Alternative link via the World Trade Institute: here

Disclaimer: I am involved with the WTI, and Philipp Aerni is a colleague.

Of antibiotics and globalisation | The Economist

Of antibiotics and globalisation

Physics – Shaking atoms to make them stop

Shaking atoms to make them stop

Personally, I am always for the Bose-Einstein statistics… consider this a political statement, if you may.

The Lift Conference this year is asking as to where the future has gone?
It is an interesting question to pose, and it is the most poetic of all questions to explore at society and technology conference. I have often been amazed as to how way off some experts can be on their predictions and how very on targets some other buffoons can be. Our inability as a species to make valid predictions is only surmounted by our inability to control, however we are often quite creative in coming up with alternative futures simply for one reason: we want to.

One billion dollars spent in political propaganda is one billion dollars spent. As an American living in Europe and with three nationalities to confuse the issue, I am stunned by the lack of substance in american political discourse. Ignorance is clearly in surplus among the voters and it is with that ignorance that many politicians play with. If they do not tackle ignorance, then they go for emotions. From Joe the Plumber to Palin, I would rather see him than her as McCain’s running mate. A few days ahead of the vote and while the polls clearly show Obama ahead, at this point I do not know what that might mean on the voting booths on “the day.”

The so-called plot to assassinate Obama may or may not have really happened, and America, south of the Canadian border and north of Mexico, may or may not be ready to accept a president of African ethnic origin. I am not in the heart of all Americans, I can not know that. I find it totally contemptuous that a character named Palin has been nominated as vice president candidate. It is tantamount to a slap in the face to any intellectual or hard working woman to have somebody so poorly educated and with such limited capabilities and no proven track record just a heart beat away from the presidency. You see, I am not so sure that Obama will either live to be sworn in, or that he will be elected in the first place. I do not know much about Obama, and if appearances and public words are of any advice, then he is clearly the holder of lot of hopes for America, if not the world. What kind of president would he be? That we do not know.

From an economic point of view I welcome the spending, but from an educational and democratic point of view, it is a catastrophe because not much of substance is being transmitted to the voters, just propaganda. From that point of view, a limitation on spending might be wise, but then, I am a liberal and limitations of spending do not fare well with us either. In this campaign the best thing that has happened to Obama is the financial crisis and Palin’s poor judgement on how to dress and who’s money to spend. By the way, I think she looks good in Manolo Blanik shoes, but so would Joe the Plumber’s wife.

Dannie Jost

Philosopher, Physicist and Swiss (at least today)

The Atlantic

shift 08 is happening soon, very soon, that is next week in Lisbon. I registered, and I fully planned to go, and that went the way that plans sometimes go. I wish that I could spill the beans of some fantastic adventure taking me to the far east and some never heard of kingdom for some romantic or otherwise adventure. Alas! There are no beans to be spilled here, and it is perhaps just a matter of choice. But this time this year, no Lisbon for me. The bit about time is always a lame excuse in my book. What do I mean when I say that I have no time for this or that? It could be that I am just being the real egoist whom I happen to be, and rather do this now. Period. I rather be doing what I am doing now.

So, but what is happening with tensoriana?

Actually not much. The basic idea of its creation is very much alive, and perhaps if I was not so busy working on that very idea, then much more would be happening with the website and the blog. Perhaps then Wall Street would not be crashing, and perhaps then there wouldn’t be a pathetic woman running for VP in a country that by sheer size has more to to say on fundamental governance matters than either you or I care to think about or are comfortable with. Perhaps then… only if… but what do you expect from me?

Now, you know that I am not into gender issues. I know it is a man’s world. I do not argue about that one, however it does not prevent me from either thinking or writing. Is it a white man’s world? Good question! I am glad that you thought of it. But then I recently heard James Watson on the matter of genetic differences, and I could not agree with the man more. We are all created alike, and some of us are more alike than others. I know that some of his remarks have gotten some feathers ruffled, what in fact has happened is that a lot of good people do not understand much of what is the fundamental architecture of life, and this is sad, very sad. Our technological society can ill afford to have so much ignorance around. If society is failing somewhere, it is failing in its recognition that education is an imperative. Actually access to education is a basic human right as chartered in the Declaration of Human Rights. So where is the problem? Why do we get side tracked about a few milligrams of melanin one way or the other?

Why is it that we value some aspects of intelligence more than others? But what is intelligence? We all know that spies only exist in James Bond movies and that what really happens in real life is a tad more mundane than the fantastic fiction. Oh, really. There are real life events and narratives that make James Bond sound like a dull character. Reality has always been much more fantastic than fiction. Fiction is only plausible, while reality does not have to adhere to plausibility. Oh, there is another kind of intelligence? Individual intelligence? Oh!

Last month I attended a fantastic conference in Geneva with what to me is a rather misleading name: Access to Knowledge. The fundamental issue is actually access to information, or as one of the speakers pointed out, access to justice. Access to knowledge boils down to the fundamental right of access to education, and that is a rough one on a global scale. When the most powerful country in the world – of which I am a citizen – has some of its influential figures – note that I am not using the word leader – all confused about one very basic biological function that we call reproductive biology, then I in my not so modest opinion see that there is a problem in education. When that same big numbers country can not manage to educate its influential figures in what are the basics of reproductive biology, how is sub-Saharan Africa going to manage to curb AIDS? There is the consoling idea that perhaps the former is not a prerequisite for the latter, and let’s hope so.

But I am biased, very biased. I was educated within the tradition of the scientific method, and was born loving the arts.

Shift your thinking, go ahead, do it! Technology, like life, is transient.

From the website of the IHT: video

it is really close to “my” heart and we – Harald, Henriette or I – are not there at offf. Pedro, Hugo and André are there and i am rather curious as to what they have to tell us about it.

the videos are here

For those who know that the tensoriana has a whole lot to do with policy formulation while having the odd claim that business is art, it may be difficult to imagine what I am doing contributing to a conference to happen in Madrid, Spain in July 13-16 titled Subject, Self and Soul: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Personhood.

Kamaran and I have explored a bit of the idea space between quantum mechanics and the non-reductionist philosophy of modal aspects and have had an interesting time in bridging what seems to be two different universes. I for my part have immensely enjoyed the opportunity to flirt with Hilbert space and cobordisms. I did my best however at trying to write the paper in plain English without calling on mathematical formalism to camouflage my inability to formulate complete sentences.

In conclusion what I could write is that a first interaction with what seems to be the welding of two ends of a long strip of theories representing the evolution of human thought where on one end the ideas encapsulated within the formalism of higher-dimension algebra, topological quantum field theories and loop quantum gravity that incorporate both the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and general relativity reside, and on the other end a narrative non reductionist philosophy of modal aspects stands awaiting critique, is a risky proposition as these two ends seem at first glance to have no common language in spite of their common goal. Both aim at making sense of our Universe. Is then sense something like a Möbius strip?

Below you will find the abstract of the paper submitted to the conference.

While physicist pursue the search for the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and the expedition to find the Higgs that ought to solidify the Standard Model, philosophers keep inquiring as to what the nature of Matter and mind might be and propose various theories. At first sight the high energy physicist or the philosopher, both human, and the elementary particle seem to have nothing in common, however we contend and argue in this paper that we are looking at different scales of what constitutes universal behaviour and use Herman Dooyeweerd’s theory of Modal Aspects to bridge the particle to the mind. To other than a physicist the dual nature of the atom or the so-called elementary particles may be difficult to comprehend and certainly appears unfathomable to intuit. This is due to the fact that the dual nature of Matter finds its anchoring within the theoretical and mathematical frameworks provided by quantum mechanics, the latter tends to not be easily accessible to most individual’s intuition. What would the consequences be if human nature itself had a dual character?

We all know that human nature is both egoistic and altruistic, however it is not often that one considers the fact that egoism is an individual behaviour, while altruism is a collective behaviour. Likewise a particle is an individual manifestation of what we call Matter, while wave nature can be considered characteristic of collective behaviour of the same Matter. Recent advances in experimental physics – the queen of reductionist science – aimed at solving the mysteries of the quantum world has led to a deepening of the mystery rather than easing it dispelling the EPR paradox and pointing out to a conceptional error in this now famous gedanken experiment, while lending some authority and validation to quantum mechanics. The strange features of the quantum world are founded on what Bohr dubbed complementarity or the way a sub particle entity can be observed to behave either as a wave or as a particle; and on Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which says that a quantum entity such as an electron do not avail themselves to a deterministic exact measurement of both position and momentum simultaneously. Such postulates seem to contradict deeply held assumptions by the deterministic and materialistically oriented world of experimental physics where everything, including the atom, can be reduced to a single aspect.

There are mounting calls for newer ways of understanding reality that are capable of handling these apparently strange incomprehensible phenomena revealed through the classical observation of the microscopic quantum world. There is also fundamental progress made in bouncing cosmology theories that bridge general relativity to quantum mechanics and provide some insight into the nature of the Universe and its transition and pre-history through the big bang. The thrust of this paper evolves around two pillars. One is that that the apparent logical fissure emergent in reductionist thought coming from orthodox science and the application of the scientific method is manifest in what we know and do not understand in quantum mechanics can be liaised to our intellectual understanding through the perspective offered by Herman Dooyeweerd’s theory of Modal Aspects. The other is the central and special role humans have in relation to the Universe. Through this approach we will argue that the dual nature of the atom or elementary particles rather than being a strange phenomena is in fact an essential characteristic of what constitutes its nature.

Authors: Kamaran Fathulla and Dannie Jost

So what was LIFT08 like?

For me: fantastic!

The Creativity Utopia Workshop went beyond my expectations. Now the kind of third-loop-learning workshops that I do are usually a bit rough on the participants, you are asked to think, think critically, and to think from a place deep within yourself. I am however fair enough to also give the participants the chance to put me on the spot and make me think then and there. I was on the spot a few times. It is all about authenticity and self-expression, and that is exactly what the workshop was about. Remember that I never claimed to know what creativity is, and I still do not know. Shani Lee did take fantastic notes and I had very valuable feedback from Yann Mauchamp with whom I spent the wee hours after the closing party roaming the streets and clubs of Geneva. Rough is a bit of the nature of my being and there is a certain kindness to that roughness that Yann offered a term for: amour vache.
You see, it is rather simple really, but then that is how I preface anything that is far beyond being simple: lies, all lies. Lies, secrets and digital deception to put it into Genevieve Bell’s words. My own Utopia is one in which the world as is, is right. I am not out to correct the path of evolution on earth or on a mission to make it a better place, nor do I want to correct and make wrong the generations and great minds that got to roam and act on this earth before I lazily showed up last century: the Universe is the way it is, accept it, deal with it, love it. It occurs to me that there is another thought linked to that one, however that other thought is not just rough, it is rude and an assault on the sensitivity and perception of most. That contingent hidden thought is also the central theme of the novel – the fiction – that I am working on now.

Shit happens, and god does not give a damn. It never did, it never will. I may or may not care, but this is my Universe, the one that I inherited from those that came here before me. So, tell me, from Big Bang to Big Bang where on earth is your reality? Who owns what, and what is it that you are responsible for?

Commodities of Interaction | LIFT conference
xposted

Tags: creativity, workshop, evolution, culture, digital, inquiry, human inquiry in action, lift08, liftconference, geneva, switzerland, dannie jost

What Happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin?
January 6, 2008 – 00:11 — Dannie Jost

It took a while, it did. I do not know much about Calvin – any of them, not even the Klein one – however given that what I have heard about Jean Cauvin is that he had a great commitment to the absolute sovereignty and holiness of God…

I propose the following discussion and have taken the liberty to invite the first three discussion starters to start the ball rolling. My idea is more that we all get involved, and I do hope that we have among the participants people who are knowledgeable in Calvin theology and Transhumanism.

For my part what I bring in is a burning passion for dialog and inquiry.In this discussion there is the possibility that we will learn something, and explore the confines of our understanding of technology.

What does Transhumanism and Calvinism have in common?

What is there to learn from looking at the evolution of human thought through technology?

What Happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin? | LIFT conference

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Tags: lift08, liftconference, geneva, switzerland