Category: Science
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The Ship of Theseus sails in Water (and not H2O)
The difference between natural language and the language of science The problem of reference in philosophy deals with relations of words to the world. Do words correspond to some mind-independent objects in the external world? In the following text, I propose the thesis that “reference” is one area where science and everyday affairs take sharp,…
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From Causality to the Supernatural: Babies know it all!
Work in cognitive psychology has shown that young infants possess the concept of causality as an innate feature of their minds. In fact, it has been shown through recent experiments that this notion is so strong that infants can infer the existence of an unseen casual interaction and even an unseen causal agent from just the motion of…
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Big Data or Pig Data?
(A fable on huge amounts of data and why we don’t need models) There was a pig who wanted to be a scientist. He was not interested in models. When asked how he planned on making sense of the world, the pig would say in a deep mysterious voice, “I don’t do models: the world…
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Galileo and Economics
Or ‘Why we can’t blame Galileo for the latest financial crisis!’ 🙂 Modern science can be roughly said to begin with Galileo Galilei. One of the commonly used methods in science is sometimes referred to as the Galilean Style. This style refers to, among other things, the idealizations and abstractions that scientists use in modeling…
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Fiction as Simulation
Studies by neuroscientists have shown that while reading fiction, our brains simulate the action narrated in the text. The information from the text is taken, integrated with the reader’s personal experience, and often those areas of the brain are activated which would also be involved if the reader was actually performing or observing comparable real…
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Alan Turing in a society of machines
I am usually not at a loss for words (at least while writing). But what can one possibly write about that bird, that song; that tragedy, that ecstasy; that lamb, that lion; that beautiful genius called Alan Turing—that hasn’t already been written? What can I add? Don’t forget what Iqbal said: ‘A particle in its place…
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Leo Tolstoy: The Supreme Agent Based Modeler OR What is Agent Based Modeling All About?
I am fond of saying to myself that science is not like art, it is art. However, upon hearing the late Iris Murdoch say that the aims of science and literature are divergent, in that science seeks to clarify whereas literature seeks to mystify, I have been forced to reevaluate my statement. Apparently, some (much?)…
Realm of the SCENSCI 