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@selfawarepatterns
The Astropolis trilogy
In the last post I discussed my recent exploration of Reddit. The one conversation I’ve started so far was a request for posthuman space opera recommendations, particularly ones without FTL, stories that envision what the future might be like if we can’t get around the speed of light limit. One hidden gem recommended was Sean Williams’ Astropolis trilogy. Williams imagines a far future where…
Social networks and exploring Reddit
It’s been a while since I’ve done a social media post, something I did more often back in the days of Twitter’s convulsions and as people fled to various other platforms. For a long time, I held out hope that the Fediverse would be the new paradigm, but while there remain many enthusiasts, and my main blog is on the Fediverse, it’s been a frustration that the federation architecture hasn’t…
The Faith of Beasts
The Faith of Beasts is the second book of The Captive’s War trilogy, authored by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo: Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, best known as the authors of The Expanse. This book continues the story of a far future human population conquered by an alien empire, the Carryx, and forced to serve that empire in order to survive. It’s a tale that Franck says was…
Children of Strife
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time books are about exploring different types of minds. In the first book he looked at spider minds, specifically uplifted Portia spiders. In the second it was octopuses and an alien group mind. In the third it was mated birds and another type of mind. In Children of Strife, he continues this theme, looking at the minds of uplifted mantis shrimp and other minds…
Is the eliminative stance productive?
A number of recent conversations, some I’ve been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that access consciousness, the availability of information for verbal report, reasoning, and behavior, exists. But phenomenal consciousness, the qualia, the what it’s like aspect of experience,…
Slow Gods
Clair North’s Slow Gods is a grim look at what happens to far future human societies in the vicinity of a supernova. It’s a novel with a strong literary feel, one that explores a number of very distinct cultures, including a hyper-capitalistic dystopia, a highly artistic society, and lots of others in between. Early in the story, an ancient AI entity known as the Slow sends messengers to a…
Project Hanuman: information as the fundamental reality
Stewart Hotston acknowledges that his Project Hanuman is inspired by Iain Banks’ Culture novels. The society he describes, known as the Archology, is very similar to the Culture in many respects. However, where Banks’ books usually have the Culture as the dominant civilization technologically, and always have them coming out on top, Hotston’s Archology finds itself in a desperate fight, with its…
The attitude of physicalism
Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue that it’s incoherent, since we can’t give a solid definition of what “physical” means. And so physicalism seems to be built on a foundation on shifting sands. This is actually…
Halcyon Years
Alastair Reynolds’ new novel, Halcyon Years, starts off as a murder mystery that takes place on an interstellar generation ship, a sealed O’Neill cylinder type environment, with cities, rivers, lakes, and forests. The ship is ruled by two rich families, the Urrys and the DelRossos, who hate each other. And while there are separate municipal governments and police forces, they’re largely corrupt…
Excession
Excession is one of the novels I missed years ago when reading Iain Banks’ Culture series. The main reason, I think, is that for along time it wasn’t published in ebook format, I suspect due to formatting complexity. It just came out in ebook a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve finally been able to rectify the oversight. The Culture, if you’re not familiar with Banks’ books, is an interstellar…
Chill about metaphysics
This week I had to block a couple of people on different platforms. Neither seemed able to make their point without lacing in insults. One seemed to be on a mission to make me feel as bad about my outlook as possible. The disagreements were on purely metaphysical grounds, physicalism vs non-physicalism. And seem to be examples of something that appears pervasive in online discussions, the…
Pushing Ice
I have a pet theory about good science fiction stories (and maybe fantasy ones). A good story needs to have both a wonder and a conflict element. A lot of classic SF only have the wonder one. Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories fit in this category. Consider 2001: A Space odyssey. Remove the wonder elements and there’s little left. I suspect even the conflict with HAL was more Stanley Kubrick than…
If usefulness isn't a guide to what's real, what is?
Seems like I’ve been writing a lot about quantum mechanics lately. Apparently so have a lot of other people. One thing that keeps coming up is the reality or non-reality of the quantum wave function. Raoni Arroyo and Jonas R. Becker Arenhart argue for non-reality: Quantum mechanics works, but it doesn’t describe reality: Predictive power is not a guide to reality. (Warning: likely…
Biological computation and the nature of software
A new paper is been getting some attention. It makes the case for biological computation. (This is a link to a summary, but there’s a link to the actual paper at the bottom of that article.) Characterizing the debate between computational functionalism and biological naturalism as camps that are hopelessly dug in, the authors propose that the brain does do computation, but that it’s a very…
Why I'm a reductionist
The SEP article on scientific reductionism notes that the etymology of the word “reduction” is “to bring back” something to something else. So in a methodological sense, reduction is bringing one theory or ontology back to a simpler or more fundamental theory or ontology. The Wikipedia entry on reductionism identifies different kinds: ontological, methodological, and theory reductionism. I think…
Merry Christmas
Happy Winter Solstice Season! The celebrations around the time that the sun’s path in the sky starts getting higher again, and the days longer, seems to stretch back into prehistory. It’s no accident that we observe many of our most cherished religious holidays and celebrate a new year around this time. It’s kind of a corrective. Have a season of good will and fellowship in the darkest time of…
Everything is a quantum wave?
In the last post, I discussed Amanda Gefter critique of Vlatko Vedral’s view that observers have no special role in reality. Conveniently, Vedral published an article at IAI discussing his view: Everything in the universe is a quantum wave. (Warning: possible paywall.) Vedral puts his view forward as a radical new interpretation of quantum mechanics. As a quick reminder, the central mystery of…