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But for whom?: Ricky Gervais thinks bees are more important than humans. The 59-year-old comedian has admitted he believes the world would actually be a “better place” if the human species were to be completely wiped out. Ricky said: “We are part of nature – we are not above it – we are not in charge. We are not even the most important species. “If we were wiped out tomorrow the world would be a better place … it would go back and it would be perfect again.” Microsoft News, “Ricky Gervais: Bees are more important than humans” at MSN He might be joking but then … Who said there was ever a perfect world anyway? Perfection is only possible Read More ›

With Nature (don’t watch this if you are afraid of snakes): Is there any corner of possibility that is not occupied by some sort of life form?

From Physical Review D: We investigate the initial conditions of inflation in a Bianchi I universe that is homogeneous but not isotropic. We use the Eisenhart lift to describe such a theory geometrically as geodesics on a field-space manifold. We construct the phase-space manifold of the theory by considering the tangent bundle of the field space and equipping it with a natural metric. We find that the total volume of this manifold is finite for a wide class of inflationary models. We therefore take the initial conditions to be uniformly distributed over it in accordance with Laplace’s principle of indifference. This results in a normalizable, reparametrization invariant measure on the set of initial conditions of inflation in a Bianchi I Read More ›

Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Search for a Search”. The conservation of information (COI) says the expected active information produced by any combination of random and deterministic processes is guaranteed to be zero or less. Active information is itself the difference between two different probability distributions. We can see the conservation of information is a generalization of Bell’s no-go theorem in quantum mechanics. It contrasts the difference between two probability Read More ›

Well, how do they? It’s not a simple question! Human language differs from animal and plant communication systems in that it enables the transmission of ideas, which are abstractions. Think of the Pythagorean theorem or tripartite government. Many explanations of how human language came to exist seem to be stabbing in the dark.

George Ellis: If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture. “Theoretical physicist defends free will” at Mind Matters News