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Category: storytelling

Atlas Hugged

Atlas Hugged

The renowned evolutionary biologist DS Wilson discusses his novel Atlas Hugged refuting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I have an e-copy if anyone wants a copy. An excerpt: “My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy into a world-destroying libertarian media empire….

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Sapience by Walden Hanes

Sapience by Walden Hanes

Here is his Facebook post discussing some of the AI research used in his book. “The opening scenes of my novel 𝗦𝗔𝗣𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘 take place at the 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗯, a research facility in 2036 that seeks to create 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀, a theoretical form of Artificial Intelligence possessing human-like intuition and self-awareness.   “Early in the novel, the 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗯 pursues its goal using methods I imagined based on current 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 theory. I merged this probabilistic approach with aspects of the 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲…

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Ideological purity

Ideological purity

I recently appreciated this Facecrook comment on the topic, copied below for those not on the crooked media platform: “Purity, as an idea, as a practice, is inherently violent. Nature isn’t pure. Beings are born amid blood and piss and shit, and when we die, our bodies rot and feed the lives of countless souls. Dirt is dirty and its what we’re born from and what we become. Pick up a handful of dirt and you are holding, literally, your…

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Hanzi Freinacht on effective value memes

Hanzi Freinacht on effective value memes

The author of the metamodern treatise Nordic Ideology. From this interview: “I’d like to say then about effective value meme that a lot of people are familiar with something quite similar, namely value memes from the spiral dynamics thinking. And it’s not just in the spiral dynamics framework, it’s all over adult development psychology really, that people have noticed, and it’s not just actually in adult development psychology, it’s also in anthropology. Those anthropologists that still or again start believing…

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The story of our reality

The story of our reality

Interesting article on how what we perceive isn’t always the reality. We make up stories that shape our perceptions. “‘It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,’ says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. ‘We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.’ Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our…

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Kuhn: The structure of scientific revolutions

Kuhn: The structure of scientific revolutions

This excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kuhn about paradigms supports my claim that worldviews are transcended and replaced, not included. Kuhn, by the way, got his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard before going into the philosophy of science. “The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve…

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What is metamodernism?

What is metamodernism?

A few of you have wondered what is metamodernism? One of my FB friends wrote this piece giving a broad overview of the history of the movement and some of it’s implications. The opening paragraph: “What is metamodernism and how can it help us collectively navigate these troubled, transitional times? The meaning of such a word must be disambiguated and its complexity foregrounded. At this point, there is no shortcut. As my colleague Hanzi Freinacht says, there’s no elevator pitch,…

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The psychology of rituals

The psychology of rituals

Subtitle: An integrative review and process-based framework, by Hobson et al. (2018), Personality and Social Psychology Review 22(3). The abstract: “Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical…

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A war broke out in heaven

A war broke out in heaven

See Zak Stein’s reflections on how the pandemic signals the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. This could be an opportunity to transform our dominant cultural worldview if we but accept the responsibility and get busy enacting it. Just a brief excerpt follows. Click on the link and be rewarded with the rest of this inspiring scripture. “One world is now gone and a new one has yet to emerge; we are now at the…

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