As any software developer knows, architecture matters. This applies to metaphysics as much as it does to physics. Traditional metaphysics, based on sacred texts that are thousands of years old, is burdened with a considerable amount of tech debt. My goal was to refresh the topic by presenting a metaphysics of entropy, followed by a metaphysics of Darwinism, followed by a metaphysics of memes. The ground covered is the same—how did we get from the dawn of creation to the present day—but the path through the territory is modern, not ancient. I have sought to show that this pathway is fully supportive of traditional ethics, the values we have cherished for thousands of years.
I wrote
The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality
Brockman has collected a portfolio of big ideas that warrant profound explanations, and each one provides an intellectual journey that both teaches and delights.
The reader is continually reminded that depth, beauty, and elegance play the same role in theories as they do in software architecture. They signal quality, reliability, and sustainability.
In This Explains Everything, John Brockman, founder and publisher of Edge.org, asked experts in numerous fields and disciplines to come up with their favorite explanations for everyday occurrences. Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity. With contributions from Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more, everything is explained in fun, uncomplicated terms that make the most complex concepts easy to…
This is my favorite explanation of how inorganic molecules could have self-assembled to create living cells from scratch.
No human being has ever come close to doing this in a lab, but then Nature had 2 billion years to work on it. The sheer complexity of the result is laughably mindboggling, but no matter—somehow it all worked, and all life has built upon this platform ever since.
And at the core of the whole structure is a simple 64-bit code made up of four letters read in groups of three.
The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there's a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists.
For two and a half billion years, from the very origins of life, single-celled organisms such as bacteria evolved without changing their basic form. Then, on just one occasion in four billion…
The essence of complexity is to extract new capabilities from existing subsystems to generate outcomes that emerge from their interactions. The ratchet principle is core to all innovation at scale.
Essentially, all systems are built upon the underpinning of prior systems, which is why you can still find business processes coded in Assembler running on mainframes.
Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet , physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular storm,specialized molecules immersed in a whirlwind of colliding water molecules. Our cells are filled with molecular machines, which, like tiny ratchets, transform random motion into ordered activity, and create the…
I continue to be amazed by the way in which simple cells and inorganic molecules self-organize to create tissues, organs, and eventually whole babies, all without a master plan. We can brag all we want about generative AI, but this is all done without any centralized computing.
Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die?
Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: how can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg? A convergence of ideas from embryology, genetics, physics, networks, and control theory has begun…
Eagleman is a great story teller, and if there is any story we all need to understand better, it is the story of our brain.
That story is currently getting a new coat of paint based on the amazing recent advances in deep neural networking, reinforcement learning, and the like. In other words, just as the organic showed the way to new ways of modeling inorganic systems, now we are seeing progress coming from the opposite direction.
'This is the story of how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life.'
Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of the inner cosmos. It's a journey that will take you into the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, genocide, brain surgery, robotics and the search for immortality. On the way, amidst the infinitely dense tangle of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see: you.
As more and more people step away from a traditional religious framework and seek fresh answers that work for the evolving world, ethics shouldn’t lose its ground. In his book, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics and Mortality, I offer readers a complete look at how the universe has evolved and our ethical place within it.
“Our core sense of good and bad does not come from above. It is neither transcendent nor divine. Rather, it is a natural extension of our mammalian upbringing.”
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
