I was listening to Leonard Susskind's talk The World as a Hologram" on my iPhone while on the train a couple of weeks ago. Most of it went over my head, but one phrase that really caught my attention was the theoretical "indestructibility of information": information is never lost or destroyed, although it can be "lost" in the sense that we no ( Read more... )

Alva Noe interviewed:
"The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It's a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world ( Read more... )

Excerpt from Raymond M. Smullyan's dialogue 'Is God a Taoist?' (1977). Read the whole thing here.

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MORTAL: Wait a minute now, do I have free will or don't I?

GOD: I already told you you do. But that does not mean that determinism is incorrect.

MORTAL: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?

GOD: The word determined ( Read more... )

Apropos of my earlier post: You don't have to totally agree with the editors' thesis (I don't), but I think The Mind's I is an interesting collection of essays and dialogues for Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicle fans who are curious about the whole mind-as-computer analogy.

Owen Flanagan reviews two new books about the mind-body problem, and runs through three theories of the mind and where its at. Interesting stuff. But is Andy Clark's "Extended Mind" theory as new and surprising as Flanagan says?
'Now a few edgy cognitive scientists and philosophers, including Clark and Alva Noë, claim that both Nearby and ( Read more... )

...for people who've read Iron Man: Extremis. ( Cut, just because )

George Johnson, The anthropologists vs Jared Diamond ("A Question of Blame When Societies Fall," NYT):
'By the time I left Amerind, I realized that what I had witnessed was a clash of world views. Central to the “cosmology” of Dr. Diamond’s tribe is a principle celebrated throughout the physical and biological sciences - to understand is to ( Read more... )

It's always interesting to see where the popular environmentalist trend might be heading. I thought I'd share this article since it's not available online to non-subscribers.

(I'm also slightly bemused at the realisation that I really do have just this issue with personal automobiles. *shakes head* My father would be ashamed of me.)

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New ( Read more... )

When the rivers run dry is a new book by Fred Pearce on the sentence of starvation and poverty for many of the world's already poorest people that our current over-harvesting of underground "fossil water" for irrigation will present once this slow-to-replenish resource (not unlike fossil fuels) runs out. It is a problem that, according to Pearce, ( Read more... )

"The search for alien life need not involve expensive interplanetary missions. If life does form readily then we might expect it to have arisen many times on our home planet. Ward discusses the intriguing idea that alien organisms may lurk all around us, unrecognised for what they are because they fail to respond to standard biochemical analysis. ( Read more... )