations of which must reflexively imply, finds itself as the template from which all extension and logical depth emanate.

Categories
Philosophy

The Cosmological and Computational Ties that Bind

What is it that binds the Cosmos to unified principles and patterns of physical laws and constants ?

Categories
Philosophy

A Computational Universe ?

Can the Universe be said to be computational ? Algorithmic ? Can distantly-connected parts of a unified physical totality really manifest computation as we currently understand it ?

Categories
Philosophy

The Outer Limits of Knowledge

Misunderstanding the world in fundamental ways, as we generally do, we more often (and collectively) seek continuity and security in those things which are only very rarely able to provide them…

Categories
communication Complexity Epistemology physics

On Equations, Art and Information Compression

I imagine that part of the beauty of an equation in physics lies in the sense in which it serves as an algorithmic information compression of the phenomena, system or relationship it describes…

Categories
culture

Extrasensory Perfection

The revelations of quantum theory and relativistic cosmology would once have appeared to be outright lunacy…

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
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