Cytaty   ostatni miesiąc   wszystkie   all quatations, since 2014 Thx to: 3 Quarks Daily

Scientists have created the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code.
 …  read and redesigned the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E coli)
 …  removing some of its superfluous codons
 …  The redesigned genetic code was then chemically synthesised and, piece by piece, added to E coli where it replaced the organism’s natural genome.
 …  it’s surprising it grows at all after so many changes /19-05-20

There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050
 …  Jared Diamond’s new book, Upheaval
 …  to accept responsibility
 …  We can buy different sorts of cars. We can do less driving. We can vote for public transport.
 …  climate .. resources
 …  We have to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
 …  balancing individual interests with community interests /19-05-20

Art of the Mathematical Conjecture
 …  the Riemann hypothesis — often considered the greatest of great conjectures
 …  the first 10 trillion cases of the Riemann hypothesis have been checked numerically
 …  absolute certainty and want to know why the conjecture is true.
 …  Euler’s conjecture .. a fourth power can never be written as a sum of three other fourth powers
    20,615,673⁴ = 2,682,440⁴ + 15,365,639⁴ + 18,796,760⁴
 …  The shortest statements can require the longest proofs
 …  There is no such thing as a 99 percent proof.
 …  For two millennia, people tried to prove that Euclid’s fifth postulate
 …  Kurt Gödel .. the greatest logical achievement /19-05-20

There Is Free Will You make choices even if your atoms don’t.
 …  Sam Harris has dueled philosopher and free-will defender Daniel Dennett for years
 …  Christian List .. Why Free Will Is Real .. tries to bridge the gap
 …  Sean Carroll and philosopher Jenann Ismael, who dissolve the old dichotomies on free will and think that a nuanced reading of physics poses no contradiction for it.
 …  fundamental physics and neurobiology are only part of the story of human behavior.
 …  You may be a big bunch of atoms governed by the mechanical laws, but you are not just any bunch of atoms. You are an intricately structured bunch of atoms, and your behavior depends not just on the laws that govern the individual atoms but on the way those atoms are assembled.
 …  Skeptics miss this point, List argues, because they rely on loose intuitions about causation.
 …  Causation is a higher-level concept.
 …  A free-will skeptic argues, first, that free will requires one or more properties: intentional, goal-directed agency; alternative possibilities—that it must be possible for me to do otherwise; or causal control over our actions. Then the skeptic claims that those properties are not to be found among the fundamental physical features of our world. Different skeptics focus on different properties.
 …  Patricia and Paul Churchland say we should understand human behavior not so much at the cognitive, psychological level where we invoke explicit mental states, goals, intentions, and purposes, but rather at a lower level of description, as the product of biophysical processes in the brain.
 …  Human beings have a strong tendency to ascribe intentions to all sorts of phenomena, like the weather,
 …  Benjamin Libet found that the conscious decision to press a button is not the beginning of the causal sequence that initiates the process,
 …  free will requires intentional agency
 …  the standard arguments against free will lies in a failure to distinguish between different levels of description.
 …  The neuroscientific skeptic is absolutely right that, at the fundamental physical level, there is no such thing as intentional goal-directed agency. The mistake is to claim that there is no such thing at all.
 …  Intentional agency is an emergent higher-level property, but it is no less real for that.
 …  the best way to make sense of those patterns and regularities is by assigning intentional agency to the people involved.
 …  Wait, I’m not sure I want indeterminism at the human level. I want my decisions to flow out of my deliberations, not to be the product of chance.
 …  This is subtle. There are different forms of indeterminism. In statistical physics, indeterminism is associated with randomness. But in the social sciences, we use a different kind of indeterminism based on option availability.
 …  In the sciences, we test for causation by looking for systematic correlations
 …  There is no conceptual reason why sophisticated AI systems could not qualify as bearers of free will. /19-05-18

falsificationism
 …  Karl Popper .. what distinguishes science from non-science is falsifiability
 …  Popper’s philosophy of science is a product of his view on the problem of induction
 …  while you can’t prove that a theory is true, you can at least show that it’s false
 …  most philosophers of science think falsificationism, despite its appeal, is actually mistaken
 …  a theory is never falsifiable simpliciter, but only relative to a set of background assumptions
 …  Kuhn was basically right about the sociology of theory change, but ...
 …  as when creationists posit that God planted fossils that seem very ancient to test our faith
 …  the search for such a criterion of demarcation between science and non-science, whether in terms of falsifiability or not, is probably hopeless. If you want to argue that something is pseudoscience, there is no shortcut that will save you the pain of having to engage with it and grapple with the arguments of its proponents. /19-05-17

disorder
 …  Planets, stars, life, even the direction of time all depend on disorder. And we human beings as well.
 …  randomness, novelty, spontaneity, free will and unpredictability.
 …  order .. systems, law, reason, rationality, pattern, predictability.
 …  like twilight and dawn, they have much in common.
 …  Ernst Gombrich believed that, although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting.
 …  delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.’ Too much order, we lose interest. Too much disorder, and there’s nothing to be interested in.
 …  the symmetry of a snowflake .. the amorphous shape of a high-riding cloud
 …  Clausius coined the term entropy
 …  Disorder is also the answer to the profound question: why is there something rather than nothing?
 …  If there were an equal number of particles and their antiparticles
 …  there is a slight asymmetry in how they interact
 …  well-known example of disorder in biology is the shuffling of genes
 …  From an evolutionary point of view, order implies predictability, patterns, repeatability – all of which allow us to make good predictions.
 …  More unexpected, perhaps, is how attentiveness to surprise, chance and novelty can also confer an advantage.
 …  departing from our familiar routines
 …  DRD4-7R .. ‘the wanderlust gene’. It occurs in about 20 per cent of the population, /19-05-16

quantum mechanics prevent even a single particle from reversing its own course through time
 …  the atoms of a scrambled egg can’t be unscrambled back inside a pristine shell. Now it seems that, under general conditions, even a single particle probably can’t go backward without help and careful tinkering.
 …  On paper, the basic laws of physics are reversible
 …  the arrow of time takes its direction not only from big numbers.
 …  Schrödinger equation .. is equally valid running forward or backward. But getting a wave function to go in reverse is no small trick.
 …  Because of the uncertainty principle, the quantum ball will never return back to the point of the origin
 …  whether the irreversibility of time is a fundamental law of nature or whether, on the contrary, it might be circumvented.
 …  The time-reversal experiment was a four-step process. First the qubits ..
 …  Now everybody can make qubits younger /19-05-13

I Watched an Entire Flat Earth Convention
 …  Speakers recently flew in from around (or perhaps, across?) the earth for a three-day event held in Birmingham
 …  flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts.
 …  try to "look for multiple, verifiable evidence"
 …  "always do your own research and accept you might be wrong"
 …  flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don't trust is scientists
 …  what their resurgence and public conventions tell us about science and knowledge in the 21st century.
 …  Flat earthers and populism
 …  Science is increasingly facing problems with its ability to communicate ideas publicly
 …  the success of this UK event – and the large conventions planned in Canada and America this year – it seems the flat earth is going to be around for a while yet. /19-05-13

Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod .. are spreading rapidly
 …  working on ways to extend smart speakers’ sensory ranges.
 …  vision as well as hearing.
 …  lidar
 …  gestures
 …  employs it to recognise utensils and ingredients laid out on a preparation surface and to check everything needed is available to cook a particular dish.
 …  recognises the owner’s smartphone and connects it automatically,
 …  Knocki, an accelerometer which can be fixed to a surface to detect the vibrations made by someone knocking on that surface. .. making the appropriate pre-arranged number of knocks.
 …  Audio Analytic .. sound-recognition technology /19-05-13

5G Terrifying Potential
 …  especially susceptible to cyberattacks and surveillance.
 …  hundred times faster
 …  everything from toasters to dog collars to dialysis pumps to running shoes will be connected
 …  fourth industrial revolution
 …  5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.
 …  facial-recognition technology
 …  what that world would look like. /19-04-29

The Ontological and Theological Dimensions of Art in the Eastern Christian Tradition
 …  the synergy of God and man.
 …  the source of the icon is not some creative work of a master who is trying to paint/write a religious-themed picture, but God Himself, who contains perfect models of all creatures, and who, more im- portantly, manifests Himself as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who shares His essence/nature and actions with the other Persons.
 …  nor is it about “being appealing”, but as an objective expression of Beauty in itself.
 … /Teresa Obolevitch/19-04-29

Make Physics Real Again
 …  those properties don’t even exist until they’re observed
 …  Richard Feynman .. “nobody understands quantum mechanics”
 …  Copenhagen interpretation .. "Shut up and calculate!"
 …  quantum mechanics is the theory that any new idea in fundamental physics must accommodate.
 …  Quantum mechanics is in essence a tool to predict the outcomes of measurements. .. logical positivism of the Vienna Circle
 …  scientific realist: The aim of science is to understand a world that exists independently of our observation; thus, quantum mechanics, despite its impressive success, could not be the whole story.
 …  “the measurement problem”
 …  Schrödinger’s cat .. In fact, Schrödinger offered it as a reductio ad absurdum of the Copenhagen interpretation.
 …  Einstein found nonlocality more problematic than the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.
 …  EPR .. hidden variables .. Bell
 …  the wisest course at present is accepting a pluralism of interpretations
 …  Quantum physics is at least approximately correct.... We just don’t know what that means yet. /19-04-26

Secular Humanism is Not a Religion
 …  Even environmentalism has been described as a religion.
 …  literal transubstantiation of wine and wafers, which the Vatican has immunized against disproof by deeming the process undetectable by empirical means.
 …  the absence of evidence is indeed evidence for absence if the evidence should have been there. .. Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist.
 …  the diversity of morality among secular humanists is far wider than that of followers of a given religion
 …  abortion is murder .. comes from the claim that fetuses, like adults, have souls
 …  that homosexuality is immoral comes from scripture.
 …  whatever God says is good is good.
 …  Stephen Jay Gould’s unconvincing attempt to harmonize science and religion in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages. There Gould proposed his NOMA (Nonoverlapping Magisteria)
 …  atheists are not automatically amoral. /19-04-26

artificial superintelligences
 …  Dennett thinks we should protect ourselves by doing all we can to keep powerful AIs operating at the level of suggestion-making tools, while Chalmers is impressed by the market forces that will probably push us into devolving more and more responsibility to these opaque and alien minds.
 …  “epistemic” actions that both test and improve their model of that world.
 …  Active Inference machines.
 …  epistemic agendas and have an Umwelt of their own. These are the only kind of AIs that may, I believe, end up being conscious of themselves and their worlds—at least in any way remotely recognizable as such to us humans.
 …  real explorations within the vast space of possible minds. /19-04-25

David Attenborough, BBC, Climate Change
/19-04-23

Peterson-Žižek
 …  Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism
 …  The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.
 …  They needed enemies, needed combat, because .. they had so little to offer.
 …  Žižek .. “We will probably slide towards apocalypse”
 …  They are both self-described “radical pessimists”
 …  They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy.
 …  They returned to their natural subject: who is the enemy? /19-04-23

... ... ... 2014

  Dydaktyka AW-CV AW    Dorota www.dorotanalepka.pl Śląsk Kraków Aleagrafy Nieskończoność
Kant