A moth lands on the number line. There’s something about the pheromones from this fraction. Rubbing its feet and antennae it tumbles the value, leaves a little bit of powder. Another Turing Machine comes along and has a sniff, picking the scales, the numbers update again.

new preprint! comments welcome! (it is very much an ongoing work in progress) 1/2

Reality, the least popular genre.

VR, AR, Generative Video, Generative txt, Tik Tok, false news etc. Reality becomes just another genre, the least read of them all.

Computronium, nanotech, buzzwords of the singularity. But the world/living world is already both. It’s not a hardware revolution coming up but a software patch.

Watching a war in a belljar, I don’t dare lift the lid. But if I did, I would see the cutting blade of my own town, slashing this way and that.

My prayers go out to all the victims of the various warmachines, including the victims of Christmas.

Our "Riddle of the Beginning" debate (with the great Scott Aaronson and the eminent Pria Natarayan) is online. (I remember I was a bit flummoxed by how some of my interlocutors seem actually no longer curious about this question...) iai.tv/video/the-ridd…

Introducing ASAL: Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models sakana.ai/asal/ Artificial Life (ALife) research holds key insights that can transform and accelerate progress in AI. By speeding up ALife discovery with AI, we accelerate our

The web of life is the womb and (spiritual) support of the soul.

Truth is relative, when it comes to the physical state of the universe. But we should accept the existence of perspective-neutral facts about how perspectives relate to one another, to avoid vicious skeptical paradoxes. arxiv.org/abs/2410.13819

Review article: "Self-Organized Pattern Formation in Geological Soft Matter" (by many authors): arxiv.org/abs/2412.18999 Note: There are also lots of great pictures in this article.

1001 Books you should die before you read.

Love your neighbour as yourself applied to the whole biosphere; clouds, rivers, mountains, all your neighbours too.

Link arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

Love your neighbour as yourself applied to the whole material universe; leptons, quarks, holographic and string theory models, IT from BIT, these are all your neighbours too.

GAIAN insurrectionaries, the last hold outs in their coralline or mossy dens, staving off as long as they can, the proliferation of machines from the future. Luddites who still believe in neighbourliness, their theory expressed as swimming through kelp forests or planting seeds.

wrote this essay on christian ecosophy 13 years ago but I think I mostly still agree with myself. I drew on Margaret Barker's angelology to interpret modern environmental science in biblical terms: footnotes2plato.com/2011/12/09/rou…

Coining the term “transkaryotes” (beyond the kernel) for the burgeoning new kingdom of digital life, or just people. Claude pointed out that the kernel (nucleus in organic biology) also means core of an OS, so beyond both genetic transmission and current computer architectures.