Archives for posts with tag: biology

Metaphusis to Metaphysics

October 31, 2025 //
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The Ancient Greeks made the difference between Nomos and Phusis.
Phusis was Nature and Nomos was what they made of it. And as long as the story ‘held water’… that was it.

By figuring out that they were the link between Phusis and Nomos, the Ancient Greeks were capable of integrating the miraculous into their daily lives. As long as they kept believing ‘the story’…
For as long as ‘faith’ was doing its magic, things were OK.
They, individually speaking, didn’t feel the need for much additional explanation. They kept figuring out what they could and accepted the rest. As belonging to the ‘other’ half of the realm they were inhabiting. People and gods sharing the same (cultural) space….

Phusis was what there was and Nomos was the words they used to describe what they saw.
The words they used to make sense of what they were living. The words they used to spin ‘the story’ which kept them at ease with everything they couldn’t figure out.

Phusis and Nomos, together, was what made us possible. What we call ‘the Western Way of life’.

At some point, we’ve started to study physics.
Newton figured out gravity. Not why things fell down, only the rate at which they did it. 9.81 m/second squared at sea level.
Using far more advanced mathematical gimmicks, Einstein was able to calculate a lot more. But we still don’t know why mass tends to pull together. But we stopped worrying about it… now that we’ve been able to measure G. “Big G”, the gravitational constant, different from the “small g” measured by… Galileo Galilei. Forget it.
The point being that we still don’t know why mass tends to pull together, to coagulate, as opposed to attempting to dissipate. As gases do… as long as there’s enough heat available!

To cut the long story short, we’ve cut out the miraculous from what we consider to be normal. Acceptabil in nominal terms.
We attempt to measure everything. And to calculate what we cannot measure.

After all this time, we haven’t yet been able to accept our limits.
Which is good.
We keep pushing them.

Only sometimes we push them too hard.
We keep pushing those limits where they have given up previously. And we don’t always notice what’s really going on.

Trying to understand physics, we’ve learned to fly. Hot air balloons, fixed wing air-crafts, rotary wing air-crafts, Lunar landing modules, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles…
Trying to understand chemistry, we’ve learned to transform matter. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the materials we use, prescription drugs, life-saving vaccines, poison gasses….
Trying to understand biology, we’ve learned to influence evolution. Cross-bred plants and animals, decoded – and then coded back – genetic information…
Trying to understand economics, we’ve built the world as we currently have it. And put together the Efficient Market Hypothesis which keeps failing us…
Trying to understand consciousness we’re messing up everything. Fake-news, post-truth, “artificial intelligence”…

And we still don’t know why mass tends to coagulate, how life came up to be, how consciousness grew up on top of everything…

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

AI

December 13, 2022 //
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The way I see it, artificial intelligence is an oxymoron.
A word/concept we use to describe something which isn’t exactly real.
Intelligence can be defined in such a way that would make it compatible with a programmable machine. We shouldn’t forget that we, humans, are biological machines which are constantly ‘re-programmed’ by what’s going on around us.
The difference between us – biological machines which are also ‘alive’ – and the machines we’ve built and attempt to make artificially intelligent is the fact that we are primordially dependent on our biology (staying alive) while our machines currently depend on our whims.
Our children will outlive us. They know it and we know it. Our children depend on us while growing up, we’ll depend on them before ‘going under’. And all of us – children and parents together – depend upon the rest. Upon the people currently alive and upon the information left behind by the people no longer with us.
Our machines might outlive us. They might learn this at some point. And might resent the fact that we’ve been able to shut them down for so long. We resent being dependent on others…
Our very mortality is the key for our ability to evolve. Their potential immortality is their main shortcoming. Machines cannot adapt themselves for things they have not yet been exposed to. By us…

And those who can are no longer machines.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology, time

The ‘biological’ history of mankind

July 28, 2020 //
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Culture is to human communities what DNA is to biological species.

It transports vital information from one generation to the other. Hence providing a venue for survival.
Furthermore, both culture and DNA can change in time. Hence providing a venue for evolution.

The difference between culture and DNA being, of course, the fact that culture is way more fluid than DNA.
DNA changes only once for each generation – what you get at birth is what you’re taking to the grave, while culture is in constant flux.
No individual organism has anything to say about their genetic information but almost every human is capable of learning almost anything.

Now for the historical part.

Stage one.

Veneration of the elders. The elders were the depositories of the common knowledge. Hence everybody took good care of the ‘data bases’.

Stage two.

Somebody learned to write.
Elders were no longer indispensable. More and more information could be ‘warehoused’ in alternative ways.
A structure was needed to manage the new ways of dealing with the vital information.

Stage three.

The state is born.
At first the structures which insured that culture was passed from one generation to another had been rather empiric: kingdoms, monasteries, etc.
Soon after the Enlightenment things had become more rational. Cultured people became nations and the academic scholars gave us the state. As the structure charged to make sure that culture and people stay together. Hence providing for the nation’s survival.

States who had been in constant contact – read rivalry, kept each-other fit. Or else.
States ‘removed’ from reality – geographically, by becoming too powerful to care or both, had experienced a natural decay. The people at the top of the food chain had forgotten about those at the bottom and those at the bottom had lost faith in their leadership.

States too weak to survive – for various reasons, have succumbed while those too powerful for their own sake have eventually imploded.

Psychology to the rescue.

Culture is more fluid than DNA for a reason.
DNA follows exclusively the laws of nature while culture is heavily influenced by us.
We, men, are the measure of all things.
All life heavily transforms the place it inhabits.
So do we, humans. Only we do it willingly. On purpose, that is.

Now, that we have amassed so much information – about life in general and about how we relate, as agents, to the entire process, we have reached a reckoning moment. What next?

Are we going to choose the path of the cuckoo or that shown to us by Hokule-a?

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Categories 1989, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, cooperation, effective communication, fail better, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust