Content
Quotes
The Science of Flow Says Extreme Inequality Causes Economic Collapse
The Spiritual, Reductionist Consciousness of Christof Koch
Articles
The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee
How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance
Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots'
Wearable brain scanner technology expanded for whole head imaging
Engineers put tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses on a single chip
Psychedelic drug psilocybin tamps down brain's ego center
Synthetic red blood cells mimic natural ones, and have new abilities
Using near-infrared light to 3-D print an ear inside the body
Shocker! Japan firms' electrifying fabric zaps bacteria
According to a recent study by Oxfam International, in 2010 the top 388 richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population– a whopping 3.6 billion people. By 2014, this number was down to 85 people. Oxfam claims that, if this trend continues, by the end of 2016 the top 1% will own more wealth than everyone else in the world combined. At the same time, according to Oxfam, the extremely wealthy are also extremely efficient in dodging taxes, now hiding an estimated $7.6 trillion in offshore tax-havens.
Why should we care about such gross economic inequality?[4] After all, isn’t it natural? The science of flow says: yes, some degree of inequality is natural, but extreme inequality violates two core principles of systemic health: circulation and balance.
The Science of Flow Says Extreme Inequality Causes Economic Collapse
Yes, there’s this ancient belief in panpsychism: “Pan” meaning “every,” “psyche” meaning “soul.” There are different versions of it depending on which philosophical or religious tradition you follow, but basically it meant that everything is ensouled. Now, I don’t believe that a stone is ensouled or a planet is ensouled. But if you take a more conceptual approach to consciousness, the evidence suggests there are many more systems that have consciousness—possibly all animals, all unicellular bacteria, and at some level maybe even individual cells that have an autonomous existence. We might be surrounded by consciousness everywhere and find it in places where we don’t expect it because our intuition says we’ll only see it in people and maybe monkeys and also dogs and cats. But we know our intuition is fallible, which is why we need science to tell us what the actual state of the universe is.
It’s terribly elegant in its simplicity. You don’t say consciousness only exists if you have more than 42 neurons or 2 billion neurons or whatever. Instead, the system is conscious if there’s a certain type of complexity. And we live in a universe where certain systems have consciousness. It’s inherent in the design of the universe. Why is that so? I don’t know. Why does the universe follow the laws of quantum mechanics? I don’t know. Can I imagine a universe where the laws of quantum mechanics don’t hold? Yes, but I don’t happen to live in such a universe, so I believe our universe has certain types of complexity and a system that gives rise to consciousness. Suddenly the world is populated by entities that have conscious awareness, and that one simple principle leads to a number of very counterintuitive predictions that can, in principle, be verified.
The Spiritual, Reductionist Consciousness of Christof Koch
It’s only in the final chapter that Boldizzoni finally articulates his own view of what capitalism actually is and offers his account why it has outlasted so many of its critics. Capitalism has three core “building blocks,” he argues: minority control over the means of production, the use of markets to allocate goods and resources, and a “bourgeois culture . . . oriented toward the acquisition of wealth for personal purposes.” In turn, these conditions require a “hierarchical social structure” and an “individualistic orientation”—features more deeply embedded in Western culture than most of capitalism’s critics have recognized, and more crucial to capitalism’s longevity than they have credited. The political, economic, and social structures of society, he argues, “are held together in a coherent way by a powerful glue: this glue is called culture, and its molecules are the meanings that humans associate with their actions, with those of their fellow humans, and with existence in general.”
A line from Ursula K. LeGuin now circulates widely on the left: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” To this, Boldizzoni might add: sure, but ending the divine right of kings took a millennium.
When Will Capitalism End?
Consider Heraclitus’ ‘Nature loves to hide’; Blaise Pascal’s ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’; or Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.’ Heraclitus comes before and against Plato and Aristotle, Pascal after and against René Descartes, Nietzsche after and against Kant and G W F Hegel. Might the history of thought be actually driven by aphorism?
Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts to construct systems. Conversely, much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from such grand systems through the construction of literary fragments. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument; the aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of logic; the other by leaps and bounds.
Good aphorisms demand to be interpreted. And in their interpretation is an invitation for the readers to engage in their own philosophical enterprise – to do philosophy themselves. Aphorisms, then, are at once before, against and after philosophy.
In praise of aphorisms
This is a great signal from a famous science fiction writer familiar with Modern Monetary Theory (please everyone become educated in this - it is the future of our economy)
Never make the mistake of thinking “efficient” is synonymous with “good”
The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee
Is there enough work for everyone? Kim Stanley Robinson on the future of planetary employment.
Say it’s the very near future, and you’re a worker put out of work in the declining oil industry. You’re highly educated, and you’ve been well-compensated, but as it becomes clear that burning more oil will wreck Earth and civilization, the stuff you make gets properly priced to reflect that reality, and quickly your industry ceases to exist. Good for the planet, but you’re out of a job! What to do?
You go to the local job center, which tells you the U.S. Department of Energy is sponsoring a public-private company to build direct-air-capture factories. Now instead of pumping a source of carbon dioxide out of the ground, you get to suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere and inject it back underground. You already know how to work with pumps and pipes from your old job, and though CO₂ removal is a new industry, it’s scaling up fast. And you have a real right to work, as stated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and, ever since passage of the Great Pandemic Recovery Act, as stated in federal law, too. A good job is a good job.
The scenario outlined above is compiled from signs coming from all over, not least of which are the weekly U.S. unemployment numbers that have been reaching seven digits. There’s a major-party presidential candidate out there right now calling for a public jobs corps consisting of 100,000 health workers. And there’s also an economic case for a full-employment vision expressed by modern monetary theory. This economics discipline is usually understood to be a new kind of Keynesianism that might replace austerity policies of the neoliberal era. It advocates creating new money to pay for necessary work and argues that government debt can always be dealt with by later government actions, so creating this new money for good purposes need not be regarded as wrong or dangerous. Some conventional economists have attacked what they see as MMT’s cavalier treatment of money, and critics sometimes call the discipline “magic money tree.” Inflation might result from such money creation—or deflation. Opinions differ, but all agree destabilization would be disastrous.
This is an interesting signal of the social affordances of online tools from Wikipedia to …..
“What’s special about a Google Doc versus a newsfeed is its persistence and editability,” says Clay Shirky, the vice provost for educational technology at New York University.
What makes Google Docs especially attractive is that they are at once dynamic and static, he says. They’re editable and can be viewed simultaneously on countless screens, but they are easily shareable via tweet or post
How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance
Facebook and Twitter might have the bells and whistles, but the word processing software's simplicity and accessibility have made it a winning tool.
In the week after George Floyd’s murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for organizing these protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely on signing in to a social network, and wasn’t even designed for this purpose. It’s Google Docs.
In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to family members and representatives to lists of funds and resources that are accepting donations. Shared Google Docs that anyone can view and anyone can edit, anonymously, have become a valuable tool for grassroots organizing during both the coronavirus pandemic and the police brutality protests sweeping the US. It’s not the first time. In fact, activists and campaigners have been using the word processing software for years as a more efficient and accessible protest tool than either Facebook or Twitter.
Google Docs was launched in October 2012. It quickly became popular, not only because Google email accounts were so widespread already, but also because it allows multiple users to collaborate and edit simultaneously. Microsoft Word, the incumbent, finally had a real rival.
This is definitely a good signal of the times and the future. It is a matter of time before such systems influence the nature of all work.
Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots'
Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report.
The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists.
Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times.
Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business.
The US tech giant said in a statement: "Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic."
This is a good signal of the ongoing progress toward a full-spectrum capacity for the ‘quantified self’ - and further knowledge of how the brain and body work in real time.
Our group in Nottingham, alongside partners at UCL, are now driving this research forward, not only to develop a new understanding of brain function, but also to commercialize the equipment that we have developed.
Wearable brain scanner technology expanded for whole head imaging
Scientists from the University of Nottingham developed an initial prototype of a new generation of brain scanner in 2018 which is a lightweight device that can be worn on the head like a hat, and can scan the brain even whilst a patient moves. Their latest research has now expanded this to a fully functional 49 channel device that can be used to scan the whole brain and track electrophysiological processes that are implicated in a number of mental health problems. Their findings have been published in Neuroimage.
Professor Matt Brookes from the University of Nottingham has led the development of this wearable scanner, he said: "Understanding mental illness remains one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. From childhood illnesses such as Autism, to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, human brain health affects millions of people throughout the lifespan. In many cases, even highly detailed brain images showing what the brain looks like fail to tell us about underlying pathology, and consequently there is an urgent need for new technologies to measure what the brain actually does in health and disease."
Brain cells operate and communicate by producing electrical currents. These currents generate tiny magnetic fields that can be detected outside the head. Researchers use MEG to map brain function by measuring these magnetic fields. This allows for a millisecond-by-millisecond picture of which parts of the brain are engaged when we undertake different tasks, such as speaking or moving.
This is a great signal of the progress (slow as it might seem) of using the memristor in our computational paradigms.
Memristors, or memory transistors, are an essential element in neuromorphic computing. In a neuromorphic device, a memristor would serve as the transistor in a circuit, though its workings would more closely resemble a brain synapse—the junction between two neurons. The synapse receives signals from one neuron, in the form of ions, and sends a corresponding signal to the next neuron.
A transistor in a conventional circuit transmits information by switching between one of only two values, 0 and 1, and doing so only when the signal it receives, in the form of an electric current, is of a particular strength. In contrast, a memristor would work along a gradient, much like a synapse in the brain. The signal it produces would vary depending on the strength of the signal that it receives. This would enable a single memristor to have many values, and therefore carry out a far wider range of operations than binary transistors.
Engineers put tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses on a single chip
MIT engineers have designed a "brain-on-a-chip," smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses known as memristors—silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain.
The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to "remember" stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements.
Their results, published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrate a promising new memristor design for neuromorphic devices—electronics that are based on a new type of circuit that processes information in a way that mimics the brain's neural architecture. Such brain-inspired circuits could be built into small, portable devices, and would carry out complex computational tasks that only today's supercomputers can handle.
Another signal about the vital role of our microbiome and the role that sleep plays in maintaining wellness.
Animals completely deprived of sleep die. Yet scientists have found it oddly hard to say exactly why sleep loss is lethal.
Why Sleep Deprivation Kills
Publishing today in the journal Cell, she and her colleagues offer evidence that when flies die of sleeplessness, lethal changes occur not in the brain but in the gut. The indigo labyrinths of the flies’ small intestines light up with fiery fuchsia in micrographs, betraying an ominous buildup of molecules that destroy DNA and cause cellular damage. The molecules appear soon after sleep deprivation starts, before any other warning signs; if the flies are allowed to sleep again, the rosy bloom fades away. Strikingly, if the flies are fed antioxidants that neutralize these molecules, it does not matter if they never sleep again. They live as long as their rested brethren.
The results suggest that one very fundamental job of sleep — perhaps underlying a network of other effects — is to regulate the ancient biochemical process of oxidation, by which individual electrons are snapped on and off molecules in service to everything from respiration to metabolism. Sleep, the researchers imply, is not solely the province of neuroscience, but something more deeply threaded into the biochemistry that knits together the animal kingdom.
What do we know of consciousness? Not much - this is an important signal of efforts to explore the mind with both new technology and ancient plant medicines
Psychedelic drug psilocybin tamps down brain's ego center
Perhaps no region of the brain is more fittingly named than the claustrum, taken from the Latin word for "hidden or shut away." The claustrum is an extremely thin sheet of neurons deep within the cortex, yet it reaches out to every other region of the brain. Its true purpose remains "hidden away" as well, with researchers speculating about many functions. For example, Francis Crick of DNA-discovery fame believed that the claustrum is the seat of consciousness, responsible for awareness and sense of self.
What is known is that this region contains a large number of receptors targeted by psychedelic drugs such as LSD or psilocybin ¾ the hallucinogenic chemical found in certain mushrooms. To see what happens in the claustrum when people are on psychedelics, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers compared the brain scans of people after they took psilocybin with their scans after taking a placebo.
Their findings were published online on May 23, 2020, in the journal NeuroImage.
For this new study, the researchers used fMRI with 15 people and observed the claustrum brain region after the participants took either psilocybin or a placebo. They found that psilocybin reduced neural activity in the claustrum by 15% to 30%. This lowered activity also appeared to be associated with stronger subjective effects of the drug, such as emotional and mystical experiences. The researchers also found that psilocybin changed the way that the claustrum communicated with brain regions involved in hearing, attention, decision-making and remembering.
This is a great signal of the post-human human - as a biosynthetic ecology.
Synthetic red blood cells mimic natural ones, and have new abilities
Scientists have tried to develop synthetic red blood cells that mimic the favorable properties of natural ones, such as flexibility, oxygen transport and long circulation times. But so far, most artificial red blood cells have had one or a few, but not all, key features of the natural versions. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have made synthetic red blood cells that have all of the cells' natural abilities, plus a few new ones.
The artificial cells were similar in size, shape, charge and surface proteins to natural cells, and they could squeeze through model capillaries without losing their shape. In mice, the synthetic RBCs lasted for more than 48 hours, with no observable toxicity. The researchers loaded the artificial cells with either hemoglobin, an anticancer drug, a toxin sensor or magnetic nanoparticles to demonstrate that they could carry cargoes. The team also showed that the new RBCs could act as decoys for a bacterial toxin. Future studies will explore the potential of the artificial cells in medical applications, such as cancer therapy and toxin biosensing, the researchers say.
This is a great signal of biotechnology and 3D printing - and the advent of a post-human capability for healing and development. The 1 min video is very clear.
the new ear began to take shape within seconds as they applied the near-infrared light beam. The final ear shape developed over the course of a month as cartilage cells grew on the structure they had printed—the researchers described it as looking almost exactly like a natural ear.
Using near-infrared light to 3-D print an ear inside the body
A team of researchers with members from several institutions in China, one in the U.S. and one in Belgium, has developed a method for 3-D printing an ear inside of the body. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their method and how well it worked on test mice.
Three-dimensional printing has evolved over the last several years to include the use of a wide variety of materials to create products. In recent years, it has come to be used in medical applications to repair defective tissue. In such applications, ultraviolet light is used to 3-D print tissue-like material through polymerization, in which materials become denser and stick together when exposed to the light. In such efforts, surgery is required to expose the tissue that needs to be repaired. In this new effort, the researchers used near-infrared light to accomplish much the same thing, but in a way that does not require surgery.
The technique involves first injecting a bioink (made of hydrogel particles and cartilage cells) into the patient. Next, a near-infrared light beam is directed at a digital micromirror device chip, which organizes the beam of light into a desired shape—the reorganized beam is then reflected down onto the patient where it penetrates the skin and collides with the bionk inside of the body. The light beam forces the bioink to form into a desired shape and to harden—the finished product resembles the cartilage that normally forms the shape of an ear. In their testing, the team used test mice with one deformed ear—the new ear was programmed using a mirror-image of the ear that was not deformed.
This is an amazing signal of the future of post pandemic fashions.
Shocker! Japan firms' electrifying fabric zaps bacteria
It's a shocking idea: a fabric that can produce small amounts of electricity powered by movement, allowing your clothing to zap microbes and bacteria as you go about your day.
A pair of Japanese firms say that's exactly what their new product can do, and are touting it for everything from curbing body odour to offering the ideal material for protective gear like face masks.
The fabric jointly developed by electronics company Murata Manufacturing and Teijin Frontier, dubbed PIECLEX, generates power from the expansion and contraction of the material itself, including when worn by someone moving around.
The low voltages aren't strong enough to be felt by the wearer, but they effectively stop bacteria and viruses from multiplying inside the fabric, the companies said.
