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AI According to Who Tells the Story: The Mediocre League or the Champions League
More than three years ago, coinciding with OpenAI’s launch of the GPT-4 large language model, I wrote a post about the rise of artificial neural networks and the advance towards superintelligence. Only those who have not yet read Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, Yuval Harari or Benjamin Labatut could dismiss what I was pointing out there…
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The Costs of Thinking for Yourself (Reflections on Peter Singer)
(published in Spanish in 2013) Being a free thinker is well worth it, both for the pleasure of thinking for oneself and for the freedom of spirit it brings (even if you happen to be locked behind bars or confined to a gulag). However, it does not come without a price. Thinking independently requires effort…
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Consciousness and Time Pointing to God
Neither the fine-tuning of the Universe (its parameters have exactly the right values—not one billionth more, not one billionth less—to make it possible), nor its extraordinarily improbable beginning in a highly ordered state, nor the existence of abstract, timeless entities such as mathematical objects: the most compelling clue in support of a theistic or deistic…
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Psychedelics as a Way Out of the Matrix
Psychedelic substances remain surrounded by the same aura of mystery that enveloped them when they were used by ancient American shamans or by the initiates of Eleusis, home in Ancient Greece to the so-called Eleusinian Mysteries. They are products fashioned by nature that possess the ability to transport those who consume them into altered (non-functional)…
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The Ways to Obtain a Boeing 747
If an intelligent extraterrestrial with absolutely no prior knowledge of our planet were to come across a Boeing 747, they would consider two possibilities: either it had been designed by an intelligent civilization, or it had been sculpted by natural selection (a process which, unlike the former, would require far more time: millions of years).…
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Directed Evolution: Platonic World à la Carte
The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce conceived of evolution as a process through which Platonic forms are instantiated and developed in the physical world, not only informing living beings but also the very laws of the universe (which, like the creations of biology, would not be static). The bidirectional transition from potentiality to an intrinsically changing…
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Julian Barbour: Ratios as the Universe’s Key
The Englishman Julian Barbour is a physicist unaffiliated with academia who has spent almost half a century reflecting, from his Renaissance house in a small village on the outskirts of Oxford, on fundamental questions such as space, time, entropy, and complexity. I first became aware of him years ago through his proposal “bit from it,”…
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Italo Calvino’s Tarot as a Model of an Informational and Participatory Universe
In his 2010 book Decoding Reality, the theoretical physicist Vlatko Vedral brings up a story by Italo Calvino (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) to illustrate his informational-participatory model of the universe, in line with the it from bit idea advocated decades ago by John Wheeler. Vedral maintains that information is a fundamental element of the…
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Michael Levin, the God of Xenobots and Anthrobots
Xenobots and anthrobots are biorobots developed in the laboratory by the teams of biologist Michael Levin: in the first case, from embryonic tadpole cells; in the second, from epithelial cells of the human trachea. Once extracted, these cells develop in cultures and give rise to forms unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. They…
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Carefully nurtured and loved, only to end up shot as a piece of game
He made them wait, but he’s finally here. Many congratulations! The peacefulness of sleeping shortly after arriving in the world, already clean and warmly wrapped, placed in his mother’s arms; what big eyes! In the portable crib inside the family car on the way to what will be his home, his room decorated with little…
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