Ranganaut
@ranganaut.bsky.social
Thinkerer, Tinkerer
Thinkerer, Tinkerer
My first love was the foundations of mathematics. Or maybe the second love; the first was quantum mechanics. But my first love where I had any kind of technical purchase on the domain of inquiry was the foundations of mathematics. In fact, I think I read a proof of Gödel’s theorem and tried to understand it, and perhaps even rework it, before I was truly fluent in much older kinds of mathematics, like the differential calculus.
In their insightful article that claims it's cognition all the way down, Levin and Dennett say:
The prominent philosopher Jerry Fodor once said that every idea has two lives: the first, in philosophy, and the second, in cognitive science. To which I might add: the third, in biology. The third avatar is quite relevant for our investigation into unicellular cognition. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, there was a lot of debate over the substrate independence of intelligence, cognition and mind, with some people saying that you need a very specific kind of fleshy apparatus to be considered intelligent, while others saying that it doesn't matter what you're made of, as long as you're solving the same problem that a human being is, then you're as intelligent as a human in that respect.
While Cellosophy is meant to be a deep dive into unicellular cognition, I'm aware that the ATmosphere isn't exactly teeming with ideas about how to study cognition in bacteria :) Forget that niche topic; my investigations so far haven't revealed as much biology on the ATmosphere as I might have expected.
Cellosophy Essay #1
In case you want my opinion: yes, Egypt and Croatia were discriminated against; Karma caught up with Portugal, which lost in the round of 16, but now I don't want Argentina to win despite being a Messi fanboy.
In my introductory post on hyperproblems, I ended with Common Source - open source plus people sharing - as the circulatory system for collective intelligence. I hadn't said what exactly was circulating, but if you look at the practice of science today, we have:
In today’s Daily Planet, @nilsgilman.bsky.social argues that a new geopolitical split is emerging around energy: a Green Entente led by China that builds dominance through green tech, and an Axis of Petrostates (the U.S. under Trump, Russia, Gulf monarchies) that defends fossil-fuel power.
As I keep saying, while we are waiting to be turned into paperclips, pay some attention to the everyday dystopias being unleashed by AI.
Wars are bad for people, but they are bad for everyone else too. As today's link says:
Military AI is characterized by epistemic opacity. Unlike civilian AI, which is subject to public scrutiny and litigation when it fails, military systems are shielded by classification and state-secret privileges. This lack of transparency prevents external validation and makes it nearly impossible to correct for human biases or technical errors.
There’s an uber-dystopian version of AI where it either annihilates us or sucks out our souls while we believe we are in a matrix of plenty. Maybe one of those dystopias will come to pass, but a far more likely dystopia is one that’s coming into being as we speak.
Michael Levin is an interesting thinker; a rare Platonist in Biology. This quote from a recent post of his makes me think of biological engineering, but not the kind where we force organisms to do our willing, but rather work with their agential capacity to produce forms that we need:
From Frederic Hanusch's "The Politics of Deep Time":
It's very hard to imagine oneself dead, and its even harder to imagine the absence of everyone like me. But that too shall come to pass: via Frederic Hanusch's "The Politics of Deep Time":
I have been reading Marcia Bjornerud's "Timefulness" and really enjoying it. The more woke we are, the more we are prone to possessing our experience as somehow uniquely our own, like "this is my reality, and you have no right to doubt it." But that personal reality is embedded in a much larger planetary reality that doesn't care about our I-Me-Myself experiences that much. As Bjornerud says when she visited Svalbard as a graduate student:
Much historical analysis is either about 'recorded time,' i.e., history as evidenced in texts and other inscriptions, or about 'end time,' e.g., Edenic beginnings or apocalyptic endings.
We barely remember what happened yesterday, so to expect us to take geological eras into consideration is a bit much. However, our lives are built on deep time - I wouldn't be writing these words if someone hadn't figured out how to turn solidified & liquified fossils into fuel.