QUICK THOUGHTS

More than machinery we need humanity...

3/25/2023

(Kevin)

Kevin has pointed us to this wonderful rendition of Charlie Chaplin's speech from "The Great Dictator" overlaid by Hans Zimmer's majestic "Time" from "Inception," and has highlighted just how much this amazing performance is speaking to the topic of our project. Check it out! Full text below.

Full text of the speech:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

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Ontogenesis, Organization, and Organismal Agency

3/25/2023

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(Yogi)

I gave an invited talk this week (online) for a workshop held in Paris with the title "Toward a science of intrinsic purposiveness: shaping development." This workshop was organized by our excellent colleagues and project collaborators Matteo Mossio and Ana Soto, and was sponsored by the "Agency, Directionality & Function" project of the John Templeton Foundation.

The talk is based on my essay on "Ontogenesis, Organization, and Organismal Agency," which is to appear as a book chapter in Jana Švorcová's "Organismal Agency: Biological Concepts and Their Philosophical Foundations" later this year.

The essay and the talk make a few very simple points:

organismic development (ontogenesis) and agency are only indirectly related, through the fact that they both require organizational continuity (persistent closure of constraints) during the complete life cycle of an evolving reproducer (which is the minimal evolvable biological unit),
this puts a sever constraint on the variability of an organism, which is what natural selection will act on,
in return, it means that we cannot understand ontogenetic processes by purely mechanistic means (see the mechanical duck below); instead, some of their features will be determined by the global constraint of organizational continuity, i.e. the necessity to produce a complete life cycle,
it is difficult to identify such constraints by purely theoretical considerations, they must be mapped using a comparative empirical approach to evolving ontogenetic processes that yields so-called cross-lineage explanations based on the concept of the homology of process,
this requires a new research program (a work package, in Alan Love's terms) in developmental biology, which uses traditional molecular, genetic, and tissue-mechanical experimental approaches, but is guided by the new framework of cellular agent theory (developed by Mossio, Soto, and colleagues).

I intend to record the lecture and upload it to YouTube, so stay tuned! In the meantime, check out the preprint of the essay, which is also listed in our publications section.

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They're Made out of Meat

3/9/2023

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(Yogi)

I have no idea, why I have never come across Terry Bisson's "They're Made out of Meat" before. It is so good I'll reproduce it in full below.

There is also a short film by Stephen O'Regan, starring Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey. It will be totally worth 7 1/2 minutes of your time!

TERRY BISSON, THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

"They're made out of meat."

  "Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

  "Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

  "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

  "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

  "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."

  "Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

  "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

  "No brain?"

"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"

  "So... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

  "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

  "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

  "So what does the meat have in mind."

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."

  "We're supposed to talk to meat?"

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."

  "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

  "I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

  "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

  "Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

  "I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

  "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

  "So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."

"That's it."

  "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

  "A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."

  "Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."
  "They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."

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Thought experiments in the studio

3/8/2023

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(Marcus)

Last week the studio was transformed as we are processing ideas in 3 dimensions and hosted a small get-together to explore first ideas in our scientific, philosophic and artistic pursuits.

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Back from beyond the age of machines...

3/5/2023

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(Yogi)

The last few weeks, I did literally go beyond the age of machines. The power unit of my laptop died and the following week I learned a lot about the fact that all laptops have their own power units, which are basically all incompatible with each other... All hail to the coming standardization with USB-C! That's all I can say. I had planned for many contingencies, but not for the case that a new power unit would have to be shipped from the U.S. and would take three weeks to arrive. So I bought a cheapo "universal" power unit, which seems to have fried the laptop completely.

Now, buying a new laptop on the quick wasn't easy, with all the supply chain issues right now. It seems to take on average between four and fourteen weeks to get a new laptop.

Also: I did learn that no philosophers use Linux, and there is no way the Philosophy Department could give me a Linux replacement laptop...

It is quite amazing just how much one's life and work is impaired by the inability to start up one's laptop. It'll be quite the readjustment.

Anyway, I'm happily in possession of a new Dell laptop running Pop!_OS 22.04, and the world can go on as it always has. Nothing will ever go wrong again...
Finally back to writing on the book at least! Also: big article about the neo-theistic death cult of silicon intelligence coming up. I'll keep you posted...

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Beyond the Age of Machines

2/25/2023

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(Yogi)

This week I gave a flash talk at an event called "Human Development, Sustainability, and Agency."

You can find its text in full length here, and a recording here. It's a three-minute read.

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Pushing the boundaries...

2/23/2023

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To start the conversation, here is a blog post written in September 2022 by project leader Johannes Jaeger, which explains what this project is, for how long it will run, and where it is hosted, including a few thoughts about the funder and their grant selection process.

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