The Faith of Beasts The Faith of Beasts is the second book of The Captive's War trilogy, authored by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo: Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, best known as the authors of The Expanse. This book continues the story of a far future human population conquered by an alien empire, the Carryx, and forced to serve that empire in order to survive.

The Faith of Beasts

The Faith of Beasts is the second book of The Captive's War trilogy, authored by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo: Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, best known as the authors of The Expanse. This book continues the story of a far future human population conquered…

Children of Strife Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time books are about exploring different types of minds. In the first book he looked at spider minds, specifically uplifted Portia spiders. In the second it was octopuses and an alien group mind. In the third it was mated birds and another type of mind. In Children of Strife, he continues this theme, looking at the minds of uplifted mantis shrimp and other minds uploaded in new ways.

Children of Strife

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time books are about exploring different types of minds. In the first book he looked at spider minds, specifically uplifted Portia spiders. In the second it was octopuses and an alien group mind. In the third it was mated birds and another type…

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

When I was programming I came across Perl and regular expressions which let you do amazing text searches, and Perl became my hammer. [everything looked like a nail.] This substack post shows how to do pretty much the same stuff just w/ google search. cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

... The main thing is to deny what all that terminology, in its most expansive form, are referring to, without making people think we're denying consciousness completely.

Thanks. I'm not sure Dennett was entirely consistent throughout his career on the terminology. But he certainly seemed pretty hardcore against it in his 1988 paper and 1991 book. He softened a little in Sweet Dreams. So I can understand what you're saying.

#philosophy #philmind

Is the eliminative stance productive? A number of recent conversations, some I've been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that access consciousness, the availability of information for verbal report, reasoning, and behavior, exists. But phenomenal consciousness, the qualia, the what it's like aspect of experience, doesn't. The problem with this view has always been clarifying what exactly is being denied.

Is the eliminative stance productive?

A number of recent conversations, some I've been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that access consciousness, the availability of information…

I fear it means going through a blizzard of ads, but the link shared from this site worked, the Read Full Article link at the bottom.
www.realclearscience.com/2026/03/10/r...

Mostly because I get bored reading description. If it's relevant to the plot, it's fine, otherwise get on with it. Note this is strictly a personal thing. Some people love description and I'm glad there are writers out there who will give them that. It's just not my thing.

Slow Gods Clair North's Slow Gods is a grim look at what happens to far future human societies in the vicinity of a supernova. It's a novel with a strong literary feel, one that explores a number of very distinct cultures, including a hyper-capitalistic dystopia, a highly artistic society, and lots of others in between. Early in the story, an ancient AI entity known as the Slow sends messengers to a number of solar systems in the neighborhood of a binary star system.

Slow Gods

Clair North's Slow Gods is a grim look at what happens to far future human societies in the vicinity of a supernova. It's a novel with a strong literary feel, one that explores a number of very distinct cultures, including a hyper-capitalistic dystopia, a highly artistic society, and…

The lost languages of ancient humans: Listen to stone-age chat The fossilised bones of our ancestors remain silent. So, how can we possibly imagine what our earliest languages sounded like?

The lost languages of ancient humans: Listen to stone-age chat www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Oops, sorry, I'm crossing conversations. Your statement was that it wasn't observable, not about physicality. But we can say the same thing, that you don't get it from just one observation (unless it's something we have an evolved instinct for), but multiple observations.

Maybe another way to say this is that we can't get information from only one measurement, one physical interaction, but require multiple. I'd be onboard with that statement.

But it still doesn't seem to get us to information not being physical. Unless I'm missing something?

Isn't the recognizer measuring the X-Y relation? It may be measuring against the category, the pattern, of such relations that it exists to recognize, but it still seems like a physical measurement, albeit a complex one, but then our perceptions seem to mostly be like that.

[thanks]

Then how do we know any information? How, for instance, do you become aware of the information in this reply? [at least once Bluesky is back up]

Information is not observable? (You have "not" in [brackets] so I may be missing something.)

4-panel comic. (1) [Person with white hat talking to another person.] PERSON 1 with white hat: As Sherlock Holmes said, When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (2) PERSON 2: What about the possibility that you forgot to eliminate a possibility? Or that you eliminated one incorrectly? Both of those remain, too. (3) PERSON 1: You’re being pedantic. It’s just a general rule for deduction. PERSON 2: But it’s a *bad rule*. (4) PERSON 2: How often have you thought, “I can’t find this thing, and I’ve searched the whole house. The only place I haven’t looked is the car, so it *must* be there.” PERSON 2: ...And then it’s never in the car. PERSON 1: *It’s never in the car!*

Eliminating the Impossible

xkcd.com/3210/

Here's a striking visual illusion - the 9 purple dots.

Focus your eyes on the top left dot. That one is more purple than the others, right? Now try another dot... that one becomes the purple one! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41744429/

Might be worth checking out Substack Notes. I know a lot of people have issues with that platform, and I definitely have mine, but there are a lot of discussions there similar to the old Twitter ones.

"The Cyclops," painted by Odilon Redon, 1914. Via Wikipedia

The origin of our eyes over half a billion years ago is looking more and more weird--from a cyclops to four eyes to two. Here's my story (gift link): nyti.ms/4rzisQP

#ScienceFiction #scifi #SpaceOpera

Project Hanuman: information as the fundamental reality Stewart Hotston acknowledges that his Project Hanuman is inspired by Iain Banks' Culture novels. The society he describes, known as the Archology, is very similar to the Culture in many respects. However, where Banks' books usually have the Culture as the dominant civilization technologically, and always have them coming out on top, Hotston's Archology finds itself in a desperate fight, with its survival hanging by a thread.

Project Hanuman: information as the fundamental reality

Stewart Hotston acknowledges that his Project Hanuman is inspired by Iain Banks' Culture novels. The society he describes, known as the Archology, is very similar to the Culture in many respects. However, where Banks' books usually have the…

I was just recommending Andy Clark to someone related to predictive coding theories.

But definitely, no argument from me on accepting the strange inversion.

I think there's value in understanding that the objective account is a construction, a theory formulated from all those subjective views. But the fact that many perspectives are included, covering blind spots of specific perspectives, is what makes it more reliable than any one personal take.

Thanks. I don't know if it's ever possible to take off all glasses completely. It seems like we always view things through some metaphysical filter. But empirical observation is always a crucial reality check.

Thanks! Definitely learning to live with provisional answers is our only option. The expectation that a view somehow not be subject to that seems like a request for a dogma that can't be questioned.

Information is one of those protean terms. Physical-information is thought to exist in all physics. (It's what the black hole information paradox is about.) There are tighter definitions like semantic-information, info useful for a particular agent. Semantic-info is a subset of physical-info.

#philosophy #philmind

The attitude of physicalism Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue that it's incoherent, since we can't give a solid definition of what "physical" means. And so physicalism seems to be built on a foundation on shifting sands.

The attitude of physicalism

Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue that it's incoherent, since we can't give a solid…