Tag: Science

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Philosophy

Metanarrative Fertility

A conspicuous absence of totalising metanarrative is a necessary condition for the efflorescing reproduction of the countless contemporary insecurities and partisan adversarialisms that masquerade as epistemological (or ideological) certainty and individuated self-determination. The absence of this binding property itself then becomes the binding property. In this way, the impossibility of logical or electromechanical (as infallibly […]

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Philosophy

You are Small, Fragile and Beautiful

Context: Solar storm on Thursday expected to make Northern Lights visible in 17 states These events are nothing if not a reminder of the diminutive transience of our own lives and (all of) our aspirations, agendas, affiliations and vanities. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the character Zaphod Beeblebrox enters a machine called […]

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Uncategorized

Las Vegas UFO and Alien Encounter

When science encounters the unexplained it tends only to see reflected back those concepts that self-validate the assumptions by (and through) which this well-ordered system of knowledge persists. The absence of unambiguous evidence is also the kind of thing we might expect when encountering any intelligence that is seeking for whatever reasons to obscure its […]

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AI

Using AI in Mental Health

Context: AI must be developed responsibly to improve mental health outcomes It is a delicate and potentially dangerous matter when self-validating commercial incentives and their accelerated technical metamorphoses have taken the center of surveilling, assessing and aspirationally recalibrating human experience in this way. I quite often wonder about the compound, composite ironies of a world […]

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Philosophy

Induction

Context: Any Single Galaxy Reveals the Composition of an Entire Universe Such induction to general principles from instances is itself, also, a broader lesson regarding complexity. If recognisable (i.e. “real world”) properties of cosmological matter and energy distribution can be inferred from a single galaxy, in what other systems does such a depth of logical […]

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Philosophy

Reverse Engineering the Future with Curiosity-Driven Research

I wonder if commercial incentives might not destructively inhibit and limit the possible range and diversity of all possible research and applications. By which I mean that decoupling curiosity-driven research from purely commercial incentives might open up a much vaster state space of combinatorial possibility than could otherwise exist or be beneficially investigated. It would […]

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Complexity

Collective Intelligence

Context: Editorial to the Inaugural Issue of Collective Intelligence, 24-Aug-22…https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114179 That intelligence and/or intelligence-like dynamical properties can be distributed, as it were, across the entire information and energy-processing “surface” of a complex system should give us all pause for thought. This seems to implicate thermodynamic system properties and self-organising computational dynamics that consistently bridge the […]

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Alien Anthropology

After Death, After Life?

Context: After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists What a difficult experience this must be. To know that life has ended and as though the dimming glow of a candle wick, to quickly fade into darkness. I wonder if this is a moment of release and cathartic decompression or a few troubled seconds […]

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communication

Communicating Science: Systems

I’m a committed advocate for the importance of systems theory, cybernetics and complexity science but the solution of communication precisely is the problem. It is not a bundle of ideas or throwaway conceptual vocabularies that can ever compress down to a brief logo. The conservation of cognitive as much as cultural resources predisposes people to […]

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technology

UFO Technology Defies Known Physics

Our fundamental theories of physics are only one experimentally validated “local minima” in a much vaster logical as mathematical and material cartography of possibility. If there is something fundamental that we are not understanding here, it represents a salient moment to ponder which of our axioms are incomplete, misinformed or obsolete. That is the point […]

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Philosophy

Genetic Predestination

Context: Genetic paparazzi are right around the corner, and courts aren’t ready to confront the legal quagmire of DNA theft — I find that the unacknowledged (yet common enough) assumption that genes deterministically prescribe destiny as more or less isomorphic mappings of downstream biological development is unhelpfully shaping an already complex debate. Yes, genes shape […]

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technology

How Technology Shapes Science

Context: Science of science workshop: discovery & inequality The data and computational tools in use are not only transforming the field, they are recursively shaping the radiative speciation of scientific practice as their own transmission medium. We rarely notice just how profoundly trajectories in science and technology are a reflexive function of the extended phenotype […]