Stuart Kauffman: Reinventing the Sacred

Other Curations sites: Oobject | Cribcandy | Popgloss | Wists | Yokiddo

rss feed

Watch me 'twat' on Twitter here: twitter.com/daveg

"Paul Kedrosky: "I'm particularly fond of SmashingTelly given how it, in effect, Tivo-ifies the web"... Guy Dickinson: "David Galbraith has turned Smashing Telly into well, the new TV."... Fimoculous: "Best Blogs of 2007"... The Guardian: Video sharing on the net has uncovered a hoard of TV gems...and a number of sites have been established to lead us to them. Take smashingtelly.com."

about

"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. ~~Not 30 second clips~~ (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.

Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."

David

January 19th, 2009 3 comments link to (permalink) posted by david

Stuart Kauffman, biologist and complexity theorist, gives a talk about his latest book: Reinventing the Sacred. If you wanted to invent a religion that was much more interesting than outmoded simplistic ones like, oh, Judaism or Christianity etc. then Kauffman’s ideas would be a much better starting point.

tags: Uncategorized

3 responses so far »

Ashley Johnston : Jan 19, 2009 at 1:37 pm

Wow, what a brilliant man!

http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/kauffman.html
admin : Jan 19, 2009 at 3:13 pm

Yeah he is – and he is onto something with his notion of systems self configuring to maximize the adjacent possible.

The only problem is that his writing style is somewhat opaque, and its sometimes easier to read commentary.
Paul Baclace : Apr 24, 2009 at 3:21 pm

Stu Kauffman has outdone himself in this empirically grounded metaphysics of the phenomenon of emergence that turns the centuries-old mind/body dualism versus reductionism debate into a moot point. The upshot is emergent phenomenon, which lose meaning and are computationally impractical in the reductionist conception, become the new soul.

The idea is not free. Reductionists must concede that mathematical Platonic perfection has practical limits. Dualists gain a concession from Reductionists, but must concede that emergent phenomenon are not other-worldly and immutable.

The study of emergence (complexity theory) has been going on for decades and this idea has been in the air. The brilliant interdisciplinary Stuart Kauffman is the right guy to get these santafe.edu ideas discussed in the broader scientific world.

(If you naturally think in terms of systems, like I do, then all of this seems rather obvious. Interestingly, Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan fits into the anti-Platonic picture at the statistical level.)

Blogroll

sources

Stuart Kauffman: Reinventing the Sacred

January 19th, 2009 3 comments link to (permalink) posted by david