Really enjoyed this piece from @philipcball.bsky.social! But I’m always confused by the idea that the gene-first view sees life as non-agentic. Doesn’t it just relegate agency from the organism to the gene - and so actually affirm that we can’t do without agency in our biological explanations?

Is Life Just Different? | Quanta Magazine

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

quantamagazine.org

Hi guys, I have a new paper out! It’s about war, entropy, and the inevitability of human extinction, but I promise it’s not as depressing as that summary implies. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Pessimistic Humanism: Extinction, Entropy, and Interwar Philosophy

Philosophers have often held that the antidote to despair is hope, and that hope is temporally oriented towards the future. How do such accounts fare, however, when faced with the prospect of human...

tandfonline.com

My talk at the Rotman (@rotmanphilosophy.bsky.social) Grad Conference on ‘Philosophical Issues in the Life Sciences’ is up on YouTube! Here I ask: Does the theory that mind and life are intrinsically entwined lead to the conclusion that animal groups - and even human societies - can have minds?

Georgie Newson - Thinking Collectives: Biological Naturalism and the Problem of Group Minds

YouTube video by Rotman Institute of Philosophy

youtu.be

Newest addition to the collection: READ MARX in an alley behind the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading

Georgie@georgien.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Slowly building up my collection of philosophical graffiti: ‘Plato’, Brockley, London ‘Zizek 13’, Marseille ‘4D Kant’, Tel Aviv ‘Psychoanalysi’, Milan

Highly depressing required reading. Before starting my PhD I found academics banging on about the decline of academia kind of annoying - like, isn’t it bad everywhere? - but now I get it: there’s something acutely soul crushing about being employed by an institution that doesn’t value what you do.

Will Davies@will-davies.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is about as comprehensive as things get. Would love to know what - if any - pushback it could receive from those representatives of the system itself. But maybe there aren’t any left. Even VCs would agree with much of it www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Nabokov, 1947, sounding like a critic of predictive AI: ‘Recurrent combinations are perceptible as such only when they cannot affect us any more… To map our tomorrows with the help of data supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete non-existence’

My talk at the Rotman (@rotmanphilosophy.bsky.social) Grad Conference on ‘Philosophical Issues in the Life Sciences’ is up on YouTube! Here I ask: Does the theory that mind and life are intrinsically entwined lead to the conclusion that animal groups - and even human societies - can have minds?

Georgie Newson - Thinking Collectives: Biological Naturalism and the Problem of Group Minds

YouTube video by Rotman Institute of Philosophy

youtu.be

This was such a wonderful and genuinely interdisciplinary conference - thank you to Anil for compiling these notes!

Anil Madhavapeddy@anil.recoil.org · 2mo ago

I dropped by Edinburgh for a workshop on 'rewilding the web', with participation from philosophers, technologists, ecologists, architects, mathematicians, authors and landscape planners. anil.recoil.org/notes/rewild... @kathrynnave.eurosky.social @mariafarrell.eurosky.social @robin.berjon.com 🌎

A first co-authored piece with the brilliant @hamishlinehan.bsky.social: Natural Born Historians open.substack.com/pub/thememor...

Natural Born Historians

Hamish Linehan (University of Stirling) and Matthew Sims (Macquarie University)

open.substack.com

How would #psychology look through the lens of @michelamassimi.bsky.social's Perspectival Realism? In her new paper, Suilin Lavelle defends the pursuit of Majority World psychological frameworks and experiments beyond WEIRD biases 👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #philsky #psysky #cogsci

Grotesque, and a corroboration of one of my most cherished stupidly macroscale cultural theories: that the science fiction tradition is a secular mythology created by the West to symbolically metabolise the dynamics of Empire.

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 2mo ago

This is real. www.whitehouse.gov/aliens/

Whenever I feel frustrated by the staid formalities of contemporary academic journals, I think about William James publishing an essay in ‘Mind’ in 1882 and being allowed to include an appendix which was literally just a long poem about Hegel he wrote when zonked out on nitrous oxide

Pretty based. 42,300 words is quite long though. Would be cool if someone invented a technology that could summarise and synthesise large textual data sets

Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical

nytimes.com

I mean yeah it is the most beautiful day of the year so far, but if for some reason you want to spend it huddled inside reading about cold Canadian cemeteries on my substack, then have I got a treat for you

3: Mount Pleasant, Toronto

Colonial suburbia and the difficulties of acknowledgement

open.substack.com

When I was a teenager I tried to make my way through the Modern Library’s top 100, but stopped when I realised there were more books on there by DH Lawrence than by women. I guess this is at least an improvement in that respect, but they could’ve thrown Sons and Lovers in for old time’s sake

Jeremy Noel-Tod@jntod.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Sucks to be DH Lawrence right now

Depressed by the number of people taken in by this misleading chart (which only shows %-point change over a 2-year period) & message (‘studying what you love is a good investment’). Reading Plato won’t get you a job. Nor will anything else. We live in economic polycrisis. You may as well read Plato

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3mo ago

All the philosophy students who pursued their passion made a wise decision. Learning how to think is a always a good investment. Psychology grads are not doing too badly on the job market either.

Respect for Rovelli, but this is a pretty bad philosophical intervention. ‘If physicalism about the mind is true, then there simply is no hard problem of consciousness!’ Well, yeah. That’s because the ‘hard problem’ is deciding whether physicalism is true.

There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ | NOEMA

Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.

noemamag.com

This is so good. ‘While other diasporas have a physical homeland, our only true homeland is the future: as in the religious concept of a Messianic era when everyone is free and safe.’

Equator@equatormag.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Rising antisemitism is the UK is real, but mainstream commentary on its meaning and causes has been worse than useless. We spoke to Barnaby Raine about the moral panic deployed by those who claim to be "protecting Jews". www.equator.org/articles/goo...

Extremely depressing national picture but so great to see the Green gains in Oxford. I was out leafleting and door-knocking the last few weeks and it felt so good to be able to tell people about policies (rent controls! Oxford living wage!!) that actually offer hope. Big congrats to the candidates 💚

Oxford Clarion@oxfordclarion.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The final scores on Oxford City Council, combining tonight’s 24 elections with the 24 from 2024, are: 🌹 Labour 20 💚 Green 13 🔶 LibDem 9 🟪 IOA 4 ◻️ Ind 2 This gives the Greens and LibDems a chance to run the council in coalition if they choose. Here’s tonight on a map. Thanks for following along!

So excited to be speaking in a few weeks at what promises to be an extremely cool event on ‘Rewilding the Web’! My talk is called ‘Beyond Self-Organisation: Libertarian Ecologies, Right and Left’. In this talk…

Kate Nave@kathrynnave.eurosky.social · 3mo ago

Rewilding the Web will take place @schoolofppls.bsky.social on the 28/29th May! With @philosodave.bsky.social, @anil.recoil.org + Jon Crowcroft, Elena Rovenskaya, Orit Halpern, @georgien.bsky.social, @r-emrys.bsky.social, @blaine.bsky.social + others Register: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rewilding-...

Random but — I was recently asked by a friend who studies complexity economics if I could send over some English-language sources on cybernetics/complexity science in China (something I became briefly obsessed with earlier this year). I’m gonna post a thread here, in case it’s useful to anyone!

Next week, I’m heading to Canada to speak at the @rotmanphilosophy.bsky.social Graduate Conference on ‘Philosophical Issues in the Life Sciences’. My paper is called ‘Thinking Collectives: Biological Naturalism and the Problem of Group Minds.’ Abstract below! 1/

I’ve never watched or read any of Kluge’s stuff, but this piece by Luke makes me extremely excited to. I was particularly taken by Kluge’s faintly Humean take on the associative, cinematic mind: ‘Film takes recourse to the spontaneous workings of the imaginative faculty’.

Los Angeles Review of Books@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Though Kluge, who died last month at the age of 94, has been typecast as the worthy, old-world éminence grise, his work isn’t so easily pinned down." Luke Dunne on Alexander Kluge: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/alexander-kluge-tribute-filmmaker-writer-new-german-cinema/

London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 3mo ago

‘There were long, argumentative pieces, densely intuitive, often obscure, inviting readers to consider how the poem was supposed to address the world, if it could rise to the occasion.’ The editors on J.H. Prynne, who died on Wednesday, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ap...

Fluid thinking about collective intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Fluid thinking about collective intelligence - Nature Machine Intelligence

Collectives exhibit intrinsically different operations, resources and limitations depending on whether their components are static or mobile. Werfel examines learning in mobile collectives and shows h...

nature.com

Camillo Golgi, nerve cells in a dog’s olfactory bulb (1885). I love these early neurobiological illustrations so much; they look almost like they could be works of Russian suprematism

‘There are many more fires, hunts and stone tools in Mithen’s story than babies and comforted children, and when it comes to thinking about talking it isn’t immediately obvious why that should be so.’ Francis Gooding investigates how we got to language. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Francis Gooding · Rocket Science for Monkeys: Sounds before Words

So far as we know, true symbolic language is unique to the human species. The question of how we alone came to be...

lrb.co.uk

How do people decide whether it’s wrong to harm a pig? A chimp? A baby? In the West, these judgments are based more on *experience* (being able to feel) than on *agency* (being able to think and act) New study finds that same pattern across other cultures journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I’m pretty sceptical about the legitimacy of these kinds of surveys, but it would be interesting if ‘empathy’ in young people declined through the 1990s and then rose after the financial crash: perfectly in line the rise and fall of the neoliberal consensus

cade@caderedkey.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Absolutely. I teach high school, Every year is better. I sincerely believe all the phone panic is actually Covid's effects. Also schools focused so much on mental health coming back kids are social/emotional ahead of pre Covid www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

I’ve been speculating for a while that Wilhelm Reich’s ‘orgone energy’ - often dismissed as oversexed New Age nonsense - might have stemmed from his experiences with what we’d now call ASMR. I just found this cool paper, which tries to empirically unify orgone, qi, prana, & other ‘vital energies’

Therapeutic Sensations: A New Unifying Concept

Physical sensations of tingling, warmth, dull pain, and heaviness are a common phenomenon in mind-body interventions, such as acupuncture, hypnotherapy, osteopathy, qigong, meditation, and progressive...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov