The Eternal Doorman

See Roche Biochemical Pathways - A legacy in scientific education . I used to work at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, where it was my job to maintain the software on people's personal computers. In order to stay sane I spent most of my spare time at the gym or cycling. I used to have an A2 printout of this poster on my wall. I loved it because it was presented as a kind of circuit. You could imagine simulating cellular metabolism on a computer by modelling reaction rates, concentrations etc. in π-calculus and plotting the physical evolution of the system in terms of some series of, what? Graphs of concentrations, temperatures, and reaction-rates? But they would have to be spatially represented somehow, ... how would you do that? How would you know what these processes you had modelled were actually doing physically? When you think about it this way, you actually find that you are asking yourself "How did they produce this abstraction?" What materials did...

It's good to see it abbreviated like this because then you can go to Proofs and Types and get all the details and it makes a lot more sense. Corresponding to these choices of what rules to allow in sequent calculi there is set of type theories, but the whole scheme is not clear to me.  It's a generalisation of the Curry Howard correspondence. Maybe this is what  The algebras of graph rewriting by Nicolas Behr, Vincent Danos, Ilias Garnier and Tobias Heindel is about? See  Martin Elsman - Deriving a Kronecker-Free Functional Quantum Simulator . Also, Dana Scott thought Martín Escardó's work on predicative formalisations of mathematics (e.g. Predicative Aspects of Order Theory in Univalent Foundations by Tom de Jong and Martín Hötzel Escardó) was important because they're in some strong sense invariant under such transformations of the proof system. See  About Logic - Interview with Dana Scott . And what about the type schemes associated with concurrent contin...

Hordes of Israelis led by Narco Rubio.  Subscribe to Reason2Resist . 

My comment : Ideas are like chaff, I suppose.  Aristotle wrote something like "And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best." Aristotle probably wrote a lot more than this guy Dzogchen did but that's the idea he started with, I think. Solid chaff! 🙂 See  James Cussen interviewing Cognitive Neuroscientist Peter Tse . Subscribe to Saman...

It's interesting how he describes the origin of humanity's  technological urge : "It hasn't rained for a while, let's try throwing another baby into the volcano, ..." See his books  The Neural Basis of Free Will Criterial Causation  and  Free Imagination: The deep roots of creativity, freedom and meaning in the human brain and mind . 47:03 Interesting bit about neural correlates of intention and the ideas of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation . 1:00:33 On sovereignty of imagination. The television documentary series  The Century of the Self  was a 2002 production for the BBC by Adam Curtis. It's crazy shit. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Standard Oil under the Sherman Act for running an illegal monopoly in 1906. In 1908, after Congress blocked the use of Secret Service agents to fight crime and corruption through financial investigation the FBI was set up . Then in 1910 "they" (who knows?) set up the Federal Reserve in...

See  The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI . My comment: Well, I am not a child, but I once walked for six days through the forest on the border with Colombia and Panama. I didn't have any food apart from one tin of fish and a packet of soda crackers that I ate on day one. One day I found some fruit that the monkeys had dropped from a tree and it was delicious! That was between Christmas and New Year in 2021.  I don't think I will ever forget that meal! Here's her full video: See also James Cussen interviewing Cognitive Neuroscientist Peter Tse . Subscribe to Hana Clio . 

My comments: Great discussion. Thank you. Bit about the money supply growing at the rate gold comes out of the ground triggered me a bit, but then I realised that under those conditions the gold price would have been the absolutely most stable measure of monetary value. Or am I wrong? Somebody correct me please if so. The thing that triggered me was that gold doesn't just spontaneously come out of the ground like plants, earthworms or water or something... Gold is ripped out of the ground and dissolved in mercury and the tailings and the mercury go into the river and poor people kill themselves to get it. The gold price rises since 2020 were an economic, social, ecological and public health disaster for the regions of Bolivia where there are gold deposits close to the surface. Evo Morales' government never managed to properly regulate miners because they were (and still are) a powerful political group. It was a stupid mess. 44:34 They haven't thought of everything you can ...

See his article published in IAI News on 10th July 2026. "Considerations of information and computing complicate thermodynamic analysis and contribute precisely nothing."  CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, has recently speculated that information might be as fundamental as mass and energy. As AI hype rolls on, many like him are increasingly tempted to apply computing principles to reality as a whole. Those who support this view rely on the idea that information has a thermodynamic cost, as proposed by physicist Leo Szilard.   See  Happy Birthday Raymond Solomonoff  (in particular 22:33  on how to get information from experiments) and  Mike McCulloch on Why Everyone Should Care About Quantized Intertia . I recently heard that the formalisation of the simplified Taylor/Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem had been completed by Anthropic AI agents . I asked Google's AI how much energy this took and the estimate was of the order of one mil...

My comment : I care about QI, really I do. Mostly because if you're right then there's a whole lot of stuff I have completely misunderstood about physics! I don't mean that facetiously though, even though it probably sounds like that. I'll tell you why I don't get it and it's that the whole of physics basically depends upon the duality of symmetry laws and conversation laws, including everything we think we know about the visible universe and it's size and mass and whatnot, basically everything about Cosmology depends on Noether's principle , and Unruh radiation is, as far as I know (which is not very far at all!) a vacuum fluctuation affect which is precisely where our measurement precision fails to be able to pick out the ground state because basically there's nothing there to measure anymore, so all we see is the noise: the signal is gone. And this means that the conservation laws are gone and so the symmetry principles are thrown out as well. An...