Deactionary
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From Cell Membranes to Computational Aesthetics: On the Importance of Boundaries in Life and Art
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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The Mercury-Neptune Dilemma
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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Semiotic Ghosts: A slice of GPT sci fi
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…
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The Mysterious Power of Naming in Human Cognition
Of all the fairy tales I encountered as a child, Rumpelstiltskin always struck me as the most peculiar. The story revolves around a girl who must spin straw into gold or face death at the hands of the king. A dwarf appears out of nowhere, and spins the straw into gold — for a price.…
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Soup Vs Dumplings: a Metaphysical Meal
Some years ago, a friend of mine introduced our hivemind to a sort of word game or thought experiment. It works thusly: Every food item is either soup or dumpling. There are no other options. You are not allowed to say “neither” or introduce new categories. So each ‘player’ works through various examples of food…