complexitystudies

Since its inception, the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics has been used to justify mysterianism, subjectivism, postmodernism, relativism, the preferred status of consciousness and human beings in the universe, a realm of intuition outside of logic and science, and other intellectual errors too many to number. It seems that people who reject reason and science [...]

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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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There’s a blog entry at FXQI by William Orem nicely summing up a few points which are important to me: FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News
First of all, much of confusion in Western Philosophy and thinking can be dissolved by looking beyond our culture - in that way we can see what are only our [...]

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A nice debunking article also delving a little bit into philosophy of science issues; but primarily a nice heuristic for evaluating “extraordinary” claims:
Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory | Cosmic Variance

Technorati Tags: philosophy of science, physics

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Wow: if you are at all interested in physics, check out this resource - seminars recorded for public viewing by the Perimeter Institute, referenced in arxiv style. You will find tons of interesting stuff there:
PIRSA - Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive

Technorati Tags: physics, pointer

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One of the weirder things in Star Trek which I didn’t quite buy were life forms that developed in outer space. But it looks as the others of ST may not have been so far off after all - physicists have found structures in plasma (!) which have properties similar to DNA - so maybe [...]

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I nearly forgot to blog this, I was at the Symposion for Modern Physics a couple of weeks ago and wrote a summary for the university online news.
Vienna Symposium on the Foundations of Modern Physics

Technorati Tags: philosophy of science, physics

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This result is widely reported on the net lately, and while we can’t yet be sure it actually occurs in plants at normal temperatures (so there is room for speculation - it shows one thing for sure - something I have been advocating for a long time: that the boundaries between the scientific disciplines [...]

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I have travelled through the science blogosphere today and discovered this very nice compilation of essential topics every scientist - and indeed also the lay public - should know:
Evolving Thoughts
http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/31058

Technorati Tags: philosophy of science, physics

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A very good article from one of my favourite blogs, which sums up quite nicely some metaphysical positions on consciousness.
Sentient Developments: Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn’t assume uploads
Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn’t assume uploads

Technorati Tags: cognitive science, physics

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