Bobby Azarian

Exactly, we are not rocks! There is a lot of neuroscience here Sam fans are missing that change the game. Very strange/bold of Sam to completely ignore the mathematical argument of Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch and @LAlbantakis. Read this recent paper:

Erik Hoel & George Ellis' work on causation suggests that mathematically it makes sense to attribute causal power to the higher levels. Have you read this recent paper by Tononi & @LAlbantakis? Completely contradicts the "useful description" stance.

I would suggest reading this recent paper by Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and information theorist. The people claiming we don't have free will are unaware of the theories that put free will in entirely mechanistic and mathematical terms.

Thanks for this interesting paper Charles. I had not heard of the strangely circular Mot Complex. And per your comment last week—I'm still trying to figure out a way to sum up the book's premise in one sentence. If you have any ideas, please send them my way!

This is a great little blog post on making sense of emergence from an evolutionary perspective. Clears up a lot of confusion but at the same time raises new interesting questions.

Yes that's true, and that's why evolution by natural selection is a process of Bayesian model updating. Here's a nice paper on this equivalence:

Yes both things are true. In fact, one of my favorite cyberneticists Valentin Turchin—author of a great book called The Phenomenon of Science—had to flee Russia because the cybernetic worldview in his book went against Soviet philosophy. Knowing the timeline would be interesting.