complexitystudies

Both strong artificial intelligence (here in the sense of sentient/conscious AI) and faster than light travel (FTL) are dreams of science fiction and (some parts of) humanity, but what is the difference between the two?
Proposing FTL today is pretty much a lost cause (although there are interesting ideas such as the Alcubierre Drive - at [...]

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Bee over at Backreaction had a post last week on Max Tegmark: Discover Interview with Tegmark, and I would like to respond to some things said there and in a previous post by Bee on the topic.
(The Tegmark paper on “The Mathematical Universe” can be found on arxiv.org.)

Does the theory warrant further scrutiny?
First of all [...]

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This is a good development:
Towards a Psychology of Philosophy?
A question that I find particularly interesting is, do attitudes about science, such as naturalism vs. anti-naturalism, correlate with levels of scientific education and talent for science and math? Could it be that one factor behind the (seemingly prejudicial) anti-naturalist attitudes that are still very influential [...]

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This post of Eli has many links and may be a good occasion for delving into some of the issues he has been talking about lately.
Overcoming Bias: Heading Toward Morality
Why? Because that is the conclusion he is drawing to:
Artificial Intelligence melts people’s brains. Metamorality melts people’s brains. Trying to think about AI and [...]

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I have updated my thesis outline here. I think that it’s now pretty stable: I have
one and half years of reading behind me, and the transformations have been considerable (my
starting point was agent-based modelling - you would never believe it when reading it now).
But the structure now contains the arguments which are most important [...]

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Discussions on the constructivist mailing list are proving very fruitful - at least I am writing down thoughts I am mulling around. Here another excerpt:
Is a house real? Its constituent parts (cement, bricks)? Does one have to go further down? Is only a completely reductionist account real?
No - all constructions. I propose a minimalist ontology: [...]

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Now I know what I will be saving my money for:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Firm rockets into space tourism
What really pleases me is that this is a european effort. Such cool ideas usually only come to fruition in the U.S. - I hope this works out.

Technorati Tags: entertainment

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A lot of posts on this blog will be about rationality, scientific realism etc. - you may ask how this is connected to complexity science.
This is because my thesis work concerns looking at “human” systems (many individual agents acting independently - ok, so they’re pseudo-humans ). I am especially interested in the relationship of [...]

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This is a very nice paper, especially well suited for a first introduction:
Heylighen F. (2001): “The Science of Self-organization and Adaptivity”, in: L. D. Kiel, (ed.) Knowledge Management, Organizational Intelligence and Learning, and Complexity, in: The Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems ((EOLSS), (Eolss Publishers, Oxford)
@INCOLLECTION {Heylighen2001,
title = {The science of self-organization and adaptivity},
author = {Heylighen, [...]

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I’m starting a new category: paper of the week. Here, I want to introduce papers important to complexity science and my research, together with related weblinks. Please note that paper of the week means neither at minimum nor at maximum a paper a week, it’s just more of a moniker with a hint to the [...]

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