"It’s a bit ludicrous to assign a value to a trait in terms of its reproductive fitness when that trait is only one among countless traits, all interacting with dynamic environments"
I agree, and yet this is the basis of population genetics, which was invented by R.A. Fisher and came to dominate evolutionary science in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Worse yet -- Fisher assumed that the fitness effects of genes were simply additive. It was a simplifying assumption, without which the math became intractable. "Ludicrous" is the mot juste.
I used to sit in on discussion at SFI about the "value" of kin selection. I won't give his name, but there was a leader in the field who would assign a 2 or a 5 based on how close the kin might be who saved a drowning cousin.... and on and on. It felt like a drunken dorm room discussion. Meanwhile, I was trying to disabuse them of the notion that two butterflies couldn't look alike by coincidence.
Five years ago, while riding my bike, I was hit by a car in a high-speed head-on collision that, according to physics, biology, and statistics, I should not have survived. Both legs, one arm, and my pelvis are held together with rods and plates. All this surgery has been so miraculously successful that I rarely think about the metal inside me. It's probable that some of the hardware is stainless steel and some is titanium, and I hadn't considered the electrochemical implications until today. I've read about people -- not a small percentage -- who have systemic reactions to the metal inside them. I've known no such problems.
I hike and scramble over boulder fields. I ride my bike almost every day. I cross-country ski and swim and do most of the yoga poses that my body once knew. I'm grateful to the doctors who defied the odds to give me my athletic life back. And grateful to something else that's harder to name.
Lucky you. Most people are not allergic. My son wasn't so lucky. But he had to get an implant or risk dying young. He may be able to have it removed, now that bones have fused. But it is an uphill battle convincing surgeons and insurance companies that the new metal allergy is related to the metal implant.
I would like to change policy (I'm trying to change policy behind the scenes) to test for metal allergies before and after surgery and have a removal plan in place if a new allergy should appear.
If your surgeon used the same manufacturer for the rods, screws and plates, there is a good chance it's all the same metal and there is not a great risk of galvanization.
Some therapists use bioelectric fields as treatment.... so who knows.
I am learning so much from you, Tori, because you teach me in a completely different language than I already know. And then I get to translate it in the languages I do know, making all sorts of new connections.
Have I mentioned that I was once getting my doctorate in the Psychology of Creativity? In one more connection to this article, Matt Ehret told me the intro to my book was the most perfect Platonic argument he'd read. I'm not as familiar with Plato as I want to be, but I've been researching Aryans (etymology heiros) as the deliberate authors of all Aryan-root languages as encoded slave colony programming. They set up the neural networks that enable us to think about abstract concepts. Sovereign meaning both the ruler and the concept of freedom is one example.
So I've been looking at AR words and proper names as codes for Heir meaning divine ruler to whom the heir-archy answers. The Greek archons meeting at Areopagus, the Greek god of wAR as Ares are obvious clues. But now I wonder if ARistotle, arguing for slavery by using the self-evident example of men's superiority over women, was a pseudonym for the ARchons. Could Plato have been the voice of women? According to his-story, women didn't speak in ancient Greece except through the fictional characters written by men. But Greece was one of the most active Goddess cultures when the Aryan invasion was evicted from Egypt and came there. I don't think they were erased, only overwritten by putting their words into the mouths of fictional men. That's one theory I'm exploring.
Are you teaching dance? or taking dance lessons? (I took ballroom dancing last winter. Can't get my husband to dance with me though.)
In my education, I learned to hate Plato. Everything I did in philosophy was to overturn the notion that there is any kind of pre-determinism. I loved discovering that what we thought were archetypes are actually emergent forms. But as I get older, I no longer feel the need to raze the temple, and I can entertain other ways of looking at the forms.
That must have been unnerving to be told by Matt Ehret that you're a Platonist when you didn't mean to be. That hasn't occurred to me yet as I read your book, How to Dismantle an Empire, but I'll be on the lookout for signs and let you know.
I take something called Worldanz that's has styles from around the globe but with an intensive workout--Zumba on steroids.
ARchetypes, another archon word.
I have a distinct memory of trying to figure out how free will and determinism could both be true in third grade. What I would say now is that all things are pre-determined once they're done--things that can't be changed are how they needed to be. But we have free will moving forward. And this is because history is being written backwards, which requires a longer explanation.
I think that Matt meant it as a compliment. I felt it was in response to the part of the intro where I say imagine your mind as a room and let me rearrange the furniture. Try it out, like a pair of glasses. Don't reject it because it's not the way you're used to seeing. Back then, everyone who read my book thought I was well-intentioned but deluded. So my intention was to get them to suspend disbelief long enough to entertain other possibilities. Covid did me the favor of gathering people who knew that the bigger the lie, the easier it was to get away with.
I'm currently reading IRREDUCIBLE by Federico Faggin after seeing him on an Essentia Foundation YouTube video. I'd be very interested to see how his ideas and yours align and /or differ. I'll look up your story co-written with Levin. Curious...how does co-writing even work?
I think perhaps living systems may harness some aspect of quantum fields that contributes to their agency, but I don't think human consciousness IS a quantum field. Faggin says "One wants to know itself" and I think that's true of living beings and a nice simple expression of the idea of consciousness. But I don't think there is consciousness before life.
Where you draw the line between life and non-life is a bit vague, but for me to be alive means using and/or creating semiosic processes. There are some proto-semiosic process that start in self-organization and RNA viral like material, but not until you get a single cell that can reproduce and has some memory do you get full blown (though still rudimentary) semiosis and life.
But I get my semiotic metaphysics from C. S. Pierce who was a pan-psychic and a monist like Faggin. They seem very similar. Pierce intuited quantum mechanics in his idea of Firstness and Pierce believed there are mind-like processes that proceed mind. But I might call those processes aspects that a mind can harnessed once life emerges. I'm still an emergentist, despite my appreciation for Levin's Platonism. I don't go all the way with Peirce. Maybe because my mentors were chaos theorists who spurned the quantum mechanists: they stressed that we don't even need quantum indeterminism to escape material determinism.
But I am becoming more plural. I do think Faggin understands a lot about the essence of agency, from what I've heard so far. I like what he says about perspective and choosing to "know oneself" by acting from a subjective perspective.
I'm also glad to hear him speaking out about how computers can't and won't ever think, designed the way they currently are. Faggin should know.
But I bet Silicon Valley will respond to his criticisms by saying that quantum computing should get us to consciousness. But as I note in this essay, computer designs don't harness any fields, quantum or otherwise.
As to process of co-authoring with Levin, maybe we can talk about that on The Strange Recital some day, after we get more of our stories out!
There is so much deep wisdom in this article. Thank you. I am not a scientist nor a mathematician, so I don't fully understand these things technically, but what you write here reminds me of what I've read about other Soviet era scientists concerning the "wave genome" so I'm wondering if these scientists such as Vladimir Cherbak are important to your point of view?
I watched the whole documentary. I will respond to this question at length in my next article. But briefly, yes waves make up the fundamental reality that precedes matter. But we have to be careful not to deify waves. We have to be careful not to bestow agency on DNA. It is just a tool used by living systems.
The mathematical laws of waves act as constraints, but waves are just one of many kinds of constraints.
The quantum hologram idea suits transhuman ideology quite well. My efforts are focused on critiquing transhumanism as misguided and misinformed.
Your other comment on my other essay is important here. The quantum hologram idea focuses on abstract laws and ignores completely the effectuality of the emergent physical world. You said, "What you write about how cells are subjective, interpretive, can make 'physical puns,' is so DEEPLY explanatory." This is the kind of explanation that both the materialists and spiritualists tend to miss, but artists tend to understand intuitively.
Thank you. I can't wait to read what you write about this. And yes, I am an artist, and I do find your perspective particularly accessible and meaningful because of my background as an artist. I certainly can see that Nabakov was able to have unique insights because he was an artist. (It would be interesting to know if the poet Maeterlinck likewise had special insight into his scientific work on bees.)
I don't know everything about the perspective of the woman who made the documentary, but I know that the Solari site which it is on consistently has an anti-transhumanist perspective. Personally, I am able to be awe-struck by the mathematical structures she describes in gene sequences, just as people have always been awe-struck when they perceive the mathematical properties we find in nature, but I avoid attributing anything overly mystical or "spooky" to this beautiful perfection. I think it's clear that when you say a cell has "intelligence" that doesn't mean that the cell is sitting there and reasoning things out and making decisions in the same sense that a person does. To think that way is to make the same mistake as people who are being misled into thinking that AI has some kind of "intelligence."
The interdependent relationship of mind to body, of energy to materiality, is the core of what artists work with, so you're right, this does give me an intuitive sense of what you're writing about.
Your philosophy of science references are mostly outside my knowledge, but I get the gist of what you're saying. I am also interested in where you would say that Robert Lanza's Biocentrism falls in this Pierce-Faggin spectrum.
And yes -- let me know about future stories from you and Levin, maybe they'll work for TSR.
"It’s a bit ludicrous to assign a value to a trait in terms of its reproductive fitness when that trait is only one among countless traits, all interacting with dynamic environments"
I agree, and yet this is the basis of population genetics, which was invented by R.A. Fisher and came to dominate evolutionary science in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Worse yet -- Fisher assumed that the fitness effects of genes were simply additive. It was a simplifying assumption, without which the math became intractable. "Ludicrous" is the mot juste.
I used to sit in on discussion at SFI about the "value" of kin selection. I won't give his name, but there was a leader in the field who would assign a 2 or a 5 based on how close the kin might be who saved a drowning cousin.... and on and on. It felt like a drunken dorm room discussion. Meanwhile, I was trying to disabuse them of the notion that two butterflies couldn't look alike by coincidence.
Five years ago, while riding my bike, I was hit by a car in a high-speed head-on collision that, according to physics, biology, and statistics, I should not have survived. Both legs, one arm, and my pelvis are held together with rods and plates. All this surgery has been so miraculously successful that I rarely think about the metal inside me. It's probable that some of the hardware is stainless steel and some is titanium, and I hadn't considered the electrochemical implications until today. I've read about people -- not a small percentage -- who have systemic reactions to the metal inside them. I've known no such problems.
I hike and scramble over boulder fields. I ride my bike almost every day. I cross-country ski and swim and do most of the yoga poses that my body once knew. I'm grateful to the doctors who defied the odds to give me my athletic life back. And grateful to something else that's harder to name.
Lucky you. Most people are not allergic. My son wasn't so lucky. But he had to get an implant or risk dying young. He may be able to have it removed, now that bones have fused. But it is an uphill battle convincing surgeons and insurance companies that the new metal allergy is related to the metal implant.
I would like to change policy (I'm trying to change policy behind the scenes) to test for metal allergies before and after surgery and have a removal plan in place if a new allergy should appear.
If your surgeon used the same manufacturer for the rods, screws and plates, there is a good chance it's all the same metal and there is not a great risk of galvanization.
Some therapists use bioelectric fields as treatment.... so who knows.
That photo, btw, is Luigi's x-ray.
I am learning so much from you, Tori, because you teach me in a completely different language than I already know. And then I get to translate it in the languages I do know, making all sorts of new connections.
Have I mentioned that I was once getting my doctorate in the Psychology of Creativity? In one more connection to this article, Matt Ehret told me the intro to my book was the most perfect Platonic argument he'd read. I'm not as familiar with Plato as I want to be, but I've been researching Aryans (etymology heiros) as the deliberate authors of all Aryan-root languages as encoded slave colony programming. They set up the neural networks that enable us to think about abstract concepts. Sovereign meaning both the ruler and the concept of freedom is one example.
So I've been looking at AR words and proper names as codes for Heir meaning divine ruler to whom the heir-archy answers. The Greek archons meeting at Areopagus, the Greek god of wAR as Ares are obvious clues. But now I wonder if ARistotle, arguing for slavery by using the self-evident example of men's superiority over women, was a pseudonym for the ARchons. Could Plato have been the voice of women? According to his-story, women didn't speak in ancient Greece except through the fictional characters written by men. But Greece was one of the most active Goddess cultures when the Aryan invasion was evicted from Egypt and came there. I don't think they were erased, only overwritten by putting their words into the mouths of fictional men. That's one theory I'm exploring.
More later after my dance class!
Are you teaching dance? or taking dance lessons? (I took ballroom dancing last winter. Can't get my husband to dance with me though.)
In my education, I learned to hate Plato. Everything I did in philosophy was to overturn the notion that there is any kind of pre-determinism. I loved discovering that what we thought were archetypes are actually emergent forms. But as I get older, I no longer feel the need to raze the temple, and I can entertain other ways of looking at the forms.
That must have been unnerving to be told by Matt Ehret that you're a Platonist when you didn't mean to be. That hasn't occurred to me yet as I read your book, How to Dismantle an Empire, but I'll be on the lookout for signs and let you know.
I take something called Worldanz that's has styles from around the globe but with an intensive workout--Zumba on steroids.
ARchetypes, another archon word.
I have a distinct memory of trying to figure out how free will and determinism could both be true in third grade. What I would say now is that all things are pre-determined once they're done--things that can't be changed are how they needed to be. But we have free will moving forward. And this is because history is being written backwards, which requires a longer explanation.
I think that Matt meant it as a compliment. I felt it was in response to the part of the intro where I say imagine your mind as a room and let me rearrange the furniture. Try it out, like a pair of glasses. Don't reject it because it's not the way you're used to seeing. Back then, everyone who read my book thought I was well-intentioned but deluded. So my intention was to get them to suspend disbelief long enough to entertain other possibilities. Covid did me the favor of gathering people who knew that the bigger the lie, the easier it was to get away with.
I'm currently reading IRREDUCIBLE by Federico Faggin after seeing him on an Essentia Foundation YouTube video. I'd be very interested to see how his ideas and yours align and /or differ. I'll look up your story co-written with Levin. Curious...how does co-writing even work?
I think perhaps living systems may harness some aspect of quantum fields that contributes to their agency, but I don't think human consciousness IS a quantum field. Faggin says "One wants to know itself" and I think that's true of living beings and a nice simple expression of the idea of consciousness. But I don't think there is consciousness before life.
Where you draw the line between life and non-life is a bit vague, but for me to be alive means using and/or creating semiosic processes. There are some proto-semiosic process that start in self-organization and RNA viral like material, but not until you get a single cell that can reproduce and has some memory do you get full blown (though still rudimentary) semiosis and life.
But I get my semiotic metaphysics from C. S. Pierce who was a pan-psychic and a monist like Faggin. They seem very similar. Pierce intuited quantum mechanics in his idea of Firstness and Pierce believed there are mind-like processes that proceed mind. But I might call those processes aspects that a mind can harnessed once life emerges. I'm still an emergentist, despite my appreciation for Levin's Platonism. I don't go all the way with Peirce. Maybe because my mentors were chaos theorists who spurned the quantum mechanists: they stressed that we don't even need quantum indeterminism to escape material determinism.
But I am becoming more plural. I do think Faggin understands a lot about the essence of agency, from what I've heard so far. I like what he says about perspective and choosing to "know oneself" by acting from a subjective perspective.
I'm also glad to hear him speaking out about how computers can't and won't ever think, designed the way they currently are. Faggin should know.
But I bet Silicon Valley will respond to his criticisms by saying that quantum computing should get us to consciousness. But as I note in this essay, computer designs don't harness any fields, quantum or otherwise.
As to process of co-authoring with Levin, maybe we can talk about that on The Strange Recital some day, after we get more of our stories out!
There is so much deep wisdom in this article. Thank you. I am not a scientist nor a mathematician, so I don't fully understand these things technically, but what you write here reminds me of what I've read about other Soviet era scientists concerning the "wave genome" so I'm wondering if these scientists such as Vladimir Cherbak are important to your point of view?
https://solari.com/future-science-the-wave-genome-with-ulrike-granogger/
I watched the whole documentary. I will respond to this question at length in my next article. But briefly, yes waves make up the fundamental reality that precedes matter. But we have to be careful not to deify waves. We have to be careful not to bestow agency on DNA. It is just a tool used by living systems.
The mathematical laws of waves act as constraints, but waves are just one of many kinds of constraints.
The quantum hologram idea suits transhuman ideology quite well. My efforts are focused on critiquing transhumanism as misguided and misinformed.
Your other comment on my other essay is important here. The quantum hologram idea focuses on abstract laws and ignores completely the effectuality of the emergent physical world. You said, "What you write about how cells are subjective, interpretive, can make 'physical puns,' is so DEEPLY explanatory." This is the kind of explanation that both the materialists and spiritualists tend to miss, but artists tend to understand intuitively.
Thank you. I can't wait to read what you write about this. And yes, I am an artist, and I do find your perspective particularly accessible and meaningful because of my background as an artist. I certainly can see that Nabakov was able to have unique insights because he was an artist. (It would be interesting to know if the poet Maeterlinck likewise had special insight into his scientific work on bees.)
I don't know everything about the perspective of the woman who made the documentary, but I know that the Solari site which it is on consistently has an anti-transhumanist perspective. Personally, I am able to be awe-struck by the mathematical structures she describes in gene sequences, just as people have always been awe-struck when they perceive the mathematical properties we find in nature, but I avoid attributing anything overly mystical or "spooky" to this beautiful perfection. I think it's clear that when you say a cell has "intelligence" that doesn't mean that the cell is sitting there and reasoning things out and making decisions in the same sense that a person does. To think that way is to make the same mistake as people who are being misled into thinking that AI has some kind of "intelligence."
The interdependent relationship of mind to body, of energy to materiality, is the core of what artists work with, so you're right, this does give me an intuitive sense of what you're writing about.
Your philosophy of science references are mostly outside my knowledge, but I get the gist of what you're saying. I am also interested in where you would say that Robert Lanza's Biocentrism falls in this Pierce-Faggin spectrum.
And yes -- let me know about future stories from you and Levin, maybe they'll work for TSR.
You bring up a good point re: brain implants with the problem of the body rejecting foreign objects and allergic reactions to metal for mending bone.
The x-rays are Luigi Magione's, by the way.
You selected the right graphic.