MachineMachine /stream - tagged with complexity http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of the arts http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/on-the-origins-of-the-arts RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small. Our vision is limited to a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wave frequencies in their fullness range from gamma radiation at the upper end, downward to the ultralow frequency used in some specialized forms of communication. We see only a tiny bit in the middle of the whole, which we refer to as the “visual spectrum.” Our optical apparatus… ]]> Sat, 21 Apr 2012 05:37:47 -0700 http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/on-the-origins-of-the-arts Bacteria Use ‘Chemical Twitter’ and ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ to Make Decisions http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/bacteria-use-chemical-twitter-and-prisoner-s-dilemma-to-make-decisions-211625.html/bacteria-use-chemical-twitter-and-prisoners-dilemma-to-make-decisions-beyond-science-science-epoch-times http://t.co/fcnjW9hb Bacteria Use ‘Chemical Twitter’ and 'Prisoner's Dilemma' to Make Decisions @RiceUniversity @AmerChemSociety ]]> Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:06:01 -0700 http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/bacteria-use-chemical-twitter-and-prisoner-s-dilemma-to-make-decisions-211625.html/bacteria-use-chemical-twitter-and-prisoners-dilemma-to-make-decisions-beyond-science-science-epoch-times Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5wCfYujRdE&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 18 Dec 2011 12:40:25 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5wCfYujRdE&feature=youtube_gdata How Computational Complexity Will Revolutionise Philosophy http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8731851297

Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of machine intelligence. In fact, it’s hard to think of an idea that has had a bigger impact on philosophy.

And yet there is an even bigger philosophical revolution waiting in the wings. The theory of computing is a philosophical minnow compared to the potential of another theory that is currently dominating thinking about computation.

@ Technology Review

]]> Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:31:23 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8731851297 What's human? What's animal? And what of the biology in between? http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/human-animal-trans-species-science?cat=commentisfree&type=article Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how to keep pace with developments in the biosciences. It can justly be said that politics and regulation have not dealt well with our newfound capacities for muddying the boundaries between us and other species. And yet the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in bioscientific techniques that increasingly call into question what it means to be human. Take the human genome project: many of us may have… ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:20:18 -0700 http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/human-animal-trans-species-science?cat=commentisfree&type=article James Gleick’s History of Information http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last half-century or so. It’s a grand narrative if ever there was one, but its key moment can be pinpointed to 1948, when Claude Shannon, a young mathematician with a background in cryptography and telephony, published a paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in a Bell Labs technical journal. For Shannon, communication was purely a matter of sending a message… ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:41:08 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Where Do Animals Come From? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15evolve.html The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types.
The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution.
Animals devoured… ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:37:46 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15evolve.html Technology Wants to Keep Evolving http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/getting-better-all-the-time Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” and includes “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” He coins the term because he wishes to emphasize the idea of technology as an overarching entity that constitutes the equivalent of an evolving “seventh kingdom of life,” one that “predated our humanness.” Indeed, the “root of the technium can be traced back to the life of an atom.” A bird’s nest and a wooden… ]]> Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:03:18 -0700 http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/getting-better-all-the-time ‘World Wide Mind’ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15scibks_excerpt.html?_r=1 Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to… ]]> Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:40:27 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15scibks_excerpt.html?_r=1 On Resilience http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed,… ]]> Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ Colonial Studies http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical... ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:39 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Colonial Studies http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical organization characteristic of human societies, a real ant colony operates without direction or management. New research is showing us how ant colonies get things done without anyone being in charge. Ants, it turns out, have much to teach us about the decentralized networks that operate in many biological systems, in which local interactions produce global behavior, without the… ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:00 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Ants and us http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 What do you think about when you think about ants? An aerial view perhaps, looking down at a line of ants moving along a trail. Go closer. If you stay with it, your view may twist, your ants grow, become singular, each an alien creature, somehow... ]]> Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:38:26 -0700 http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 Ants and us http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 What do you think about when you think about ants? An aerial view perhaps, looking down at a line of ants moving along a trail. Go closer. If you stay with it, your view may twist, your ants grow, become singular, each an alien creature, somehow militarised. As primitives we ate them, they were our crunch, and now they are lodged in our subconscious. We know their noise in the soil, even if we do not acknowledge it. The mandibles dominate, snipping, giving the ant its name in Old English, “aemette”, from the proto-Germanic ai mait, meaning to cut away,… ]]> Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:38:00 -0700 http://moreintelligentlife.com/print/3083 Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P7717-XOQ&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Mon, 03 May 2010 09:38:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P7717-XOQ&feature=youtube_gdata Uniformity and Variability: An Essay in the Philosophy of Matter http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/transcripts/Delanda.html If the planet needs us to speed up information, and slow down matter, what does this mean for the complex relationship between information and nature? There is a growing awareness of the importance of studying the behaviour of matter in its full complexity. According to Manuel DeLanda, author of A Short History of Matter, this is partly the result of experimentation with non-homogeneous materials. DeLanda explores some of the philosophical issues raised by new developments in materials science, including the significance of the idea that many different material and energetic systems may have a common source of spontaneous order. The… ]]> Mon, 03 May 2010 09:35:00 -0700 http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/transcripts/Delanda.html 'A Thousand Years of Non Linear History' : reVIEW http://www.altx.com/EBR/reviews/rev8/r8young.htm A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (which says a lot); and it is fully capable of surviving the advances from free-floating New Agers as well as the equally inevitable rebuffs from academic Old Agers. De Landa's greatest strength, no doubt, is his ability to synthesize - to create a self-sustaining system of theories that are merged, as it were, into an intellectual meshwork. Here, however, a final irony emerges: in… ]]> Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:25:00 -0700 http://www.altx.com/EBR/reviews/rev8/r8young.htm BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos (2010) (Part 1/6) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEpZFEIDHdc&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:30:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEpZFEIDHdc&feature=youtube_gdata Divine Wilderness http://canopycanopycanopy.com/7/divine_wilderness PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle that housed Him in the desert, and then the Temple that was His residence in Jerusalem. The dimensions of these structures were dictated by a divine blueprint. The Temple gave birth to a city, and from it emerged a civilization. We are descendants of this tradition, irrespective of such trivialities as whether one identifies as a “believer.” ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:02:00 -0700 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/7/divine_wilderness On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces http://benfry.com/traces/ We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself. The second edition, for instance, adds a notable “by the Creator” to the… ]]> Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:56:00 -0700 http://benfry.com/traces/