There is a lot of talk lately about social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. being gatekeepers to our free speech. I’ve written on the issue before from the free speech angle. Here I’m more interested in the human behavioral side of things.
Continue reading “Should Social Media Monopolies Be Trust-Busted?”
I just read this piece by conservative Christian Rod Dreher commenting on this story by Anthony Borrelli and Katie Sullivan Borrelli in the Ithaca Journal newspaper. Dreher says that this is tantamount to the Ithaca Journal getting permission from a commissar, which makes the story propaganda for the LGBTQ agenda. Is Dreher right about this?
Cartesian dualism has been a point of contention in philosophy since at least, well, Descartes. The dispute is whether the mind is a separate, immaterial entity from the physical body. Problems have plagued the dualist view since the time of Descartes, primarily how it is that the immaterial mind and material body interact.
Nature reported that Russian molecular biologist Denis Rebrikov is planning to perform CRISPR experiments on human embryos. He’s running the experiments on the same CCR5 gene as Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. This is once again raising questions on the ethics of human genetic experimentation.
What is quantum computing and why is it so damn difficult?
Human nature, as I define it, is the set of cognitive and behavioral patterns that are innate in human beings, regardless of culture and specific upbringing. These are patterns passed down to us by evolution. With humans, though, we seem to be unique in our ability for metacognition – thinking about our thinking and our behaviors. Does that give us the ability to change our innate human nature?
In the 2018 NeurIPS conference, 4,845 papers were submitted. The paper I’m reviewing here by Chen et al, 2018, titled Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, won best paper award. The paper discusses using continuous Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) for Neural Networks (NN) as opposed to the sorts of discrete layers used in the standard Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN).
Continue reading “Journal Club: Chen et al, 2018: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations”
Natural rights don’t exist, except in the human mind. They are a way for a social species to maintain social cohesion. But, as useful as natural rights may be in deciding how to organize society, they are not fundamental; instead, they are derivative of what humans, in general, desire.
Continue reading “Transhumanist Virtue Ethics: Desirable Innate Preferences Determined by Reason”
Since at least World War 1 the idea of war as being all about glory and heroism has seen massive disillusionment. Most people, I think, would agree that war is not a good thing, even if some think it a necessary thing. But technological arms races, both during war and in peacetime, generate a plethora of technological advances. That raises the question: should futurists and transhumanists welcome war in order to usher in greater and faster technological advances?
Mesh networks figure extensively in my Incarnate series. They’re used by the forty-eights – and others – as a way to run parallel ‘internets’ so as not to be tracked on the original internet. But mesh networks are not all science fiction – they’re actually being used in the real world.
Continue reading “Mesh Networks: Alternatives to the Internet?”
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that features heavily in my Incarnate novel series. This technology isn’t just a science fiction creation, though. Just like in my story, it’s becoming more and more a part of our lives and only promises to become a bigger part in the near future.
A collaboration of hundreds of scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have been able to capture an image of a supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy.