Category: Uncategorized

The other day I read an essay by Wendell Berry. He said this: “I want, and I think in my farming poems I have been consciously working toward, a poetry that would not be incompatible with barns and gardens and fields and woodlands. The mind, carrying such poetry into such places, would be freed and […]

When we are hungry, we eat. When we need to communicate, we talk or we converse. When we feel affection we might hug or even kiss. Sometimes we also argue. When there’s music and we want to move, we dance. And when, in those moments of life when we come closest to another person, when […]

Some days ago, as the hang-fire drama of the US election was inflaming the internet and crisis fatigue seemed to be gnawing an ever-widening hole in our collective mental health, I decided it was time to turn away from the news, take several deep breaths, spend a minute communing with any humans, pets, plants, trees, […]

The world seems to be moving in two opposing directions: in one, there is death, sickness, loneliness, cruelty, and despair at the crevasse of political turmoil and economic hardship we seem to be sinking into. In the other, there is a wave of collective solidarity, kindness, determination, and altruistic ingenuity that may be unique in […]

Note: the was first published on the CadCad forum. I want to answer this question: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an economic network to effectively govern itself? This post is about the possibility of designing an economic game (along the lines of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma) that could help answer this question […]

“Collective Intelligence” is an enormous territory. As a phrase, it appears in a slew of academic and practical fields, understood differently depending on context. This post takes an initial, informal look at an approach to understanding and categorizing forms of collective intelligence based on flows of information. It’s neither complete nor fully rigorous, instead intending […]

Introduction Progress in neuroscience and AI has lead to growing speculation about conscious machines and the possibility of “uploading” human minds into digital substrates. Several organizations offer brain preservation services on the premise that future technology will allow their customers’ identities to be transferred to artifical systems [@regalado_startup_2018]. Philosophical assumptions behind much of the discussion […]

The holy is a serious business. Wars have been fought over the proper way to worship, and the contradictions and absurdities of religion can seem limitless. What if this is because we have the wrong metaphor? What would happen if we didn’t think of religious and spiritual traditions as competing ideas about The Way It […]

“Efficiency” usually means the degree to which costly inputs to a process are reduced in relation to the process’s desirable outputs. This linear input-process-output model of efficiency fits well with the linear models of production, consumption, and growth that have been spreading, like cultural parasites, over the globe for the past few hundred years. On […]

Please note, dear reader and esteemed member of the choir: this hortatory fragment was written some time ago. Since then, the climate has changed just slightly. This means it is already out of date. However, it remains less out of date than most hymnals, so the choir may still find it of modest interest. How […]