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This essay was originally posted on April 21, 2014 at 3 Quarks Daily. No one knows exactly how life began, but a pivotal chapter in the story was the formation of the first single-celled organism — the common ancestor to every living thing on the planet. I like to think of the birth of life…
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It is not possible to know whether a gap between theory and observation requires adding a bit of missing data, or is instead grounds for revamping the theory. Let me explain. The planet Neptune was discovered “with the point of a pen”: it solved an apparent discrepancy between the observed orbit of Uranus and what…
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I wanted to try some GPT-generated ‘theory fiction’. ChatGPT responded to my prompt as usual, but then I got a strange formatting error. A tad creepy, given the topic? “Yes, that’s right,” the computational anthropologist said, nodding. “They are like specters of meaning, haunting the network of the language model and shaping its behavior in…