🌐Mind Expanding 30 Oct 2023: have some foresight🔮living in a simulation?🤯neuropolitics🧠🗳assembly theory💭the capitalocene💰dead internet theory🪦
Forbidden by gravity🌌
Mind Expanding is Memia’s *intermittent*1 curation for paid subscribers of links to deeper dives, bigger thinks and other eclectica that I’ve come across while compiling the weekly newsletter. Thanks for reading!
In this issue:
🔮Have some foresight Singapore’s 30-year foresight capabilities.
💫Physics and Cosmology
🌌Forbidden by gravity A new 3D map of matter from the Dark Energy Survey.
🤯 Living in a simulation? The Second Law of Infodynamics and its implications…
🔄 Backwards time travel quantum entanglement to go back in time
🧠Neuroscience / Intelligence / Consciousness
🗳 Neuropolitics fMRI reveals cognitive biases affecting political views.
🤔📈 Consciousness and entropy Consciousness as a side-effect of brain state optimization.
🤖💭 Assembly theory is Intelligence the cooperative assembly of neural sub-networks?
💸Economics
💶 The end of Europe? More from Yanis Varoufakis
💳Why credit money matters Steve Keen challenging orthodox economics again
🤝 Governing for the Common Good Mariana Mazzucato's new economic paper.
💰 Capitalocene is "Anthropocene" as too anthropocentric?
📉 Post-growth vs. green growth degrowth all the way, baby…
🌿 Economics of decarbonisation UBI through carbon pricing?
🇨🇳 Belt and Road 2.0 China's BRI initiative shifts focus to smaller, greener projects
🤖AI
📖Dictionary in embedding space word positions relative to synonyms/antonyms.
👩💼 Turing transformation AI could transform the economy and labour markets by raising everyone UP
👎 Don't be a DECEL Noah Smith chastising those who would slow technological progress
💥Plural noun for crisis?
🌾 Cruel fantasies Monbiot on the UK agricultural reforms .
🌳 Fast-moving ecological crises Mike Joy argues that behaviour change is essential over policy
🔀 Converging crises the world's top industrial countries lack any kind of coherent approach
🌍 Modelling the drivers of Metacrisis Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenburger lay it all out
🎨Miscellany
🪦Dead internet theory the Internet is becoming overwhelmed.
🧬Dublin Longevity Declaration a new proposal for radical life extension research.
📚Reading List
🌏 Earth for all steering humanity away from catastrophe.
🕵️ Foundry fast-moving near-future spy thriller based on semiconductor geopolitics
Something for everyone I hope, enjoy!
🔮Have some foresight
A magnificent paper from the Singapore government's Centre for Strategic Futures, Conversations for the Future Vol. 3 showcases how foresight capabilities are now embedded in their government planning and operations after 30 years of practice:
“For a small, open and globalised country, planning for the future is a vital skillset. The government must have the curiosity and bandwidth to assess
what lies ahead and how future changes will affect Singapore. Long-term thinking, complemented by the agility to adjust strategy and policies to
meet future challenges and seize new opportunities, has long been in our DNA.”
— Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong
They make it look so effortless… but this muscle takes decades of constant exercise to build up and I would argue is a key component of Singapore’s international success in so many areas. My own country Aotearoa has much to learn and emulate.
💫Physics and cosmology
🌌Forbidden by gravity A new view of all the objects in the universe A new model provides the most complete 3D map yet of matter in the universe, using new techniques and data from the Dark Energy Survey:
🤯Are we living in a simulation? University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson has put forward research discovering what he calls Second Law of Infodynamics: Information IS Energy:
“the second law of infodynamics states that the information entropy of systems containing information states must remain constant or decrease over time, reaching a certain minimum value at equilibrium.”
He has proposed experimental tests that could reveal if our reality is actually a computer simulation:
“My studies point to a bizarre and interesting possibility that we don't live in an objective reality and the entire universe might be just a super advanced virtual reality simulation.“
Mindblowing stuff.
🔄Backwards time travel? University of Cambridge physicists have shown that by manipulating quantum entanglement—a feature of quantum theory that causes particles to be intrinsically linked—they can simulate what could happen if one could travel backwards in time.
Examples of chronology-violating particles traversing hypothetical CTCs… Arvidsson-Shukur et al
🧠Neuroscience / intelligence / consciousness
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