Podcasts about Ontology

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Larry Swanson, creator of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast, for their second conversation together. The two cover a wide range of interconnected topics, starting with a correction Larry makes about the true origin of the term "artificial intelligence," tracing it back to the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and its distinction from Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. From there, the conversation moves through the history and structure of knowledge graphs, ontologies, RDF (Resource Description Framework), and the W3C standards process, touching on concepts like the T-box, A-box, and C-box, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Semantic Web paper. Stewart and Larry also dig into the limitations of large language models — particularly around reasoning, confabulation, and what Larry describes as "cognitive surrender" — and why symbolic AI and knowledge engineering may hold answers that the neural network world hasn't fully embraced. The episode also ventures into consciousness, panpsychism, Michael Pollan's ideas, and Stewart's own hands-on experience vibe coding a personal chatbot to replace functionality he feels he's lost with recent changes to Claude. Larry's podcast can be found at kgi.fm.Timestamps00:00 - Stewart introduces Larry Swanson; Larry corrects the record on AI's origin, distinguishing it from Norbert Wiener's cybernetics at the 1956 Dartmouth conference.05:00 - Larry discusses interviewing semantic web paper coauthors on its 25th anniversary; RDF's hidden ubiquity compared to SIM cards powering everything invisibly.10:00 - Knowledge graphs explained through t-box terms, a-box assertions, and Dave McComb's c-box; IKEA's three-layer knowledge graph as a practical example.15:00 - Stewart connects metadata complexity to AI needs; faceted search explained as c-box attributes driving product filtering experiences.20:00 - RDF 1.2 reification standards discussed; W3C's rigorous recommendation process powering governments and enterprises worldwide through collaborative standards.25:00 - Cyc project examined as influential "successful failure"; Pat Hayes bringing description logic into semantic web; LLMs lacking true reasoning capability.30:00 - Epistemological fault lines between human and computer intelligence; cognitive surrender paper reveals no intelligence threshold protects against AI manipulation.35:00 - Stewart's Claude regression problem drives chatbot vibe coding quest; small language models and domain-specific approaches explored as alternatives.40:00 - Consciousness discussion through Michael Pollan's panpsychism lens; language versus cognition disconnect revealing LLMs as pure token-stitching without genuine thought.45:00 - Context graphs as purpose-built knowledge graphs for AI; Stewart's planning agents versus coding agents architecture and ground truth verification problem.50:00 - Docs-as-code versus code-as-docs paradigm shift; knowledge graphs as universal verifiers against validated facts; RDF 1.2 enabling provenance and degrees of certainty.55:00 - Jessica Talisman's Knowledge Graph Academy recommended for onboarding; kgi.fm podcast shared; knowledge representation community needs better abstraction for wider adoption.Key Insights1. The term "artificial intelligence" was not a marketing gimmick but was coined deliberately at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference to distinguish the work of John McCarthy from Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. The two camps represented genuinely different approaches, and the AI label was a form of intentional intellectual branding rather than empty promotion.2. The semantic web, often called the most successful failure in technology history, has quietly embedded itself everywhere despite never achieving its original vision. Technologies like RDF power metadata standards inside every Adobe product and form the invisible backbone of government systems, enterprise data infrastructure, and cultural heritage organizations worldwide.3. Knowledge graphs are best understood as an ontology combined with all the instances that populate it. The distinction between things and strings, popularized by Google in 2012, captures the core idea that knowledge representation is about concepts as distinct from the labels we give them.4. The t-box, a-box, and c-box framework offers a practical model for understanding knowledge architecture. The t-box holds terminology and concepts, the a-box holds assertions about specific instances, and the c-box manages the attributes, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies that sit between them and enable things like faceted search.5. Large language models produce fluent, convincing output but lack genuine reasoning, epistemological grounding, or judgment. Research on cognitive surrender shows that even people who understand how LLMs work are still susceptible to being misled by their fluency, meaning intelligence and awareness offer no reliable protection against being deceived.6. The gap between language and cognition matters deeply when evaluating AI. Evidence from people with aphasia shows that thinking can occur without language, which suggests LLMs, being purely language-based systems, are missing a fundamental layer of cognition that cannot be recovered through more tokens or better training.7. Knowledge graphs and RDF-based representation are well suited to the problem of verification and grounding in AI systems. Rather than relying on vectorized embeddings of language, a knowledge graph can store validated, provenance-tracked facts with degrees of certainty, making it a natural foundation for building trustworthy AI applications.

What did "materialism" actually mean to the ancients, and how does it differ from our modern scientific understanding? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Max Wade (Ph.D., Boston College) to bridge the gap between ancient Greek ontology and modern philosophical debates.We dive deep into the "weirdness" of ancient thought, exploring why the Stoics believed in physical gods and why the Epicureans were the only true ancient materialists. Dr. Wade challenges the secularized modern reading of Socrates and Plato, revealing how their theories of divine design were actually a reactionary response to pre-Socratic natural philosophy.In this episode, we discuss:The Miriology of Being: Why the relationship between parts and wholes is the key to unlocking ancient ontology.Active vs. Passive Matter: The crucial distinction that separates Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics from the Epicureans.The "Swerve": Why materialism and determinism were considered incompatible in the ancient world.Plato's Atlantis & Egyptian Wisdom: Why reading Plato literally misses his point about the soul's forgetfulness and eternal truth.Marxism & Hegel: How modern materialism is often a misreading of ancient concepts through a German Idealist lens.About Our Guest: Dr. Max Wade is a scholar of ancient philosophy whose dissertation focused on Plotinus' Ontology of Artifacts. Follow his work at maxway.substack.com.Send us Fan Mail Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian, Drea, Free Beer 

Explore how AI is redefining the boundaries between uniquely human intelligence and machine capabilities, and discover which aspects of intelligence remain distinctly human. This episode delves into building smarter, more efficient organizations by leveraging the complementary strengths of people and AI—focusing on the critical role of an ontology-first approach, knowledge graphs, and live digital twins in digital transformation. Listeners will gain actionable insights into integrating dynamic processes for real-time decision-making, structuring enterprise knowledge, and eliminating organizational inefficiencies using practical, AI-powered solutions.

Who God is, gives pattern to what God does. The Trinitarian vision sees ordinary life as a participation in the life of God that is both being and doing.

1.1 Tl;dr Alignment is often conceptualized as AIs helping humans achieve their goals: AIs that increase people's agency and empowerment; AIs that are helpful, corrigible, and/or obedient; AIs that avoid manipulating people. But that last one—manipulation—points to a challenge for all these desiderata: a human's goals are themselves under-determined and manipulable, and it's awfully hard to pin down a principled distinction between changing people's goals in a good way (“providing counsel”, “providing information”, “sharing ideas”) versus a bad way (“manipulating”, “brainwashing”). The manipulability of human desires is hardly a new observation in the alignment literature, but it remains unsolved (see lit review in §3 below). In this post I will propose an explanation of how we humans intuitively conceptualize the distinction between guidance (good) vs manipulation (bad), in case it helps us brainstorm how we might put that distinction into AI. …But (spoiler alert) it turns out not to really help, because I'll argue that we humans think about it in a deeply incoherent way, intimately tied to our scientifically-inaccurate intuitions around free will. I jump from there into a broader review of every approach that I can think of for writing a “True Name” for manipulation or [...] ---Outline:(00:13) 1.1. Tl;dr(02:04) 1.2. Bigger-picture context: why is this issue so important to me?(04:48) 2. How do humans intuitively define empowerment, agency, manipulation, etc.?(04:56) 2.1. Background: human free will intuitions(09:20) 2.2. Our free-will-infused intuitive notions of empowerment, agency, manipulation, corrigibility, responsibility, etc.(12:00) 2.3. Another dimension: counsel vs manipulation as an emotive conjugation(13:07) 3. If the intuitive definitions of manipulation etc. reside in a messed-up ontology, has the alignment literature found any alternative, better way to define these concepts?[... 12 more sections]--- First published: May 11th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vzHtHHBJoKATi5SeK/empowerment-corrigibility-etc-are-simple-abstractions-of-a --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Stewart Alsop sat down with Michael Shackelford to discuss their experiences building applications through vibe coding—the practice of using AI to create software without traditional programming expertise. Stewart, who runs the AI Whispers community in Buenos Aires and hosts the Crazy Wisdom podcast (with over 660 interviews), shared how he went from teaching people prompt engineering to building his own video conferencing software as a Riverside.fm replacement, while Michael opened up about his year-long journey creating Genrupt Inc, an AI-powered content generation tool for e-commerce sellers. The conversation covered everything from the decline in quality of Claude's reasoning capabilities and how Chinese companies used distillation attacks to copy Anthropic's models, to the importance of spaced repetition systems for managing knowledge in the age of LLMs, with both sharing battle-tested prompting strategies like asking AI to "explain it to me in genius terms" and using deep research queries to reverse engineer how competitors build their products.Show Notes:- Dan Martell's book "Buy Back Your Time" was mentioned as one of the best business books for thinking about life and business- Check out John Vervaeke's "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" for understanding relevance realization and why AI fundamentally cannot determine what's relevant to humans without being toldTimestamps00:00 Michael discusses being exhausted from getting his app ready for launch, working nonstop with AI to prepare landing page for podcast traffic driving beta signups05:00 Stewart explains starting AI Whispers in Buenos Aires after leaving OpenAI vendor company, meeting early adopters like Torin who was building mind-reading EEG technology10:00 Discussion of how corporations resist AI adoption due to political games and job security fears while some companies use AI as excuse for pandemic-era layoffs15:00 Stewart describes teaching workshops on using LLMs as linguistic tools rather than coding tools, noting technical people often lack humanities background needed for prompting20:00 Explaining chatbot wrappers, API calls, and how Anthropic's reasoning quality declined after Chinese distillation attacks copied their secret sauce developed with philosophers25:00 Technical discussion of model training, fine-tuning versus RAG for new information, and different approaches to updating AI knowledge beyond initial training30:00 Stewart describes building podcast recording software to replace expensive Riverside, struggling with syncing audio and video files across different computer clocks35:00 Discussion of critical factors in vibe coding, discovering unknown technical requirements, and how AIs don't automatically reveal missing information40:00 Stewart's reverse engineering process using deep research function to study competitors' hiring and technology stacks, separating planning agents from coding agents45:00 Prompting techniques including "explain like I know everything" and using spaced repetition systems to capture valuable prompts and technical knowledge50:00 Michael explains his Generux app for generating ecommerce content using Amazon review data analysis to inform high-converting listing images and videos55:00 Discussion of founder mentality involving self-delusion about project timelines, Michael working nine-plus hours daily for nine months on app development60:00 Comparing Amazon's expert software to prosumer software approach, discussing distribution challenges and future robotics applications for customized products65:00 Stewart demonstrates spaced repetition app for memory improvement and knowledge retention, explaining relevance realization problem that AI agents cannot solve without embodimentKey Insights1. Stewart Alsop started AI Whisperers in Buenos Aires after leaving his role at Invisible Technologies, which was OpenAI's largest vendor for RLHF work. He noticed that machine learning engineers at tech companies lacked the humanities background needed to properly interact with large language models, which are fundamentally linguistic tools. This led him to create weekly workshops teaching non-technical people how to use AI effectively, running events every Thursday for two years straight. The group attracted intense geeks from the start and eventually led to Stewart speaking right after Vitalik Buterin at DevConnect, marking a significant milestone for the community.2. Large corporations are resistant to AI adoption due to multiple factors including political dynamics within organizations and employees fearing job loss. Many companies that grew during the pandemic are now using AI as an excuse to downsize when the real issue is inefficiency from rapid expansion. Stewart observed that even technical people in machine learning often don't understand how to properly use AI tools because they lack linguistic and humanities training. The fundamental problem is educational, requiring companies to train people how to use these new tools while those same people resist learning them.3. Vibe coding has evolved significantly with Claude Code being a game changer that reduced the technical barrier to entry. Before Claude Code, developers needed substantial technical knowledge to work through constant doom loops and debugging cycles. The success of coding AI tools stems from thirty years of testing infrastructure that provides clear yes or no feedback on whether code works. This infrastructure doesn't exist in the same way for manufacturing, science, and other fields, which is why software became the dominant area for AI assistance initially.4. Claude's quality degradation over recent months resulted from multiple factors including distillation attacks by Chinese companies who reverse engineered Anthropic's reasoning capabilities. Anthropic had hired philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists to develop exceptional reasoning in Claude 4.5, but this was expensive to run. When Chinese models like Kimi copied these capabilities at one tenth the cost, and when mainstream users flooded the platform before Anthropic's planned IPO, the company had to reduce quality to manage computational costs. This represents a significant loss for power users who relied on Claude's superior reasoning abilities.5. Stewart built a podcast recording application to replace Riverside because he needed API access to automate workflows, which Riverside wanted one thousand dollars monthly to provide. The technical challenge involves syncing audio and video from local recordings on multiple computers with different clocks through a server, then merging them so voices match lip movements. This problem requires understanding complex timing issues across different network conditions and file formats. Stewart has been working through AI psychosis for months on this FFMPEG pipeline problem, illustrating how vibe coding still requires building intuition about technical problems even without traditional coding knowledge.6. The transition from expert software to prosumer software represents a major opportunity for AI-enabled tools. Expert software like Photoshop, Blender, and terminal interfaces have extreme complexity that intimidates beginners, but AI is making these capabilities accessible through natural language. The reign of specialists is ending as generalists with broad knowledge and curiosity can now build complete applications by leveraging AI to fill technical gaps. This shift particularly benefits entrepreneurs and founders who specialize in getting into difficult situations and figuring them out, even when they originally thought tasks would be easier than they turned out to be.7. Building applications with AI requires accepting massive time investments beyond initial estimates and developing strategies for overcoming knowledge gaps. Michael estimated his ecommerce content generation app would take months but spent nearly a year working over nine hours daily, while Stewart spent months solving audio-video sync issues. Success requires using tools like deep research to understand how competitors solve problems, maintaining separate planning and coding agents, and learning to ask the right questions. The key insight is that vibe coders can achieve ninety percent of functionality independently, but the final ten percent often requires understanding specific technical concepts that AI cannot intuit without proper context and domain knowledge.

Bright on Buddhism - Episode 140 - Who is Bodhidharma? What is his significance to East Asian Buddhism? What are some legends about him?Resources: charya, Raghu (2017), Shanon, Sidharth (ed.), Bodhidharma Retold – A Journey from Sailum to Shaolin, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, ISBN 978-81-208-4152-9Broughton, Jeffrey L. (1999), The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-21972-4Buswell, Robert E., ed. (2004), Encyclopedia of Buddhism, vol. 1, Macmillan, ISBN 0-02-865718-7Cole, Alan (2009), Fathering Your Father: The Zen of Fabrication in Tang Buddhism, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-25485-5Dumoulin, Heinrich; Heisig, James; Knitter, Paul F. (2005). Zen Buddhism: India and China. World Wisdom, Inc. ISBN 978-0-941532-89-1.Faure, Bernard (1986), "Bodhidharma as Textual and Religious Paradigm", History of Religions, 25 (3): 187–198, doi:10.1086/463039, S2CID 145809479, archived from the original on 2007-09-28, retrieved 2007-02-13Ferguson, Andrew (2000), Zen's Chinese Heritage: The Masters and their Teachings, Somerville: Wisdom Publications, ISBN 0-86171-163-7Garfinkel, Perry (2006), Buddha or Bust, Harmony Books, ISBN 978-1-4000-8217-9Henning, Stanley (1994), "Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan" (PDF), Journal of the Chenstyle Taijiquan Research Association of Hawaii, 2 (3): 1–7, archived from the original on 2011-02-23, retrieved 2019-10-19Henning, Stan; Green, Tom (2001), "Folklore in the Martial Arts", in Green, Thomas A. (ed.), Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIOJorgensen, John (2000), "Bodhidharma", in Johnston, William M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Monasticism: A-L, Taylor & FrancisKambe, Tstuomu (2012), Bodhidharma. A collection of stories from Chinese literature (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-11-06, retrieved 2011-11-23McRae, John R. (2000), "The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism", in Heine, Steven; Wright, Dale S. (eds.), The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, Oxford University Press, archived from the original on 2012-07-25, retrieved 2006-11-30.McRae, John R. (2003), Seeing Through Zen. Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, The University Press Group Ltd, ISBN 978-0-520-23798-8McRae, John R. (2004), Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, University of California PressPine, Red, ed. (1989), The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma: A Bilingual Edition, New York: North Point Press, ISBN 0-86547-399-4Pine, Red, ed. (2009), The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 978-0-86547-399-7Sekida, Katsuki (1996). Two Zen Classics. Mumonkan, The Gateless Gate. Hekiganroku, The Blue Cliff Records. Translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida. New York / Tokyo: Weatherhill.Shahar, Meir (2008). The Shaolin Monastery: history, religion, and the Chinese martial arts. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3110-3.Sutton, Florin Giripescu (1991), Existence and Enlightenment in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra: A Study in the Ontology and Epistemology of the Yogācāra School of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Albany: State University of New York Press, ISBN 0-7914-0172-3.Williams, Paul (1989), Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Psychology Press, ISBN 0-415-02537-0_________________________________If you like our show and would like to support us, we encourage you to give your money or resources to a worthy cause. We can get through this. Our strongest weapon is solidarity. Stay strong and help where you can. Thank you.Do you have a question about Buddhism that you'd like us to discuss? Let us know by emailing us at Bright.On.Buddhism@gmail.com.Credits:Nick Bright: Script, Cover Art, Music, Voice of Hearer, Co-HostProven Paradox: Editing, mixing and mastering, social media, Voice of Hermit, Co-Host

There's a cannon in most towns. Next to a plaque nobody reads. Families take photos there during the day. Men cruise there at night, cars idling, windows fogged, child seats in the back. That gap is exactly what legacy does.In this episode, Gavin Stephens looks at legacy as a cultural technology — not a tribute, but a selection mechanism. Monuments don't remember everyone. They decide who counts. And once you see that, you can't unsee it in vision boards, retirement plans, factory jobs, productivity apps, and the White House.Topics include: Camus and absurdism, the myth of meritocracy, why retirement is backwards, the self-help industry as hierarchy maintenance, and why making a podcast about not needing to be remembered is not ironic — it's just honest.Park Bench Ontology is hosted by Juno-nominated comedian and Canadian Screen Award-winning writer Gavin Stephens. Equal parts philosophy, stand-up, and cultural diagnosis.Welcome to the Collapse.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Joshua Bate, founder of Bonfires.ai and DeciWorld, for a wide-ranging conversation covering knowledge management, graph technology, ontologies, decentralized science, and the future of how humans organize and share information. They break down the differences between personal and enterprise knowledge management, explore why flat ontological graphs may be the key to making diverse knowledge bases interoperable, and get into why traditional RAG systems break down at scale and how graph RAG offers a more principled solution. The conversation expands into the philosophy of categorization, the slow death of basic "gentleman science" under institutional pressures, and how decentralized protocols might restore a kind of mycelial knowledge network connecting small groups of researchers, enthusiasts, and communities — much like the original spirit of the encyclopedia before it was co-opted by institutions. You can learn more about Joshua's work at bonfires.ai and deci.world or follow him on X at @Bonfiresai and @DeSciWorld.Timestamps00:00 - Stewart introduces Joshua Bate, founder of Bonfires.ai, discussing personal versus enterprise knowledge management and their fundamental differences at scale.05:00 - Joshua explains ontologies as classifiers for knowledge structures, describing their two-year search for a perfect ontology and ultimately building a flat, ontology-less graph protocol.10:00 - Stewart connects categorization to shamanic practice and intercategorical theory, noting how major companies like Netflix and Yahoo built graph-based ontologies while the discipline remains underappreciated philosophically.15:00 - Joshua traces Bonfires origins through decentralized science, explaining how NFT community excitement inspired redirecting capital toward funding unconventional researchers locked out of institutional systems.20:00 - Joshua describes building federated knowledge networks through hackathons and conferences, comparing the vision to what Wikipedia could have been with decentralized incentive structures.25:00 - Discussion shifts toward inevitable collapse of rigid scientific institutions, debating patchwork age theory, nation-state fragmentation, and rhizomatic versus arboreal knowledge structures.30:00 - Joshua articulates the mycelial network vision, enabling direct cross-cultural information access where individuals control their own narrative lens, warning against collective we thinking and authoritarianism.Key Insights1. Knowledge management exists on a spectrum from personal to enterprise, but the founder of Bonfires argues this split is artificial. He believes knowledge itself does not respect those boundaries, and that small groups, researchers, hobbyists, and large institutions all possess knowledge that can and should interoperate with each other.2. After two and a half years of searching for the perfect ontology to structure their knowledge graph, the team concluded that no perfect ontology exists. Their solution was to build the flattest possible graph structure with only events, entities, and edges, creating a base layer others can build specialized ontologies on top of.3. Graph-based knowledge systems are more efficient than traditional databases for AI traversal because once a graph is computed, it is relatively free to query. Graph RAG combines the discovery power of vector search with the structured precision of graph traversal, solving many hallucination problems associated with standard retrieval augmented generation.4. Basic scientific research, the soil from which applied discoveries grow, is deteriorating because institutional funding structures only reward commercially viable outcomes. The founder built his platform partly to redirect community-driven capital toward researchers who are doing important work without institutional support.5. The institutionalization of science has historically blocked the open exchange of ideas that drove the original scientific revolution. The human spirit for open inquiry has not changed, but people cannot pursue it without financial support, and building decentralized infrastructure could restore that possibility.6. A federated knowledge network would allow individuals to access information from any contributor and filter it through their own preferred lens, rather than receiving information pre-filtered by centralized platforms. This represents a form of information symmetry similar to how mycelial networks distribute nutrients across a forest.7. The concern is not whether current scientific and governmental institutions will change but in what direction the rebuilding goes. Those capitalizing on the transition carry the same incentives as the previous era, which risks reproducing the same problems inside new structures.

400 years ago a frightened philosopher cut reality in two, inner and outer. Mind and world. We have been living inside of that split ever since and it is the reason your inner work keeps gong deeper but never arrives. This teaching identifies the wound plainly, shows how it lives in the body and offers a way back to the world that was never actually dead. Come home to the heart. If you appreciate my work please consider a donation to: "paypal.me/newdayglobal". You can also search for me on Substack.com. Thank you!

400 years ago a frightened philosopher cut reality in two, inner and outer. Mind and world. We have been living inside of that split ever since and it is the reason your inner work keeps gong deeper but never arrives. This teaching identifies the wound plainly, shows how it lives in the body and offers a way back to the world that was never actually dead. Come home to the heart. If you appreciate my work please consider a donation to: "paypal.me/newdayglobal". You can also search for me on Substack.com. Thank you!

In this episode of Genetics in Your World, GSA Early Career Scientists Multimedia Subcommittee member Luke Arnce interviews Caitlin Peaslee of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University about her research. Read her paper titled, "Mapping whole-organism genetic comorbidities across model species using unified ontologies," published in the April 2026 issue of GENETICS: https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyag038 This study developed a cross-species computational framework, CoMo DBM, to analyze 204 mouse genes that caused non-obstructive azoospermia and mapped their phenotype associations across human, zebrafish, fruit fly, and roundworm databases. Music: Loopster Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/#GeneEditing #cancer #GeneOntology Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Build a shared semantic foundation for your enterprise data in Microsoft Fabric IQ. Generate a full business ontology from an existing Power BI semantic model, map entities and relationships, and embed real-time operational signals alongside business rules that live inside the ontology with the data and its meaning. From there, trace cascading operational impacts across your business through the relationship graph, stand up Operations Agents in natural language with Teams-based actions, and connect the same ontology as a knowledge source in Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry.  Chafia Aouissi, Fabric IQ Principal PM Manager, shares how to model your business operations, embed intelligence in your data, and deploy agents that act on it.  ► QUICK LINKS:  00:00 - Unify models & data with Fabric IQ 01:12 - Generate an ontology 02:27 - Bring in Power BI reports 03:08 - View across multiple data sources 04:23 - Define rules 05:18 - Built-in ontology graph 06:03 - Fabric IQ agents 08:24 - Fabric IQ as Knowledge Source 08:54 - Wrap up ► Link References Get started at https://aka.ms/FabricIQ ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics  

Langdon and Eden dive into the collapse, tackling Event Factory, the first book from Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels. Meaning disappears, rituals empty of signal, and the malaise of our urban existence is revealed. But also, potentials are exposed, connections are made, and understanding hinted at. Music played: Ordh - Apis Bull https://ordh.bandcamp.com/track/apis-bull

Learn why an organization's ontology, a structured framework for how a business defines, connects, and makes sense of its data and knowledge, is the most valuable and most overlooked asset in any AI strategy. Jessica Talisman, CEO and Founder of The Ontology Pipeline, and Tony Seale, Founder of The Knowledge Graph Guys, break down what it actually takes to build trusted AI, covering everything from semantic layers and knowledge graphs to why provenance is non-negotiable. They explain how organizations can start building their knowledge infrastructure for AI, and make the case for why their ontology is their most defensible competitive asset. Key Moments BI Semantic Layers vs. AI Context Layers (02:21): Explore the evolution from 1990s business vocabularies to modern AI context layers. Learn why ontologies are essential for connecting data points beyond traditional BI. Why Knowledge Graphs are Essential for AI (09:22): Understand why relational databases fail AI's needs. Tony explains how knowledge graphs turn data relationships into "first-class citizens" using open standards. How to Build Your First Business Ontology (17:04): Stop over-modeling and start delivering. Learn how to anchor your data strategy to high-value use cases and business-language competency questions. Solving the AI Provenance & Lineage Gap (34:19): Why LLMs lack built-in reliability. Jessica discusses the necessity of injecting data lineage at the retrieval layer to verify AI accuracy and prevent hallucinations. Why Your Ontology is Your Most Valuable IP (39:27): In the age of commodity AI, your internal data relationships are your only moat. Discover why hosting your ontology with third parties puts your core assets at risk. Key Quotes “If you let somebody else take your ontology, learn the essence of what it is that you know that's out of distribution with the rest of the world, you've just given them everything valuable about your company.” - Tony Seale “The accuracy of the information you receive is reliant upon the lineage or the provenance of the information received from an LLM. It's so important." - Jessica Talisman “As a business leader, you need to be looking below the surface to the data infrastructure. The key trick to do right now is to turn the power of the models that we've got back upon your own internal infrastructure to build out these rich ontologies and to connect your information.” - Tony Seale "Your ontology is like your thumbprint, your digital thumbprint for your organization. It's unique to each organization, and how you define things may not be the same as an LLM might define something." - Jessica Talisman Mentions The Ontology Pipeline® - A Semantic Knowledge Management Framework | Jessica Talisman How the Ontology Pipeline Powers Semantic Knowledge Systems | Jessica Talisman Why Early Knowledge Graph Adopters Will Win the AI Race | The Knowledge Graph Guys Spec-First Development: Why LLMs Thrive on Structure, Not Vibes | The Knowledge Graph Guys The Knowledge Graph Academy Guest Bios  Tony Seale For over a decade, Tony has been passionate about linking data. His creative vision for integrating Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs within large organisations has gained widespread attention, particularly through his popular weekly LinkedIn posts, earning him the reputation of ‘The Knowledge Graph Guy.' Today, as the founder of The Knowledge Graph Guys, Tony is dedicated to helping organisations harness the power of their data. His consultancy develops cutting-edge Knowledge Graphs that fuel innovation and growth in the rapidly evolving Age of AI. Jessica Talisman Jessica Talisman has dedicated her 25-year career to exploring the dynamics of information and knowledge—how it flows across systems, evolves through context, and powers intelligent technologies. Her work spans historical research, educational frameworks, and enterprise-scale applications of artificial intelligence. Previously a Senior Information Architect at Adobe, Jessica led the development of semantic knowledge graphs to enrich content and contextual understanding. She now serves as CEO and Founder of Ontology Pipeline, where she leads efforts to bridge the worlds of library science and data management - building robust, scalable knowledge systems for the AI era. Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.

Is it truly possible to love the unlovable? In our latest teaching series at Let's Talk Scripture, we dive deep into one of the most convicting and essential passages in the New Testament.This study on 1 John 4:7-21 moves beyond surface-level definitions of “love” and examines it as the primary evidence of a true relationship with God. If you are looking for biblical clarity on salvation, the nature of God, and how to handle difficult relationships within the church, this resource is for you.Understanding the Litmus Test of FaithIn this lesson, we explore the “Apostolic Witness” as the final standard for truth. We address the hard reality that while some people are difficult or “light switches” in their consistency, the command to love remains absolute.Key themes explored in this teaching include:The Ontology of God: Understanding that “God is love” refers to His very essence and nature.The Doctrine of Propitiation: How Jesus satisfied the righteous wrath of God to prove His love for us.Divine Enablement: Why the Holy Spirit is the only way we can love those who are naturally unlovable.Assurance in Judgment: How perfected love removes the fear of punishment and gives us confidence before the throne of Christ.Complete Your Resource LibraryTo help you study or teach this material effectively, we have released a Complete Digital Resource Pack. This package is designed with a professional, publication-style layout, perfect for copying into Microsoft Word for your own lessons or handouts.What you will receive in the Digital Pack:Detailed Publication-Style Outline: A comprehensive guide with time markers synchronized to the video for easy reference.Teacher & Student Guides: Expert insights for the instructor and engaging study materials for the learner.Theological Quiz: A 10-question assessment to reinforce key concepts like deity, humanity, and propitiation.Answer Key & Explanatory Guide: In-depth explanations for every answer to deepen your theological understanding.Whether you are a teacher preparing a lesson or a student of the Word looking for deeper exegesis, these materials provide the structure and depth needed for a professional Christian publication.Access the Lesson TodayStop guessing about your spiritual standing and start walking in the confidence of God's perfected love. Use the links below to watch the full video and download the complete study resource pack.[Watch the Full Video] | [Download the Resource Pack]Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

ReferencesGuerra, DJ.2026. Unpublished LecturesAutism Research and Treatment 2011(3):398636Journal of Disease and Global Health 2022. December.DOI: 10.56557/jodagh/2022/v15i38023Nature Communications 2018.Vol. 9, Article number: 1228 Allman, D. 1972. Little Marthahttps://open.spotify.com/track/2WPLFvAldG0GG6Ad3Xa0TO?si=2a64dc0a38f54d61

Beth maps out five ways humans understand God and shows most Christians are already in a bucket they've never heard of. Then she goes beneath the standard model of physics to explain what's actually holding all of this together.

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Timothy Morton, philosopher, writer, and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, for a wide-ranging conversation about hell, ontology, and what it means to live without an "outside." Morton is the author of Hell, along with numerous works on ecology, object-oriented ontology, and the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds. Together, John and Morton explore hell not as an afterlife destination but as a lived condition of felt distance from the divine and deep entanglement with the biosphere. This conversation moves through ontology and how things exist, the critique of holism and mastery as tied to fascism and colonial habits of thought, the distinction between panic and grief as pathways to change, and why mystery, irony, and hesitation may be the most honest responses to reality. Morton frames social media as a continuation of 18th-century politics of sensibility, critiques metaphysics of presence and gnostic hierarchies, and suggests that paradise is not elsewhere but something we build inside hell. Rather than offering resolution, this episode invites listeners into an uncomfortable and generative encounter with the structures we inhabit without seeing. Key Takeaways: Timothy Morton defines ontology as how things exist and argues that our deepest assumptions about reality shape everything from ecology to politics. The conversation frames holism and mastery as colonial and fascist habits of thought, suggesting that ecology requires giving up the fantasy of total comprehension. Morton distinguishes panic from grief, proposing that panic is an ontological shock when our worldview cracks, while grief is the doorway through. The interview explores hell as an embodied, cultural structure rather than a metaphysical location, and suggests irony, hesitation, and mystery as reality signals. Morton reads William Blake as a poet of infinite narrators and weaponized gentleness, connecting the Lamb and the Tiger to questions of presence and paradox. Timestamps (00:00) Welcome and Guest Intro (01:26) Workshops and Community Updates (03:38) Substack and Upcoming Book (04:26) Jumping Straight Into the Recording (05:34) Writing Without Forcing (07:54) Why Hell and Ontology (13:22) Ontology Explained Simply (14:41) Holism and Fascism Critique (18:53) Ecology Against Mastery (23:02) Building Heaven in Hell (25:22) Trauma and Meaning Saturation (26:48) Mystery and Opacity of Truth (33:01) Colonizer Mind and Worldviews (39:00) Panic as Ontological Shock (41:19) Panic Before Grief (42:28) Mockery and Woke (43:26) Grief Breaks Control (44:24) Worldviews as Weapons (45:52) Frog Versus Soldier (49:02) Initiation and Identity Loss (52:37) Phenomenology Explained (56:46) Glitches and Consciousness (58:44) Gods of Decay (01:01:45) Evolution Without a Plan (01:06:34) Trust Made of Mistrust (01:08:29) Art as Emotional Poison (01:12:27) Social Media Sensibility (01:15:46) Irony Hesitation Reality (01:18:47) Online Irony Lacks Democracy (01:19:29) Blake Tiger Infinite Narrators (01:23:02) Lamb Poem Weaponized Gentleness (01:24:34) Hell as Flipped God Presence (01:27:04) Buddhism Fixation and Bypass (01:31:33) VIP Paranormal Double Speak (01:36:37) Hell Not Just State of Mind (01:39:35) Metaphysics Presence and Hierarchy (01:50:32) Embodied Paradox as Divine (01:52:28) Closing Reflections and Thanks Connect with Timothy Morton Rice University Faculty Page: Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University Book: Hell by Timothy Morton Website for John http://www.drjohnwprice.com WATCH: YouTube for The Sacred Speaks https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ @thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/ Brought to you by: https://www.thecenterforhas.com Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

Beth asks you two simple yes-or-no questions from ontology — a branch of philosophy most people have never heard of — and your answers reveal what you actually believe about God, reality, and consciousness whether you've thought about it or not. She walks you from materialism to idealism to the no-no box of neutral monism, takes it all the way to the substance of heaven, and lands on what she claims is the deepest paradox anyone can reach: what existed before creation, before Genesis, before the first vibration?

https://skepticsandseekers.squarespace.com/blog-1/apologetics-series

Juan and Tim have a rant session with a special guest in person, Jesús Barrasa, well known in the knowledge graph space. We covered AI trends, the balance between operational vs. strategic work, knowledge graphs, context graphs. The most valuable part of our rant was our pragmatic discussion about ontologies stripping them down to what they actually are and why they matter. Starting to work with ontologies? Think about these two dimensions: WHAT (Formal, Explicit and Shared Meaning) and WHY (Interoperability, Automation).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In our second episode about AI, we dive into the ontology of AI to figure out what is at its core. Lots of good discussion about the current and future state of AI, what it is, what it isn't, and how that impacts us as believers. Hope you enjoy! www.theologyinthedirt.com

In this episode of Liminal Phrames, Darren/Exo and Nathan dig into the ontological status of "beings" in contact reports. Persistent agents, symbolic projections, or dynamically instantiated interfaces—what are we actually encountering?

O que há em comum entre uma bateria antiaérea da Segunda Guerra Mundial, os algoritmos do WhatsApp e o bolsonarismo? Para Letícia Cesarino, professora associada de Antropologia Social na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, a resposta está na cibernética. Neste episódio, produzido em parceria com o Observatório da Extrema Direita, David Magalhães e Guilherme Casarões recebem Letícia para discutir seu artigo recém-publicado na revista Current Anthropology: “An Ecology of Mind Approach to Far-Right Publics in Brazil“, no qual ela aplica o quadro teórico da ecologia da mente, desenvolvido pelo antropólogo Gregory Bateson, para reler o bolsonarismo como um sistema tecnopolítico. No bloco de notícias, David traz dois termômetros da extrema-direita global: os resultados das eleições municipais na França, que revelam o avanço territorial do Rassemblement National a despeito de um teto de vidro nas grandes cidades, e as eleições húngaras de abril, onde Peter Magyar desafia 15 anos de governo Orbán. E ainda tem, no último bloco, dica cultural. Aperte o play! Quer apoiar o Chutando a Escada? Acesse chutandoaescada.com.br/apoio Mande um café usando nossa chave PIX: perguntas@chutandoaescada.com.br Comentários, críticas, sugestões? Escreva pra gente em perguntas@chutandoaescada.com.br Participaram deste episódio: Letícia Cesarino (UFSC), David Magalhães e Guilherme Casarões Capa do episódio: Agência Brasil (CC BY 3.0 BR) Escute também no Spotify, no YouTube ou Apple Podcasts. Capítulos: 00:00 — Abertura 00:02 — Entrevista: ecologia da mente, cibernética e extrema-direita digital 00:32 — Bolsonarismo, populismo e públicos digitais artificiais 00:45 — Radicalização, a lacuna online-offline e os limites da etnografia 00:57 — Boletim: França — eleições municipais e o Rassemblement National 01:03 — Boletim: Hungria — Orbán e Peter Magyar às vésperas das eleições de abril 01:08 — Dica cultural: Feels Good Man (Amazon Prime, 2020) Citados no episódio CESARINO, Letícia. “An Ecology of Mind Approach to Far-Right Publics in Brazil”. Current Anthropology, 2026. BATESON, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler, 1972. GALISON, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision”. Critical Inquiry, v. 21, n. 1, 1994. WIENER, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press, 1948. MASSUMI, Brian. Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception. Duke University Press, 2015. SIMONDON, Gilbert. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Jérôme Millon, 2005. LIFTON, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books, 1986. EASTON, David. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. Wiley, 1965. Documentário Feels Good Man. Direção: Arthur Jones. EUA, 2020. Disponível na Amazon Prime. Chute 391 — Transcrição Parceria Chutando a Escada e Observatório da Extrema Direita Publicado em 26 de março de 2026 Abertura David Magalhães: Olá, pessoal! Sejam bem-vindos e bem-vindas a mais um episódio da parceria entre o Chutando a Escada e o Observatório da Extrema Direita — o primeiro episódio de 2026. A partir de agora, nos encontramos sempre na última semana de cada mês com episódios dedicados a discutir a extrema-direita em suas dimensões globais, teóricas e também reagindo ao calor dos acontecimentos. Para quem já acompanha o podcast, vale lembrar que nosso programa segue dividido em três blocos. No primeiro, trazemos uma entrevista mais aprofundada com pesquisadores e pesquisadoras que estão na linha de frente desse debate. Depois, passamos para um boletim com as análises das principais notícias envolvendo a extrema-direita global. E, para fechar, uma dica cultural sempre conectada com o universo do extremismo de direita — pode ser um livro, um filme, uma série, uma produção musical. Peço que você fique conosco até o fim, porque a dica deste episódio está completamente relacionada com o tema da nossa entrevista. Vamos lá. Entrevista — Letícia Cesarino David Magalhães: Estou aqui com o meu amigo Guilherme Casarões para receber a nossa convidada deste episódio, que é a Letícia Cesarino. A Letícia é professora associada de Antropologia Social na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina e também uma das novas integrantes do Observatório da Extrema Direita. Aproveitamos para dar as boas-vindas — é um prazer ter você conosco, não só no episódio, mas também no Observatório. Nos últimos cinco anos, a Letícia desenvolveu uma pesquisa bastante aprofundada e relevante sobre antropologia digital, extrema-direita e redes sociais. E, mais recentemente, ela acaba de publicar — acabou de sair do forno — um artigo bastante interessante e instigante na revista Current Anthropology. O artigo se intitula “An Ecology of Mind Approach to Far-Right Publics in Brazil” — algo como uma abordagem da ecologia da mente aplicada aos públicos de extrema-direita no Brasil. A ideia deste episódio é discutir esse novo artigo. Letícia, você mobiliza um quadro teórico bastante sofisticado, especialmente ao trazer a ideia de ecologia da mente — ecology of mind —, que vem do trabalho de Gregory Bateson, um antropólogo e linguista britânico importante do século XX. Confesso que não o conhecia; encontrei o livro dele em PDF na internet e li um pouco para me inteirar de como você adota e aplica esse quadro teórico para discutir redes sociais e extrema-direita brasileira. Fiquei bastante interessado no uso do termo “cibernético”, porque para ouvidos contemporâneos ele remete imediatamente ao universo digital, de redes e internet. Mas as principais obras de Bateson são publicadas logo após a Segunda Guerra, nos anos 1960 e 1970 — embora ele tenha iniciado seu desenvolvimento nos anos 1930 —, e ele não estava falando exatamente de internet. Isso me gerou dúvidas. Antes de falarmos da aplicação propriamente dita, você poderia nos explicar um pouco sobre essa abordagem e esse quadro teórico? Bateson propõe tudo isso muito antes da chamada terceira revolução industrial. Letícia Cesarino: Oi, David, Casarões. É um grande prazer estar aqui com vocês no podcast e também no Observatório da Extrema Direita como um todo. Obrigada pelo convite. Acho que esse artigo é um bom gancho para trabalharmos questões da minha abordagem mais específica para a extrema-direita, porque, diferente de muitos que trabalham nesse campo, eu não venho dos estudos da política. Sou uma antropóloga cuja área de origem é a antropologia da ciência e tecnologia — sempre foi assim, desde a graduação —, e nos últimos anos fui transitando para essas questões das mediações digitais, das plataformas e da cibernética. O meu olhar para a extrema-direita é, portanto, um olhar tecnopolítico. O meu interesse é entender essa dimensão relativamente pouco trabalhada nas ciências sociais: o papel das máquinas, o papel da técnica, o papel das infraestruturas técnicas na conformação dessa força política e, mais especificamente no caso desse artigo, dos ecossistemas digitais de extrema-direita. A ecologia da mente e o Bateson — nos últimos anos consolidei em torno da obra dele um arcabouço que remeto também a outros autores da antropologia e da área dos estudos de mídia e tecnopolítica, para desenvolver uma perspectiva que veja agência humana e maquínica juntas, de forma recursiva. E aí a cibernética — podemos começar por ela, esclarecendo o termo. O termo remete a computadores, o que faz sentido, porque a cibernética clássica dos anos 1940, a de Norbert Wiener, o matemático estadunidense que inventou o termo, também deu origem à indústria de tecnologia que temos hoje. Existe, portanto, uma continuidade entre o que chamamos de cibernética hoje e o que era a cibernética como superciência da comunicação e do controle, tanto nos sistemas maquínicos como nos sistemas animais, incluindo o humano. Gregory Bateson fez parte do grupo original das chamadas Conferências Macy, nos anos 1940. Mas depois da Segunda Guerra houve uma bifurcação: uma linha foi trabalhar o que chamo de cibernética das máquinas — Norbert Wiener, Von Neumann, todos os nomes precursores da indústria de tecnologia, da construção dos computadores, da inteligência artificial —, enquanto Bateson foi trabalhar a questão da cibernética dentro de uma chave mais próxima da teoria da evolução e da história natural, o que chamo de cibernética da vida. Ele tem um arcabouço que inclui a cibernética das máquinas, os princípios comuns do funcionamento de máquinas cibernéticas, humanos e animais, mas vai além, trazendo as camadas extras que o humano coloca na relação com a máquina. Nesse sentido, a ecologia da mente inclui a cibernética, mas é maior. É a partir desse ponto de vista que tenho olhado para a participação de máquinas cibernéticas — que, no fundo, hoje são basicamente algoritmos, e a evolução dos algoritmos são as inteligências artificiais — e como elas influem e participam em processos que entendemos como políticos, mas que, na verdade, são tecnopolíticos, porque têm cada vez mais a participação de agências não humanas, agências maquínicas. Guilherme Casarões: Letícia, eu também ficava intrigado com essa terminologia cibernética. Lembro que na faculdade, na aula de sociologia, tive contato com David Easton, que aplicava a cibernética aos sistemas políticos e aos sistemas humanos em geral. Sempre achei curioso que não tivesse a ver com computador — essa foi a maneira como sempre encaramos o termo. Mas toda teoria de sistemas convida a um tipo de abordagem cibernética, com essa linguagem muito interessante de inputs e outputs, de como os sistemas funcionam. Trazer isso de volta à discussão é fundamental. E você argumenta no seu texto que a infraestrutura das redes sociais carrega uma espécie de ontologia do inimigo, herdada dessa cibernética militar da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Como essa visão do ser humano como um servomecanismo — um animal a ser controlado por algoritmos — cria uma afinidade eletiva com a lógica da guerra e a desumanização do outro praticadas pela extrema-direita? Letícia Cesarino: Ótima pergunta. É um bom gancho para colocarmos mais camadas na questão da cibernética. O que tentaram fazer nos anos 1940 — e é importante notar que a cibernética nasce do esforço de guerra, do esforço de guerra dos americanos entrando na Segunda Guerra contra o nazifascismo; a primeira conferência foi em 1946, se não me engano — era produzir conhecimento básico, porque a cibernética é uma ciência que explicaria formas comuns de funcionamento de máquinas cibernéticas, de animais e de humanos. O que têm em comum entre o funcionamento desses sistemas? A cibernética gira em torno da ideia não só de input e output, mas principalmente do feedback — quando o output volta para o sistema como input. O coração da cibernética é essa questão da recursividade, ou causalidade circular, que é uma característica de qualquer organismo vivo e também de máquinas construídas à imagem e semelhança desses organismos, ou seja, máquinas que tomam decisões sozinhas. Essa é, para mim, a principal definição de máquina cibernética, porque os algoritmos fazem isso. Mas muito antes da indústria de tecnologia, outras máquinas já faziam isso — como a própria máquina a vapor de James Watt, que é a base do que Marx, no uso grundrissiano, chama de automata. Ele já identificou no século XIX que havia máquinas sendo incorporadas nas infraestruturas do trabalho que tomavam decisões sozinhas — ainda muito rudimentares, mas a ideia de que as máquinas começam a dar o ritmo do trabalho humano já estava colocada desde o século XIX. A cibernética dos anos 1940 traz para o centro essa questão da guerra, que é quando houve um pico na produção dessas máquinas antes da indústria de tecnologia propriamente dita. Peter Galison — um dos grandes historiadores da ciência, físico de formação — tem um artigo no qual trabalha a ontologia da cibernética de Wiener a partir do contexto de guerra. Ele vai elaborar o que seria essa ontologia do inimigo de guerra a partir da cibernética. Ele faz uma progressão que vale a pena resgatar brevemente aqui. Quando você está numa conjuntura de guerra — uma conjuntura de exceção, isso é importante —, você precisa desumanizar seu inimigo, porque assim vai torná-lo eliminável. Em modelos de guerra anteriores, até a Primeira Guerra, quando você tinha que confrontar seu inimigo no corpo a corpo com uma baioneta ou uma arma de fogo de curto alcance, a forma de desumanização era através de analogias com animais, com monstros. Galison trabalha, por exemplo, cartas de soldados americanos que representam os japoneses através de analogias com ratos, com vermes. Essa é uma forma de desumanização. A segunda forma seria a da Segunda Guerra, que compartilha com a cibernética essa ideia do servomecanismo — um híbrido de humano-máquina. Quando Norbert Wiener começou a desenvolver a cibernética para produzir artilharia antiaérea — máquinas que conseguissem calcular sozinhas a trajetória do caça inimigo para atirar antes de o avião chegar, e o projétil encontrar o alvo no meio da trajetória —, o que o servomecanismo significa? Por que essa imagem do inimigo desumaniza? Porque não interessa quem está dirigindo aquele avião. O que interessa é como aquele avião se comporta — e um comportamento que possa ser previsto e controlado. É um tipo de desumanização cibernética. E podemos pensar também em outras formas de desumanização que evoluem com a guerra, como essa guerra de videogame que temos hoje, onde o inimigo não é sequer visto — é quase como algo da fantasia dos videogames. Isso sempre acompanha a guerra. A cibernética é uma boa epistemologia para entender contextos de exceção, conjunturas de guerra, conjunturas de crise que não se superam, porque são conjunturas de grande instabilidade, de não linearidade, com essa tendência à bifurcação do corpo social. Essas são ferramentas melhores para esse tipo de conjuntura do que muitas das ferramentas clássicas das ciências sociais — Durkheim, por exemplo, desenvolveu ferramentas em sua maioria para contextos de estabilidade, de paz, onde o social está mais estruturado, mais previsível e regido por normas. Num contexto de exceção, de crise e de guerra, o social muda de modo de funcionamento. Uma das hipóteses do meu próximo livro é a de que o social de guerra, de exceção e de crise, funciona em outra dinâmica, e que a cibernética tem boas ferramentas para entender isso, inclusive as formas de desumanização que tendem a se proliferar nesses contextos. David Magalhães: Excelente. Acho que é um bom gancho para avançarmos para a parte do seu texto em que você enquadra todo esse arcabouço para compreender a extrema-direita em ambiente digital. As principais linhas interpretativas preocupadas em compreender a ascensão dessa onda ultradireitista global olham para a questão ideológica, para eleitores frustrados, para a relação desses eleitores com a globalização e com a crise da democracia liberal. Mas você propõe algo diferente: observar esse fenômeno como um grande organismo cibernético, um sistema no qual humanos — lideranças, influenciadores, seguidores — e máquinas — algoritmos do WhatsApp, do Telegram, de redes sociais — operam de maneira integrada, como parte de um ecossistema. O que ganhamos analiticamente ao fazer esse deslocamento? Letícia Cesarino: São muitas camadas. Uma das coisas que acho importante — sempre começo palestras com isso — é a questão do ciborgue. O que é o ciborgue? É um híbrido de humano-máquina, outra forma de falar no servomecanismo. Mas temos essa imagem fantasiosa do ciborgue que vem da ficção científica, a de que seria um indivíduo com partes de sua função fisiológica — alimentação, respiração — suplementadas por máquina. O Robocop seria o tipo ideal disso. O ciborgue da vida real, porém, não se parece em nada com o Robocop. O ciborgue da vida real somos nós. É qualquer um que acorda e a primeira coisa que faz é pegar o celular — para olhar o WhatsApp ou para desligar o alarme — e fica nessa relação de dependência com aquela máquina o dia inteiro, para questões de memória e de tomada de decisão. Por que isso acontece? Porque o Homo sapiens é uma espécie extremamente técnica — uma questão antropológica. Sobrevivemos como espécie, enquanto todos os outros hominíneos foram extintos, pela questão da técnica, da cultura. Precisamos ser suplementados. Como espécie biológica, precisamos ser suplementados o tempo todo pela cultura e pela técnica. Isso não significa que outros animais não tenham técnica — vários mamíferos têm, pássaros também. Mas para o sapiens, isso é existencial. Como Bateson diz, a mente não termina na pele; a mente humana é estendida para o seu ambiente. A unidade de análise da ecologia da mente nunca é o indivíduo sozinho — tentamos delimitar qual é o circuito relevante, e esse circuito de feedbacks é sempre maior que o indivíduo. Pode ser uma família, como no caso dos cães e de uma matilha; pode ser uma comunidade, algum território existencial qualquer. E o nosso território existencial hoje passa necessariamente por essas tecnologias. Os algoritmos, as máquinas, a agência maquínica fazem parte desse território existencial. Isso é um preâmbulo para chegar ao argumento que também faço em vários textos — inclusive nesse —: de que a extrema-direita, se a gente for transposto para a política, é uma força política nativa digital, pelo menos essa extrema-direita que conhecemos hoje. O nazifascismo histórico tem muita participação de mídia, embora isso não seja suficientemente notado. Há muitos estudos históricos que mostram o papel do rádio na capilarização do Terceiro Reich, para conformar esse grande território existencial imaginado e como isso atraiu os alemães comuns em torno daquele projeto. De certa forma, algo similar — similar, mas muito diferente também — está sendo recolocado hoje com relação à nova infraestrutura técnica midiática que são as plataformas digitais. Evito usar a palavra “mídia” porque quando falamos em mídia pensamos em máquinas específicas — televisão, rádio —, mas plataformas não são exatamente mídias. Elas se sobrepõem a todo tipo de infraestrutura técnica, não apenas midiática. Com a plataformização — uma tendência relativamente recente; a internet era muito diferente antes de 2010 — e com os smartphones, que foram um verdadeiro game changer, as primeiras áreas cujos efeitos foram sentidos foram a política eleitoral e a área da saúde. Mesmo antes da pandemia, pesquisadores já identificavam como o autocuidado começou a passar rapidamente por essas infraestruturas, com o “doutor Google”. Para não me estender, vou colocar os dois pontos principais que desenvolvo no artigo, porque são mais ontológicos: como essas máquinas mudam a própria relação espaço-temporal dos nossos sistemas sociotécnicos. O que os algoritmos fazem? Eles hiperaceleram — e esse é, para mim, o ponto central. Quando você hiperaccelera, desestabiliza a relação da mente humana com o seu ambiente. Fica aquele fluxo constante de eventos ao qual você tem que responder o tempo todo, e cognitivamente isso é lido como uma situação de crise, do ponto de vista da ecologia da mente — não só para o humano, para qualquer espécie. Quando há uma instabilidade muito grande do ambiente, isso tende a reverter para o modo crise. É o que Wendy Chun chama de situação de crise permanente que as plataformas jogam nos nossos sistemas sociotécnicos. Isso é, obviamente, uma base fértil para a instrumentalização por forças de extrema-direita. Um outro ponto que os algoritmos introduzem, relacionado à hiperaceleração — que seria uma dimensão mais temporal —, é uma dimensão mais espacial de bifurcação. Algoritmos programados para segmentar públicos, porque essa é a lógica do modelo de negócios da economia da atenção, acabam gerando — não sozinhos, mas na interação com os usuários humanos, porque a recursividade do humano-máquina vai para os dois lados — um efeito sistêmico não de segmentação pura e simples, mas de bifurcação. É aí que entra o código amigo-inimigo, a polarização, a sismogênese — todos esses processos de antagonismo extremo, o que chamo de “mundo do avesso”: um lado é o extremo oposto do outro, numa dinâmica de guerra em que só um pode prevalecer, porque o outro é visto como uma ameaça existencial. No ecossistema de extrema-direita, ele vai desde um polo mais moderado — Tarcísio, digamos — até um polo mais radicalizado — o pessoal do 8 de janeiro, o “tio França” que se explodiu na frente do STF. O que é a extrema-direita? Um lado? O outro? Agentes específicos? Discursos específicos? Não. Do ponto de vista da ecologia da mente, a extrema-direita é toda essa ecologia, todo esse ecossistema que cobre todo esse espectro e que inclui a agência maquínica como um dos seus principais motores. Primeiro porque ela desestabiliza o mundo real, com a hiperaceleração e todos esses processos. Mas ao mesmo tempo ela direciona — é como um rio que tem uma corrente que vai para um lado, e os agentes da extrema-direita são aqueles que nadam a favor da correnteza, porque as plataformas são um ambiente; elas não são variáveis. Elas mudam o ambiente no qual fazemos política. E esse ambiente tem vieses técnicos intrinsecamente favoráveis a uma força política como a extrema-direita. Por isso não é que eles estejam mais espertos ou inteligentes — é que a forma como fazem política converge com a lógica das redes de maneira subliminar, intrínseca. Como o Casarões disse, há uma certa afinidade eletiva com a lógica das plataformas. Mas essa afinidade não é aleatória — por isso foi importante voltarmos à cibernética dos anos 1940, ao esforço de guerra, à artilharia antiaérea. O próprio DNA dessa indústria de tecnologia se originou da guerra e nunca saiu da chave de guerra. Depois da Segunda Guerra, a cibernética se tornou parte da Guerra Fria, com a mesma lógica do controle indireto — fazer o inimigo fazer o que você quer que ele faça indiretamente —, que é essa ideia cibernética do controle numa chave sempre não linear, sempre recíproca. É o que o Trump exatamente tenta fazer agora, em outra versão. Houve um breve interregno onde se tornou uma indústria civil, nos anos 1980 e 1990, mas a lógica algorítmica, a lógica cibernética, continuou sendo a da guerra — só que agora, em vez de controlar o inimigo, você vai controlar o usuário, para fazê-lo clicar num anúncio e vender a atenção daquele usuário para os anunciantes. Há também uma convergência, especialmente durante a Guerra Fria, entre a lógica de guerra indireta, a lógica da propaganda e a indústria de publicidade que temos hoje. Não foi a publicidade que originou a propaganda política — foi a propaganda política que veio primeiro e depois se tornou uma indústria civil, que é o coração da lógica da economia da atenção. Mesmo essas plataformas que se colocavam como liberais sempre tiveram um DNA mais próximo da lógica de guerra, propaganda e controle indireto do que de algo parecido com democracia. Era, de certa forma, um pouco inevitável que as coisas se desenrolassem como estão se desenrolando, porque já estavam previstas na própria ontogênese dessa indústria — como Simondon chamaria —, uma ontogênese ligada à guerra, ao controle e à desumanização. As plataformas, os algoritmos, não nos veem como humanos. É exatamente a mesma coisa do caça com o piloto dirigindo: a máquina é incapaz de ver interioridade, incapaz de ver subjetividade. Ela só nos interpela no nível do controle, da previsão de comportamento. A política está se tornando isso — retroalimentando-se com os discursos da extrema-direita que ativam o senso comum na direção da regeneração, que é a lógica do fascismo histórico: seria possível vencer essa crise, resetar o sistema e construir o estereótipo de um inimigo que precisa ser derrotado para que a crise permanente seja superada. No fim das contas, é uma mistificação de processos reais e de problemas reais, numa linguagem nacionalista e nativista. Guilherme Casarões: Letícia, um outro conceito com que você trabalha no texto e na sua obra é o de populismo. Uma das passagens que mais me chamaram a atenção — e que acho fascinante — é que essa abordagem ecológica de Bateson ganha muita relevância frente ao populismo contemporâneo, justamente porque esse populismo se ampara em públicos que, como você diz no texto, são parcialmente artificiais. A passagem, para quem quiser ler depois, está na página 2 do texto: “os públicos que são produzidos por essa dinâmica são resultados transindividuais de uma agência que é humana e não humana, na medida em que os algoritmos coemergem permanentemente por meio de ciclos cibernéticos”. Essa questão da artificialidade do público é muito central para entender tanto a dinâmica amigo-inimigo quanto a maneira pela qual o populismo contemporâneo consegue controlar a construção narrativa e a mobilização de seu público. Queria ir mais especificamente para o caso que você estuda no texto, que é o bolsonarismo. Seu texto descreve o bolsonarismo não só como uma ideologia, mas como uma dinâmica mutante que oscila entre a moderação e a radicalização. Você traz o conceito de indecidibilidade rítmica — essa coisa de ir e voltar — e eu queria que você explicasse como o bolsonarismo, a partir dessa chave analítica, alterna entre o institucional e o antiestructural, e como isso permitiu ao ex-presidente Bolsonaro manter o sistema político num estado de antagonismo permanente sem chegar a uma ruptura total — o que só vai acontecer em 2023. Letícia Cesarino: O que tentei fazer nesse texto é reler parte do governo Bolsonaro até as eleições de 2022 a partir dessa lógica cibernética — ou seja, como ele performou uma dinâmica cibernética que é essa tecnopolítica moldada pelas máquinas. Casarões, você trouxe a questão do populismo, e acho que são etapas. Desde 2013 até 2018, temos essa invasão muito forte e muito rápida da agência técnica dessas mídias e desses dispositivos dentro da política — um movimento mais tectônico, de desestabilização. E aí essas figuras aparecendo mais ou menos ao mesmo tempo: Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán — é aí que o conceito de populismo realmente faz mais sentido, nesse sentido dessa irrupção de uma política antiliberal, com uma norma mais afetiva, mais espontânea. É a política da exceção. E que, novamente, bate com a estrutura das plataformas, porque as plataformas também são políticas de exceção e de multidão. É importante termos isso em mente. A citação que você trouxe mostra como as plataformas fazem um tipo de prestidigitação: colocam uma coisa na interface, então o usuário tem a impressão de que é livre, de que é um indivíduo, enquanto o que está acontecendo atrás da tela é que esse indivíduo está sendo desagregado e reagregado com fragmentos de outros usuários em grandes multidões digitais. Ele não tem liberdade — ao contrário, está tendo seu comportamento indiretamente controlado, no sentido cibernético, pelos algoritmos. E esse social de multidão é o social de crise. Quem está imerso nesses ambientes está se colocando num modo crise — e a extrema-direita é a força política que mais combina com esse tipo de ambiente. Sem crise eles não são nada. Se você tirar a crise, a atmosfera de ameaça de que o Brasil vai acabar, eles não têm nada. Por isso não têm programa político: são uma força política na e da crise e da exceção. Daí esse paradoxo de como uma tecnopolítica de crise, de exceção e de guerra se rotiniza como um governo — que foi exatamente o paradoxo do governo Bolsonaro. E ainda teve a pandemia, que adicionou uma camada enorme de crise a isso. Ciberneticamente, faz muito sentido esse vai e vem — os ciclos de feedback positivo e negativo. O feedback positivo é o que acelera o viés que você já está; o negativo coloca um freio. Bolsonaro, enquanto governante, não podia ficar só no runaway, só no feedback positivo, porque o feedback positivo sozinho eventualmente leva a um colapso — tanto nos organismos vivos como nas máquinas. O que ele e o Trump fazem é colocar estrategicamente esses freios, esses recuos: avanço e recuo, feedback positivo e negativo. Tentei mostrar no artigo como isso se deu durante o governo e como esse processo perde o controle na eleição de 2022, redundando eventualmente no 8 de janeiro. O governo Bolsonaro não construiu nada — estava destruindo coisas, que é o que a extrema-direita faz — mas dosando até onde poderia ir na relação com os outros agentes: o Congresso Nacional, o público. E o público passou a ser medido através das redes sociais — pelas métricas das mídias digitais — e cada vez mais por pesquisas de opinião, que são outra forma de feedback que coteja com as mídias sociais. Bolsonaro foi assim sentindo, de forma propriamente recursiva, lidando com um ambiente de causalidades circulares, crises, etc. A linearidade só é possível em contextos de estabilidade e paz — e é exatamente o que o Trump está fazendo hoje. Agora, uma virada acontece, e aí é muito importante a questão do método. Esse artigo é baseado em pesquisa de métodos mistos, onde a abordagem qualitativa antropológica foi composta com uma abordagem computacional de grandes quantidades de dados, com os meus parceiros da Universidade da Bahia, do LabHD, onde fazíamos o mapeamento em tempo real dos públicos do Telegram. Foi muito interessante ver como, em meados de 2021, o comportamento desse ecossistema transindividual — que chamamos de públicos refratados, os públicos da extrema-direita — mudou. O comportamento pandêmico, ativado pela pandemia, e inclusive as teorias da conspiração começaram a diminuir. Isso foi bem na época da questão do voto impresso. Quando o voto impresso é enterrado, um conspiracionismo eleitoral começa a subir e se estabilizar. Por quê? As condenações do Lula tinham sido definitivamente canceladas, e eles, na mentalidade de guerra deles, já previam: “Está vindo um golpe que vai impedir o Bolsonaro de ganhar as eleições de 2022.” Isso mais de um ano antes da eleição. Já entraram no modo de contra-golpe. Que é outra característica desse social de crise — o que Brian Massumi, também batesoniano, chama de preempção: você passa a agir antecipando a ação do seu inimigo. É muito como a lógica da Guerra Fria entre os dois blocos. Por isso a extrema-direita está sempre reagindo — isso é uma característica muito consistente, inclusive dos ecossistemas misóginos, que estão sempre reagindo à suposta provocação ou traição da mulher. O bolsonarismo entrou nesse modo preemptivo, com a certeza de que haveria um golpe contra ele. Na cabeça deles, dessa grande mente transindividual controlada pelo Bolsonaro, o golpe deles era um contra-golpe: seria dado um golpe no Bolsonaro, e o que estavam fazendo seria a resposta. Quando você vê tudo o que fizeram ao longo desse tempo com esse olhar, tudo faz sentido — e o Bolsonaro, como depois ficou demonstrado, de fato estava tentando articular esse contra-golpe. Nas eleições de 2022, estavam nessa dinâmica de avanço e recuo, não deixando o sistema escalar demais, a temperatura subir demais, enquanto conspiravam. Quando ele finalmente desiste, vê que não ganhou a eleição — isso se arrasta por algumas semanas —, e quando realmente percebem que os comandantes das três forças não vão entrar, que o golpe não vai acontecer, Bolsonaro fica em silêncio. Ciberneticamente, isso foi muito importante, porque era ele que fazia a regulação cibernética entre a camada moderada e a camada radicalizada. Ele não deixava as coisas escalar. Era um agente de radicalização, mas também de moderação. Quando ele se retira, a coisa escala — e foi justamente o 8 de janeiro. Olha que interessante: quando aquela multidão invadiu o Congresso, o que aconteceu? Ficaram esperando para ver o que ia acontecer, porque confiavam no plano — só que o plano já tinha dado errado e eles não sabiam disso. Tem esse componente de um mundo de fantasia criado dentro das comunidades radicalizadas — o Bateson ajuda a entender isso, porque ele tem uma teoria cibernética da fantasia e do jogo. Foi aquele choque de realidade. Não houve mais regulação, não houve mais feedback negativo, a coisa escalou, a temperatura subiu — e é onde o artigo termina, fazendo essa releitura cibernética e ecológica dos eventos do segundo governo Bolsonaro e das eleições de 2022. David Magalhães: Ótimo, Letícia. Encaminhando para o fechamento: no finzinho do artigo você faz uma ressalva que achei bastante importante, ao apontar que a ecologia da mente é extremamente poderosa para entender essas dinâmicas sistêmicas mais amplas, mas que também tem limites — especialmente quando tentamos compreender a totalidade da vida cotidiana do sujeito. É justamente aí que você coloca a necessidade de retornar à etnografia tradicional, à etnografia offline. Queria te ouvir sobre esse desafio metodológico. Como a antropologia pode costurar essas duas pontes — de um lado, a visão de um sistema cibernético amplo no qual os indivíduos parecem agir quase como parte de um circuito, de maneira relativamente previsível; de outro, as trajetórias de vida, as experiências subjetivas, as dores concretas que não desaparecem. Como não reduzir essas pessoas a meros nós de rede? Letícia Cesarino: Ótima pergunta, porque é realmente um desafio metodológico. No caso da ecologia da mente, você nunca pode fechar só no indivíduo. Mas é possível — e é o que estou fazendo no livro novo — pensar como o indivíduo enquanto sistema, porque todo organismo individual é um sistema cibernético, com outras camadas além dele, mas ele próprio é uma camada de individuação bastante importante. Ele pode estar dividido entre dois territórios existenciais — e é um pouco como estou tentando trabalhar a questão da radicalização no livro novo. O online oferece um tipo de território existencial onde a persona online do sujeito está com interações específicas. É isso que gera o elemento de fantasia nas comunidades extremistas: no online é possível cultivar uma realidade e um tipo de estereotipação do inimigo, toda a questão da desinformação, que não é possível fazer no offline. Por isso o que aconteceu depois da invasão ao Congresso e ao STF: a realidade bateu. Eles achavam que a realidade era o que era cultivado na mente transindividual do online — e isso não bateu com o que estava acontecendo offline. Com a internet, não é mais preciso se deslocar fisicamente para se radicalizar. Você pode viver sua vida normalmente e, em parte do seu circuito, se radicalizar só no online. São muito esses casos que abordarei no próximo livro: adolescentes e jovens que estão no quarto jogando videogame, vivendo normalmente na escola, e estão fazendo coisas indescritíveis na internet — que você só vai descobrir quando a polícia bater na porta. Etnografar a radicalização é muito difícil, porque é um processo — você precisa acompanhar a pessoa desde o início, quando não estava radicalizada. É praticamente impossível, a não ser que alguém muito próximo passe por isso. Mas existem autorrelatos. Tenho trabalhado muito com o caso dos neonazistas, onde já há na Europa e nos Estados Unidos um repertório grande de testemunhos e autobiografias de pessoas que saíram dessas comunidades extremistas. No jihadismo também há bastante material; os manifestos de atiradores em escolas, por exemplo, muitas vezes trazem essa visão subjetiva da radicalização. Há um outro ponto que descobri e que não estava na pesquisa anterior: o que alguns estudos de radicalização chamam de reduplicação. Isso vem de um estudo histórico de Robert Lifton sobre médicos nazistas — como eles dividiam a personalidade. Quando estavam em Auschwitz, eram um tipo de pessoa; quando estavam em casa, com a família, eram completamente diferentes. Era uma reduplicação da personalidade em duas, como forma de resolver dissonâncias e contradições. O médico conseguia desumanizar as pessoas que selecionava para morrer em Auschwitz, enquanto em casa humanizava os seus. Algo assim parece acontecer também no nível da mente individual através da lacuna online–offline: as pessoas inconscientemente encontram formas de dividir a sua mente entre esses dois mundos, de forma que não precisem romper com familiares, amigos ou colegas de trabalho por razões políticas. Esse efeito da lacuna online–offline deve ser estudado — não é só uma questão metodológica, é a questão de qual é o efeito dessa própria separação, que é inédita: são as primeiras tecnologias que possibilitam essa divisão em ambientes existenciais separados, ainda que em relação recursiva. Isso pode ser um indutor de radicalização. Sabe aquele meme dos cachorros latindo no portão? Quando o portão abre, cada um vai para um lado. O humano tem um pouco disso: fica mais agressivo, fala coisas e faz coisas quando não está cara a cara com a pessoa — coisas que não faria no presencial. Isso é muito característico da extrema-direita: estão latindo, agressivos, no comportamento de ameaça, e quando a Polícia Federal bate na porta, revertem ao comportamento de autopiedade e vitimização — que é o que o Bolsonaro está fazendo agora na cadeia. Bateson trabalha isso muito bem, não só no humano, mas em outros mamíferos. A ecologia da mente, pegando inclusive insights de outros mamíferos — como o Bateson faz —, nos ajudaria a reincorporar o elemento biológico-evolutivo nas nossas explicações. E aqui chego a um ponto que acho muito importante: a extrema-direita tem todo um repertório do darwinismo social e da psicologia evolutiva para dizer que a forma como ela vê o humano é a forma real, a forma biológica, a forma natural. São leituras completamente erradas e enviesadas, mas para o senso comum são muito intuitivas. A questão de gênero, por exemplo: a ideia de que o homem é para um papel e a mulher para outro não tem apoio em estudos sérios de outras espécies ou da nossa. A antropologia, porém, abandonou esse campo — tornou-se etnografia, estudo da cultura, abandonou a natureza e a biologia, por razões relacionadas à história e à política interna da disciplina. Um dos meus objetivos é recuperar esse espaço de autoridade científica para falar do humano, do que é natural no humano, a partir de abordagens como a do Bateson — que é uma teoria da evolução que inclui a cultura — para competir também nesse campo da naturalização do comportamento humano. Eu diria que é talvez o campo mais persuasivo dos discursos da extrema-direita, porque a esquerda e as ciências sociais ficam só na desconstrução e no culturalismo, enquanto eles estão falando daquilo que é espontâneo, natural, atemporal. É assim que o fascismo mira, e precisamos competir nessa ordem de discurso, reivindicando uma abordagem científica mais universalista — um outro tipo de universalismo, não o positivista. A ecologia da mente é uma das principais vias que vejo para isso. No contexto desse artigo, foi também um subtexto: o artigo foi parte de um dossiê financiado pela Fundação Wenner-Gren, a maior fundação de antropologia dos Estados Unidos, e queria passar essa mensagem para os meus colegas antropólogos — a gente pode falar de universais humanos de uma forma mais refinada e rica, e competir com a extrema-direita nesse campo de discurso. Guilherme Casarões: Letícia Cesarino — incrível, tanto no pessoal quanto no profissional. E agora descobrimos, o que não deveria ser exatamente uma surpresa, que você é especialista em memes. Foi de longe uma das conversas mais eruditas que tivemos aqui, não só na colaboração com o OED, mas de todas as entrevistas que já fiz. Uma densidade impressionante, transmitida de forma didática. Tenho certeza de que os nossos ouvintes vão adorar esse papo. Quem está acompanhando, fiquem por aí — ainda temos a segunda parte da conversa, com o boletim de notícias e a dica cultural. Boletim — Giro de Notícias David Magalhães: Vamos ao nosso boletim com duas notícias envolvendo a ultradireita. França No próximo ano teremos eleições nacionais na França, que serão importantíssimas tanto para a Europa quanto para o futuro da direita radical no mundo. No dia 22 de março, domingo, ocorreu o segundo turno das eleições municipais francesas, que costuma ser um termômetro importante para medir o crescimento e a capilaridade da direita radical francesa, representada aqui pelo Rassemblement National. O resultado dessas eleições foi bastante ambíguo. O Rassemblement National, partido de Marine Le Pen e da estrela em ascensão Jordan Bardella, não conseguiu vencer em grandes cidades estratégicas — como Marselha e Toulon —, onde havia uma expectativa de vitória da direita radical. Por outro lado, o partido avançou de forma importante em outro nível: consolidou uma presença territorial, especialmente no sudeste e no nordeste do país, conquistando dezenas de prefeituras e ampliando de maneira bastante significativa sua base local. Hoje, de acordo com matéria do Le Monde de 23 de março, o Rassemblement National passa a governar aproximadamente 70 municípios e conta com cerca de 3 mil representantes locais — uma quantidade bastante considerável. Outro ponto central é um certo teto de vidro que tem impedido a vitória do RN em grandes cidades. Esses centros urbanos mais ricos, mais jovens e com maior nível educacional têm sido um desafio para a expansão da direita radical. Por outro lado, há um crescimento muito forte em áreas periféricas, regiões pós-industriais e comunas menores, geralmente marcadas por uma sensação de abandono e por um acúmulo de ressentimento — o que alguns autores chamam de left behinds, os que foram deixados para trás —, sentimento que a direita radical populista costuma explorar. Quero destacar ainda um fator que pode ser preocupante olhando para as eleições nacionais de 2027: não houve, ou houve em pouquíssimas cidades, a chamada frente republicana — também chamada de cordão sanitário. O cordão sanitário é o conjunto de alianças tradicionais de partidos com compromissos democráticos para barrar a direita radical no segundo turno das eleições. A quase inexistência desse cordão fez com que o RN conquistasse cidades onde, em eleições anteriores, havia sido bloqueado. No final das contas, essas eleições não deram o resultado que o RN esperava — um grande impulso nacional —, mas consolidaram uma base territorial sólida. Isso coloca uma questão relevante olhando para 2027: seria esse enraizamento local suficiente para sustentar uma vitória nas eleições presidenciais? Seguiremos acompanhando o caso da França. Hungria Passamos para a Hungria — continuamos falando de eleições, já que os húngaros vão às urnas em abril para decidir se encerram os 15 anos de governo de Viktor Orbán. No domingo, 15 de março, os dois principais atores políticos do país — Viktor Orbán, do Partido Fidesz, e o oposicionista Peter Magyar, do partido Tisza — realizaram grandes manifestações em Budapeste no Dia Nacional Húngaro. Mais do que uma comemoração histórica, os eventos funcionaram como um teste de força às vésperas das eleições de abril. Os dois lados reivindicaram vitória em termos de mobilização — como já vimos aqui no Brasil. O governo afirmou que foi uma das maiores marchas já realizadas no país, enquanto a oposição chegou a afirmar que reuniu meio milhão de pessoas. Ainda que sejam números exagerados, as estimativas independentes indicam que o Tisza, de Magyar, levou mais gente às ruas do que o Fidesz de Orbán, o que sinalizaria um possível avanço da oposição no campo urbano. Essas manifestações têm algo interessante: acontecem dentro de um calendário nacional, e foi possível observar uma disputa não só eleitoral, mas simbólica. Ambos os lados tentavam se apropriar da memória da Revolução de 1848. Orbán engendrou uma narrativa que associa o passado à luta contra o domínio estrangeiro, ao globalismo, à ingerência da União Europeia e à ameaça da guerra na Ucrânia. A oposição liderada por Peter Magyar utiliza os mesmos símbolos nacionais, mas com outros significados: para eles, a defesa da liberdade hoje se traduz em manter a Hungria dentro da União Europeia e vinculada à OTAN, além de restaurar o funcionamento das instituições democráticas do Estado húngaro — bastante prejudicadas nos anos de Orbán. As pesquisas de intenção de voto desde julho do ano passado mostram um quadro relativamente estável, com uma diferença de aproximadamente 10% em favor da oposição. É preciso ter cautela com essas pesquisas, no entanto, porque em 2011 Orbán fez uma importante reforma eleitoral que dá mais peso aos distritos rurais, geralmente mais conservadores. Além disso, ele concedeu cidadania a húngaros que vivem na Eslováquia, na Romênia e na Sérvia, uma população que tende a votar no governo. E há também uma mobilização ideológica mais incandescente da direita radical húngara, que pode fazer diferença nas urnas. Fato é que nenhum dos lados parece acreditar numa vitória esmagadora. Já se discute a possibilidade de alianças — o partido Jobbik, na Hungria, pode ser crucial para a formação de uma maioria no parlamento. No nosso episódio de abril, iremos repercutir o resultado dessa eleição. Dica Cultural David Magalhães: A nossa recomendação cultural deste episódio tem tudo a ver com a conversa que tivemos no primeiro bloco com a Letícia Cesarino. Se você se interessou pelo debate sobre internet, cultura digital, extrema-direita e disputa de narrativas, vale muito a pena assistir o documentário Feels Good Man, disponível na Amazon Prime. O documentário é de 2020, mas chegou recentemente a essa plataforma. O filme conta a história do Pepe the Frog, personagem criado pelo cartunista Matt Furie nos anos 2000. Originalmente era um sapo tranquilo, good vibes, que circulava numa tirinha independente. Com o tempo, porém, esse personagem foi sendo apropriado na internet — primeiro como meme, depois ganhando formas cada vez mais distorcidas, até virar um símbolo associado ao alt-right e a outros grupos de extrema-direita. O documentário é bastante interessante porque não trata isso como uma mera curiosidade da internet. Ele mostra como esse processo revela algo mais profundo: como essas comunidades online — fóruns, antigamente o 4chan, hoje um ecossistema bem mais complexo — funcionam como verdadeiros laboratórios de produção cultural e política, com uma lógica quase darwiniana de disputa por atenção, em que os conteúdos mais chocantes e extremos ganham mais visibilidade, com toda uma engenharia algorítmica por trás. O filme também acompanha o próprio criador do Pepe, que se vê completamente impotente diante da transformação da sua obra. E esse é um ponto central: na era da internet, a circulação de imagens e memes escapa completamente ao controle original — pode ser capturada e ressignificada por distintos atores políticos. O documentário tem um aspecto que dialoga diretamente com o que conversamos com a Letícia Cesarino: esses grupos utilizam o humor, a ironia, a ambiguidade e as trollagens para disseminar ideias racistas, misóginas e xenófobas, muitas vezes sob a aparência de brincadeira. Isso cria uma zona cinzenta que dificulta a crítica e, ao mesmo tempo, aumenta o alcance dessas mensagens de ódio. Feels Good Man nos ajuda a entender essa cultura digital e como ela se relaciona com a extrema-direita — e dialoga perfeitamente com os temas que trouxemos na entrevista do primeiro bloco. Até a próxima. The post Ecologia da mente e extrema-direita appeared first on Chutando a Escada.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with David Lachmish, co-founder of Ika, to explore the cutting-edge world of decentralized cryptography and its real-world applications. They cover the foundational problem of zero-trust custody and interoperability in crypto, breaking down why most people end up relying on centralized custodians despite crypto's original promise of removing third-party trust, and how Ika's novel 2PC-MPC cryptographic protocol addresses this with decentralized wallets (d-wallets) that require both the user and the Ika network to generate a signature. The conversation also touches on AI agents and the critical need for access control guardrails when agents handle real financial transactions, the philosophical parallels between crypto's growing pains and the early internet, decentralized governance and its potential to reshape how societies make decisions, and a surprising look at how decentralized certificate authorities could dramatically improve everyday internet security. David also gives a first public mention of an upcoming privacy-focused project called Encrypt.Links mentioned:- Ika website: https://ika.xyz- Ika on X: https://x.com/iкаdotxyz- David Lachmish on X: https://x.com/d3h3d_- Encrypt (upcoming project): https://encrypt.xyzTimestamps00:00 - David Lachmish introduces Ika and DWallet Labs, explaining their cybersecurity and cryptography background led them to solve zero trust custody and interoperability.05:00 - The d wallet concept is revealed as a decentralized signing mechanism controlled jointly by user and network, requiring new cryptography breakthroughs.10:00 - Crypto's philosophical parallels to early Internet are drawn, framing scams and misuse as inevitable growing pains of transformative infrastructure.15:00 - Wallet abstraction and agent constraints are explored, comparing future seamless crypto interaction to modern WiFi versus early modem connections.20:00 - Public key cryptography's binary ownership problem is explained, leading into MPC secret shares and Fireblocks' centralized access control tradeoffs.25:00 - 2PC MPC protocol is introduced as Ika's breakthrough, enabling decentralized policy enforcement without trusting any single entity.30:00 - Decentralized governance via token staking and code as law is discussed, contrasting corporate representative governance with crypto's direct decision-making.35:00 - Futarchy prediction markets and decision trees are connected to knowledge graphs, tracing humanity's accelerating governance transition.40:00 - Automation's historical parallels are examined, arguing AI's displacement of lawyers and developers mirrors every prior technological revolution.45:00 - Bitcoin and Ethereum's uncertain futures are assessed alongside Ika's positioning in custody and interoperability infrastructure.50:00 - Zero trust interoperability is explained, revealing how bridges create dangerous honeypots that Ika eliminates through native cryptographic control.55:00 - MetaMask's limitations for agents are detailed, contrasting stored private keys against Ika's policy-enforced guardrails for agentic transactions.60:00 - HumanTech's Wallet as a Protocol is presented as a practical way to give agents spending policies while maintaining user cryptographic control.65:00 - Decentralized certificate authorities emerge as Ika's broader cybersecurity vision, eliminating single points of failure across the entire Internet.Key Insights1. Zero Trust Custody and Interoperability: David and his cofounders at DWallet Labs identified that most cryptocurrency is held by centralized custodians, which contradicts crypto's core purpose of removing third-party trust. They set out to create "zero trust custody and zero trust interoperability" — systems where users maintain cryptographic control without sacrificing usability or relying on any single entity.2. The D-Wallet Primitive: Ika is built around a new cryptographic concept called a "d-wallet" — a decentralized wallet controlled jointly by the user and a decentralized network. A signature cannot be generated without the user's participation, meaning even if all network operators are compromised, they cannot act unilaterally. This required inventing new cryptography called 2PC-MPC.3. Access Control as the Missing Layer: Traditional crypto wallets operate on binary ownership — you either have full control or none. The d-wallet model introduces programmable access control policies enforced by a decentralized network, enabling features like spending limits and whitelisted addresses without trusting a centralized company like Fireblocks.4. Bridges Are Crypto's Biggest Security Vulnerability: Interoperability across blockchains typically requires trusting a bridge, which creates a honeypot for hackers. Ika eliminates this by allowing users to natively control assets on multiple chains simultaneously, maintaining cryptographic guarantees without a trusted intermediary.5. AI Agents Need Cryptographic Guardrails: Giving AI agents control over crypto wallets like MetaMask is dangerous due to hallucination and prompt injection risks. Ika enables agents to operate within strict, code-enforced policies — they can transact autonomously but cannot exceed boundaries set by the user, combining automation with genuine security.6. Decentralized Governance as a Structural Advantage: Ika operates as a permissionless network where two-thirds of token-staking operators control the protocol's direction. Even the founding team cannot unilaterally change the network, making governance transparent and resistant to capture — a meaningful contrast to closed, corporate-controlled systems.7. Decentralized Certificate Authorities as a Future Application: Beyond crypto, David envisions d-wallets solving broader cybersecurity problems. Today's internet relies on a handful of certificate authorities whose compromise would break global web security. A decentralized certificate authority built on Ika's infrastructure would require attacking hundreds of operators simultaneously, representing a fundamental upgrade to how trust is managed across the internet.

Tommy Miller, Bobby Shane Brooks, and Jason have a powerful conversation about union, identity, and the goodness of God, exploring how much of modern Christianity has framed the gospel through separation, behavior, and fear rather than inclusion, belovedness, and Christ-centered being. Tommy unpacks the difference between “tragic ontology” and “salvific ontology,” while Bobby shares his deeply personal story of losing his daughter and how the revelation of God's unwavering love carried him through grief without turning him against the Father. Together, they reclaim salvation, healing, holiness, and identity through the lens of union, arguing that the delusion of separation is over and that the gospel is ultimately the awakening to who we have always been in Christ.Homecoming Conference Link: https://legacy-church-ohio.churchcenter.com/registrations/events/3410549For more content like this, go to:https://afamilystory.org/JOIN our RGWT Subscriber-Based Community:https://promo.fourriversmedia.com/rethinking-god-with-tacos/JOIN A Family Story's Mailing Listhttps://dashing-field-76805.myflodesk.com/pie4be6wtoJOIN the Rethinking God with Tacos Facebook Group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/godandtacosFollow Rethinking God with Tacos on Instagram at:https://www.instagram.com/rethinkinggodwithtacos/Follow Jason's personal Facebook page at:https://www.facebook.com/afamilystory.org/Follow Jason on Instagram at:https://www.instagram.com/jasonclarkis/Follow Jason on X at: https://x.com/jasonclarkis SEND A DONATION!!https://app.moonclerk.com/pay/36393kxxeh8

******Support the channel******Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenterPayPal: paypal.me/thedissenterPayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuyPayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9lPayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpzPayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9mPayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ******Follow me on******Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/The Dissenter Goodreads list: https://shorturl.at/7BMoBFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/Twitter: https://x.com/TheDissenterYT This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. Dan Zahavi is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Zahavi writes on phenomenology (especially the philosophy of Edmund Husserl) and philosophy of mind. In his writings, he has dealt extensively with topics such as self, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and social cognition. He is the author of several books, including Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology. In this episode, we focus on Being We. We talk about phenomenological sociology, and go through topics like individual subjectivity, the self, collective intentionality, we-identity, and social cognition and interpersonal understanding. We discuss the roles played in social cognition by empathy, second-person engagement, imaginative perspective-taking, and detached inferential mindreading. Finally, we talk about the varieties and limits of we, and thin and thick we.--A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, HEDIN BRØNNER, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ALEX CHAU, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, VALENTIN STEINMANN, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, LUCY, MANVIR SINGH, PETRA WEIMANN, CAROLA FEEST, MAURO JÚNIOR, 航 豊川, TONY BARRETT, NIKOLAI VISHNEVSKY, STEVEN GANGESTAD, TED FARRIS, HUGO B., JAMES, JORDAN MANSFIELD, CHARLOTTE ALLEN, PETER STOYKO, DAVID TONNER, LEE BECK, PATRICK DALTON-HOLMES, NICK KRASNEY, RACHEL ZAK, AND DENNIS XAVIER!A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, NICK GOLDEN, CHRISTINE GLASS, IGOR NIKIFOROVSKI, PER KRAULIS, AND JOSHUA WOOD!AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

Is anything real? How many universes are there? Is everything a simulation being run by a quantum computer through a wormhole from a future era? Is the answer to everything really ... 42? The affable and charming astrophysicist, author and philosopher of tiny particles Dr. Adam Becker pulls up a seat. And enjoy this encore episode as Alie has an existential crisis or two as they discuss the drama, intellectual battles and drunken debates of science past, and the hope that a new era of thinkers will figure out what exactly is going on in the world. Either way: cut bangs and text your crush. Follow Dr. Adam Becker on BlueSky and Instagram Purchase his book "What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics” Or his new book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity A donation went to Techbridge Girls More episode sources & links Sponsors of Ologies Transcripts & bleeped episodes Support Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a month OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes! Follow @Ologies on Twitter and Instagram Follow @AlieWard on Twitter and Instagram Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Music by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, hosts Courtney and Mecca talk with Dr. Sara Juengst about her bioarchaeological work in coastal Ecuador among the very early and early Gangala, including differing ideas of what it means to be a “body”, the sociocultural and subsistence roles of the ocean, and the benefits of combining paleopathological, mortuary, and stable isotopic analyses. Dr. Juengst is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA. As an anthropological bioarchaeologist, her research integrates social theory and skeletal evidence to address lived experiences of disease, diet, migration, and violence in the past and present. Her research primarily focuses on South America (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru), but she does consulting work on projects in North Carolina, Kenya, and Nigeria. In all of her work, she explores how people navigated changing social and environmental climates and highlights how skeletons embody power and community. She earned her BA in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University in 2008 and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. ------------------------------ Find the paper discussed in this episode: Juengst, S.L., Lunnis, R., Cruz, Y.Z., Cobb, E.M., Bythell, A. (2024). An Investigation of Identity and Ontology at Salango, Ecuador (BCE 100–300 CE) Combining Paleopathological, Mortuary, and Stable Isotopic Analyses. Bioarchaeology, 8(1-2). https://doi.org/10.5744/bi.2023.0010 ------------------------------ Contact Dr. Juengst at sjuengst@charlotte.edu and follow her work at https://www.sarajuengst.com/ ------------------------------ Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and the Human Biology Association: Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org Courtney Manthey, Co-Host Website: holylaetoli.com/ E-mail: cpierce4@uccs.edu, Twitter: @HolyLaetoli Mecca Howe, SoS Producer, HBA Fellow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mecca-howe/, Email: howemecca@gmail.com

In Part 2 of our conversation with Leo Gura, the discussion moves from abstract truth into the territory most people avoid: morality, evil, love, and survival. If everything is one, what becomes of good and bad? If reality is infinite consciousness, are our moral systems discoveries or inventions shaped by fear and self-preservation? The episode wrestles with whether absolute truth dissolves morality or reveals a deeper foundation beneath it, and what it would mean to live from that realization without collapsing into nihilism.Part 1: https://youtu.be/rLYFHXf1xXUPATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADOX LOST PRE-SALE: https://buy.stripe.com/7sY7sKdoN5d29eUdYddEs0bHOMEBREW MUSIC - Check out our new album!Hard Copies (Vinyl): FREE SHIPPING https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/products/vinyl-lp-secretary-of-nature-everything-is-so-good-hereStreaming:https://secretaryofnature.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-so-good-herePARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-show00:00 Go!00:03:55 Good, Bad, and Absolute Ontology00:06:17 Stages of Moral Development00:09:41 Expanding the Self to Infinity00:12:03 Relative vs Absolute Morality00:17:24 Accountability Within Oneness00:21:35 Law, Consent, and Moral Relativism00:27:22 When Love Becomes Naive00:30:24 Survival Corrupts Pure Ideas00:33:02 Radical Open-Mindedness00:37:13 Good and Evil as Human Constructs00:42:01 Can Evil Exist Ontologically?00:46:16 Trauma, Awakening, and Survival00:51:10 Jesus, Suffering, and Infinite Love00:55:06 Ontology of Love and Infinity00:59:05 Infinity, God, and Absolute Reality01:06:40 Unity in Nature and Daily Life01:11:18 Integration and Practical Awakening01:16:23 Consciousness Beyond Humanity01:19:41 Immortality Through Infinity01:21:20 Closing Reflections and Invitation #Nonduality, #Consciousness, #Awakening, #AbsoluteTruth, #PhilosophyOfMind, #MoralPhilosophy, #InfiniteLove, #SelfInquiry, #SpiritualAwakening, #TruthSeeking, #PhilosophicalDebate, #skepticism , #physicspodcast, #philosophypodcast MERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/AMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98DONATE: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaDSUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@UCqV4_7i9h1_V7hY48eZZSLw@demystifysci RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rssMAILING LIST: https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySciMUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

Full article: Large Language Model-Generated Expansion of the RadLex Ontology: Application to Multinational Datasets of Chest CT Reports Could a large language model (LLM) be used as a scalable solution for expanding radiology ontologies? Tobi Folami, MD, discusses the AJR article by Lee et al. exploring a LLM for large-scale expansion of the RadLex ontology.

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on February 22, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and executionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106686&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): Japanese Woodblock Print SearchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107781&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Attention Media ≠ Social NetworksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110515&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:53): A Botnet Accidentally Destroyed I2POriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106985&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:21): Back to FreeBSD: Part 1Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108989&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:48): Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI – it's Ontology. An open-source deep diveOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107512&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:16): What Is a Database Transaction?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110473&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:44): Iranian Students Protest as Anger GrowsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108256&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:12): People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So MuchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107819&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:39): U.S. Cannot Legally Impose Tariffs Using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108538&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, to explore how seemingly different systems—from proteins and music to knowledge structures and AI reasoning—share underlying patterns through hierarchy, self-organization, and scale-free networks. The conversation ranges from the limits of current AI interpolation versus true discovery (using the fire-to-fusion example), to the emergence of agent swarms and their non-linear effects, to practical questions about ontologies, knowledge graphs, and whether humans will remain necessary in the creative discovery process. Markus discusses his lab's work automating scientific discovery through AI agents that can generate hypotheses, run simulations, and even retrain themselves, while Stewart shares his own experiences building applications with AI coding agents and grapples with questions about intellectual property, material science constraints, and the future of human creativity in an AI-abundant world.Timestamps00:00 - Introduction to Marcus Buehler's work on knowledge graphs, structural grammar across proteins, music, and AI reasoning05:00 - Discussion of AI discovery versus interpolation, using fire and fusion as examples of fundamental versus incremental innovation10:00 - Language models as connective glue between agents, enabling communication despite imperfect outputs and canonical averaging15:00 - Embodiment and agency in AI systems, creating adversarial agents that challenge theories and expand world models20:00 - Emergent properties in materials and AI, comparing dislocations in metals to behaviors in agent swarms25:00 - Human role-playing and phase separation in society, parallels to composite materials and heterogeneity30:00 - Physical world challenges, atom-by-atom manufacturing at MIT.nano, limitations of lithography machines35:00 - Synthetic biology as alternative to nanotechnology, programming microorganisms for materials discovery40:00 - Intellectual property debates, commodification of AI models, control layers more valuable than model architecture45:00 - Automation of ontologies, agent self-testing, daughter's coding success at age 1150:00 - Graph theory for knowledge compression, neurosymbolic approaches combining symbolic and neural methods55:00 - Nonlinear acceleration in AI, emergence from accumulated innovations, restaurant owner embracing AI01:00:00 - Future generations possibly rejecting AI, democratization of knowledge, social media as real-time scientific discourseKey Insights1. Universal Patterns Across Disciplines: Seemingly different systems in nature—proteins, music, social networks, and knowledge itself—share fundamental structural patterns including hierarchy, self-organization, and scale-free networks. This commonality allows creative thinkers to draw insights across disciplines, applying principles from one domain to solve problems in another. As an engineer and materials scientist, Buehler has leveraged these isomorphisms to advance scientific understanding by mapping the "plumbing" of different systems onto each other, revealing hidden relationships that enable extrapolation beyond what's observable in any single domain.2. The Discovery Versus Interpolation Problem: Current AI systems, particularly large language models, excel at interpolation—recombining existing knowledge in new ways—but struggle with genuine discovery that requires fundamental rewiring of world models. Using the example of fire versus fusion, Buehler explains that an AI trained on combustion chemistry would propose bigger fires or new fuels, but couldn't conceive of fusion because that requires stepping back to more fundamental physics. True discovery demands the ability to recognize when existing theories have boundaries and to develop entirely new frameworks, something current AI architectures aren't designed to achieve due to their training objective of predicting the most likely outcome.3. The Role of Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: While some AI researchers argue that ontologies are unnecessary because models form internal representations, Buehler advocates for explicit knowledge graphs as essential discovery tools. External ontologies provide sharp, analytical, symbolic representations that complement the fuzzy internal representations of neural networks. They enable verification of rare connections—like obscure papers that might hold key insights—which would be averaged away in standard AI training. This neurosymbolic approach combines the generalization capabilities of neural networks with the precision of formal knowledge structures, creating more powerful discovery systems.4. Emergent Properties and Agent Swarms: Just as materials science shows that collections of atoms exhibit properties impossible to predict from individual components, AI agent swarms demonstrate emergent behaviors beyond single models. When agents are incentivized not just to answer questions but to challenge each other adversarially, propose theories, and test hypotheses, they can spawn new copies of themselves and evolve understanding beyond their initial programming. This emergence isn't surprising from a materials science perspective—dislocations, grain boundaries, and other collective phenomena only appear at scale, fundamentally determining material behavior in ways unpredictable from studying just a few atoms.5. The Commoditization of Intelligence: The fundamental AI models themselves are becoming commodities, as evidenced by events like the Moldbug phenomenon where people built agents using various providers interchangeably. The real value is shifting from who has the smartest model to how models are orchestrated, integrated, and deployed. This parallels historical technology adoption patterns—just as we moved past debating who makes the best electricity to focusing on applications, AI is transitioning from a horse race over model capabilities to questions of infrastructure, energy, access speed, and agent coordination at the systems level.6. Human-AI Collaboration and Creative Control: Rather than wholesale replacement, AI enables humans to operate in an intensely creative space as orchestrators sampling from vast possibility spaces. Similar to how Buehler's 11-year-old daughter now builds sophisticated applications that would have required professional developers years ago, AI democratizes access to capabilities while humans retain the creative judgment about direction and meaning. The human role becomes curating emergence, finding rare connections, playing at the edges of knowledge, and exercising the kind of curiosity-driven exploration that AI systems lack without embodied stakes in their own survival and continuation.7. Technology as Evolutionary Inevitability: The development of AI represents not an unnatural threat but the next stage of human evolution—an extension of our innate drive to build models of ourselves and our world. From cave paintings to partial differential equations to artificial intelligence, humans continuously create increasingly sophisticated representations and tools. Attempting to stop this technological evolution is futile; instead, the focus should be on steering it ...

This is the takeaway episode with Nachiket Mehta, an experienced data leader who has lived and breathed the “shift left”. In this episode we will unpack how ontology, events and culture unlock enterprise AI. We discuss why your ontologist needs to visit the fulfillment center, how to shift data teams from afterthought to proactive partner, and why the five why's matter more than your tech stack.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it mean to think communism philosophically, and how can a political rupture be understood as an ontological transformation of the conditions of everyday life? Adam is joined by Bruno Gulli and Richard Gilman-Opalsky to discuss their book of dialogues "Communist Ontologies: An Inquiry into the Construction of New Forms of Life" out now with our comrades over at Minor Compositions. They discuss the nature of identity and difference, insurgent ontologies, and how to think of communism as an abolitionist horizon latent in struggles against oppression today. Get the book:https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1320 Check out Richard's latest rhythms: edgetonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/a-fierce-and-gentle-forceSupport the showSupport the podcast:Current classes at Acid Horizon Research Commons (AHRC): https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-mainWebsite: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast Boycott Watkins Media: https://xenogothic.com/2025/03/17/boycott-watkins-statement/ Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438Merch: http://www.crit-drip.comSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform: https://pod.link/1512615438 LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHANDHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

ReferencesGuerra, DJ 2026 In PreparationThomas, R .1969. Eternity Road FoCC. Moody Blueshttps://open.spotify.com/track/13z2K32dMaQLDohef5Ndne?si=2493932acf2945f2

Ryan and Alex explore the overlap between consciousness and unseen intelligences, digging into thought forms, disembodied entities, and tulpas, ideas that suggest the mind may help create or shape non-physical realities. Drawing on Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, they discuss whether reality itself has memory, and whether belief, attention, and pattern play a role in encounters with the unknown.

We consider chapter 2, "Aesthetics Is the Root of All Philosophy," where Harman describes how art can help us see behind the veil to things-in-themselves. Art is "theatrical" in that it's really the spectator who is standing in like an actor for the object encountered in art. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsor: Visit functionhealth.com/PEL to get the data you need to take action for your health.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Larry Swanson, a knowledge architect, community builder, and host of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. They explore the relationship between knowledge graphs and ontologies, why these technologies matter in the age of AI, and how symbolic AI complements the current wave of large language models. The conversation traces the history of neuro-symbolic AI from its origins at Dartmouth in 1956 through the semantic web vision of Tim Berners-Lee, examining why knowledge architecture remains underappreciated despite being deployed at major enterprises like Netflix, Amazon, and LinkedIn. Swanson explains how RDF (Resource Description Framework) enables both machines and humans to work with structured knowledge in ways that relational databases can't, while Alsop shares his journey from knowledge management director to understanding the practical necessity of ontologies for business operations. They discuss the philosophical roots of the field, the separation between knowledge management practitioners and knowledge engineers, and why startups often overlook these approaches until scale demands them. You can find Larry's podcast at KGI.fm or search for Knowledge Graph Insights on Spotify and YouTube.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Knowledge Graphs and Ontologies01:09 The Importance of Ontologies in AI04:14 Philosophy's Role in Knowledge Management10:20 Debating the Relevance of RDF15:41 The Distinction Between Knowledge Management and Knowledge Engineering21:07 The Human Element in AI and Knowledge Architecture25:07 Startups vs. Enterprises: The Knowledge Gap29:57 Deterministic vs. Probabilistic AI32:18 The Marketing of AI: A Historical Perspective33:57 The Role of Knowledge Architecture in AI39:00 Understanding RDF and Its Importance44:47 The Intersection of AI and Human Intelligence50:50 Future Visions: AI, Ontologies, and Human BehaviorKey Insights1. Knowledge Graphs Combine Structure and Instances Through Ontological Design. A knowledge graph is built using an ontology that describes a specific domain you want to understand or work with. It includes both an ontological description of the terrain—defining what things exist and how they relate to one another—and instances of those things mapped to real-world data. This combination of abstract structure and concrete examples is what makes knowledge graphs powerful for discovery, question-answering, and enabling agentic AI systems. Not everyone agrees on the precise definition, but this understanding represents the practical approach most knowledge architects use when building these systems.2. Ontology Engineering Has Deep Philosophical Roots That Inform Modern Practice. The field draws heavily from classical philosophy, particularly ontology (the nature of what you know), epistemology (how you know what you know), and logic. These thousands-year-old philosophical frameworks provide the rigorous foundation for modern knowledge representation. Living in Heidelberg surrounded by philosophers, Swanson has discovered how much of knowledge graph work connects upstream to these philosophical roots. This philosophical grounding becomes especially important during times when institutional structures are collapsing, as we need to create new epistemological frameworks for civilization—knowledge management and ontology become critical tools for restructuring how we understand and organize information.3. The Semantic Web Vision Aimed to Transform the Internet Into a Distributed Database. Twenty-five years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila published a landmark article in Scientific American proposing the semantic web. While Berners-Lee had already connected documents across the web through HTML and HTTP, the semantic web aimed to connect all the data—essentially turning the internet into a giant database. This vision led to the development of RDF (Resource Description Framework), which emerged from DARPA research and provides the technical foundation for building knowledge graphs and ontologies. The origin story involved solving simple but important problems, like disambiguating whether "Cook" referred to a verb, noun, or a person's name at an academic conference.4. Symbolic AI and Neural Networks Represent Complementary Approaches Like Fast and Slow Thinking. Drawing on Kahneman's "thinking fast and slow" framework, LLMs represent the "fast brain"—learning monsters that can process enormous amounts of information and recognize patterns through natural language interfaces. Symbolic AI and knowledge graphs represent the "slow brain"—capturing actual knowledge and facts that can counter hallucinations and provide deterministic, explainable reasoning. This complementarity is driving the re-emergence of neuro-symbolic AI, which combines both approaches. The fundamental distinction is that symbolic AI systems are deterministic and can be fully explained, while LLMs are probabilistic and stochastic, making them unsuitable for applications requiring absolute reliability, such as industrial robotics or pharmaceutical research.5. Knowledge Architecture Remains Underappreciated Despite Powering Major Enterprises. While machine learning engineers currently receive most of the attention and budget, knowledge graphs actually power systems at Netflix (the economic graph), Amazon (the product graph), LinkedIn, Meta, and most major enterprises. The technology has been described as "the most astoundingly successful failure in the history of technology"—the semantic web vision seemed to fail, yet more than half of web pages now contain RDF-formatted semantic markup through schema.org, and every major enterprise uses knowledge graph technology in the background. Knowledge architects remain underappreciated partly because the work is cognitively difficult, requires talking to people (which engineers often avoid), and most advanced practitioners have PhDs in computer science, logic, or philosophy.6. RDF's Simple Subject-Predicate-Object Structure Enables Meaning and Data Linking. Unlike relational databases that store data in tables with rows and columns, RDF uses the simplest linguistic structure: subject-predicate-object (like "Larry knows Stuart"). Each element has a unique URI identifier, which permits precise meaning and enables linked data across systems. This graph structure makes it much easier to connect data after the fact compared to navigating tabular structures in relational databases. On top of RDF sits an entire stack of technologies including schema languages, query languages, ontological languages, and constraints languages—everything needed to turn data into actionable knowledge. The goal is inferring or articulating knowledge from RDF-structured data.7. The Future Requires Decoupled Modular Architectures Combining Multiple AI Approaches. The vision for the future involves separation of concerns through microservices-like architectures where different systems handle what they do best. LLMs excel at discovering possibilities and generating lists, while knowledge graphs excel at articulating human-vetted, deterministic versions of that information that systems can reliably use. Every one of Swanson's 300 podcast interviews over ten years ultimately concludes that regardless of technology, success comes down to human beings, their behavior, and the cultural changes needed to implement systems. The assumption that we can simply eliminate people from processes misses that huma...

Political conversations often feel unavoidable and quickly charged. We enter them believing we are simply sharing opinions, yet underneath sits rigidity, righteousness, and a deep attachment to being right. What starts as dialogue easily turns into defensiveness, frustration, and disconnection, leaving relationships strained and nothing truly changed.  

Do Gods exist? Why is magic more effective when Gods and spirits are involved? What makes magic effective? How to influence people and political events?All of this and more in this discussion with Chaos Magician Peter J. Carroll.Check out Peter Carroll's website: https://specularium.org/CONNECT & SUPPORT

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop explores the complex world of context and knowledge graphs with guest Youssef Tharwat, the founder of NoodlBox who is building dot get for context. Their conversation spans from the philosophical nature of context and its crucial role in AI development, to the technical challenges of creating deterministic tools for software development. Tharwat explains how his product creates portable, versionable knowledge graphs from code repositories, leveraging the semantic relationships already present in programming languages to provide agents with better contextual understanding. They discuss the limitations of large context windows, the advantages of Rust for AI-assisted development, the recent Claude/Bun acquisition, and the broader geopolitical implications of the AI race between big tech companies and open-source alternatives. The conversation also touches on the sustainability of current AI business models and the potential for more efficient, locally-run solutions to challenge the dominance of compute-heavy approaches.For more information about NoodlBox and to join the beta, visit NoodlBox.io.Timestamps00:00 Stewart introduces Youssef Tharwat, founder of NoodlBox, building context management tools for programming05:00 Context as relevant information for reasoning; importance when hitting coding barriers10:00 Knowledge graphs enable semantic traversal through meaning vs keywords/files15:00 Deterministic vs probabilistic systems; why critical applications need 100% reliability20:00 CLI tool makes knowledge graphs portable, versionable artifacts with code repos25:00 Compiler front-ends, syntax trees, and Rust's superior feedback for AI-assisted coding30:00 Claude's Bun acquisition signals potential shift toward runtime compilation and graph-based context35:00 Open source vs proprietary models; user frustration with rate limits and subscription tactics40:00 Singularity path vs distributed sovereignty of developers building alternative architectures45:00 Global economics and why brute force compute isn't sustainable worldwide50:00 Corporate inefficiencies vs independent engineering; changing workplace dynamics55:00 February open beta for NoodlBox.io; vision for new development tool standardsKey Insights1. Context is semantic information that enables proper reasoning, and traditional LLM approaches miss the mark. Youssef defines context as the information you need to reason correctly about something. He argues that larger context windows don't scale because quality degrades with more input, similar to human cognitive limitations. This insight challenges the Silicon Valley approach of throwing more compute at the problem and suggests that semantic separation of information is more optimal than brute force methods.2. Code naturally contains semantic boundaries that can be modeled into knowledge graphs without LLM intervention. Unlike other domains where knowledge graphs require complex labeling, code already has inherent relationships like function calls, imports, and dependencies. Youssef leverages these existing semantic structures to automatically build knowledge graphs, making his approach deterministic rather than probabilistic. This provides the reliability that software development has historically required.3. Knowledge graphs can be made portable, versionable, and shareable as artifacts alongside code repositories. Youssef's vision treats context as a first-class citizen in version control, similar to how Git manages code. Each commit gets a knowledge graph snapshot, allowing developers to see conceptual changes over time and share semantic understanding with collaborators. This transforms context from an ephemeral concept into a concrete, manageable asset.4. The dependency problem in modern development can be solved through pre-indexed knowledge graphs of popular packages. Rather than agents struggling with outdated API documentation, Youssef pre-indexes popular npm packages into knowledge graphs that automatically integrate with developers' projects. This federated approach ensures agents understand exact APIs and current versions, eliminating common frustrations with deprecated methods and unclear documentation.5. Rust provides superior feedback loops for AI-assisted programming due to its explicit compiler constraints. Youssef rebuilt his tool multiple times in different languages, ultimately settling on Rust because its picky compiler provides constant feedback to LLMs about subtle issues. This creates a natural quality control mechanism that helps AI generate more reliable code, making Rust an ideal candidate for AI-assisted development workflows.6. The current AI landscape faces a fundamental tension between expensive centralized models and the need for global accessibility. The conversation reveals growing frustration with rate limiting and subscription costs from major providers like Claude and Google. Youssef believes something must fundamentally change because $200-300 monthly plans only serve a fraction of the world's developers, creating pressure for more efficient architectures and open alternatives.7. Deterministic tooling built on semantic understanding may provide a competitive advantage against probabilistic AI monopolies. While big tech companies pursue brute force scaling with massive data centers, Youssef's approach suggests that clever architecture using existing semantic structures could level the playing field. This represents a broader philosophical divide between the "singularity" path of infinite compute and the "disagreeably autistic engineer" path of elegant solutions that work locally and affordably.

Continuing on Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018), finishing up ch. 1 (discussing what's so bad about reductionism) and moving to ch. 4, "Indirect Relations," which is about causality. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel.

Lionel battles a freezing New York studio and a radiator that defies the laws of physics to deliver a masterclass on media literacy, breaking down the difference between "Ontology" (what is real) and "Epistemology" (how we know it). The hour veers from high philosophy to heated debates as Lionel challenges a caller who believes God chooses political sides. The conversation takes wild turns into the nuances of "Black Privilege," the psychology of horse whispering, Santería rituals, and why modern TV lacks the moral fiber of Barney Miller and Different Strokes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join Lionel for a four-hour masterclass in chaos, controversy, and high-octane opinion. In this marathon episode, Lionel dissects the legal absurdity of hate crimes, arguing that the justice system has turned prosecutors into mind readers. The conversation pivots to a "Round Two" of COVID nostalgia, where he roasts Dr. Fauci and dissects Ilhan Omar's "mysterious" encounter with apple cider vinegar. Battling a freezing studio, Lionel shifts gears to "Epistemology for Dummies," debating whether God picks political sides and explaining the difference between reality and how we perceive it. Finally, on The Other Side of Midnight, take a trip through the bizarre history of Atlantic City diving horses and 1905 doomsday prophecies as Lionel shadowboxes with the absurd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018). What counts as an entity in the world? Harman includes not just physical objects, but fictional objects, "sensual objects," and even events, which you might have thought were the alternative to objects. With this promiscuous ontology comes a strange theory of causality whereby no real object touches another real object, and an epistemology that involves us having no knowledge of real objects at all, though Harman's theory art gives us a back-door to make up for this deficiency, and philosophy itself ends up sharing in these properties of art. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel. Go to HelloFresh.com/pel10fm to Get 10 free meals + a free Zwilling Knife with your third box.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop welcomes Roni Burd, a data and AI executive with extensive experience at Amazon and Microsoft, for a deep dive into the evolving landscape of data management and artificial intelligence in enterprise environments. Their conversation explores the longstanding challenges organizations face with knowledge management and data architecture, from the traditional bronze-silver-gold data processing pipeline to how AI agents are revolutionizing how people interact with organizational data without needing SQL or Python expertise. Burd shares insights on the economics of AI implementation at scale, the debate between one-size-fits-all models versus specialized fine-tuned solutions, and the technical constraints that prevent companies like Apple from upgrading services like Siri to modern LLM capabilities, while discussing the future of inference optimization and the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars cost barrier that makes architectural experimentation in AI uniquely expensive compared to other industries.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Data and AI Challenges03:08 The Evolution of Data Management05:54 Understanding Data Quality and Metadata08:57 The Role of AI in Data Cleaning11:50 Knowledge Management in Large Organizations14:55 The Future of AI and LLMs17:59 Economics of AI Implementation29:14 The Importance of LLMs for Major Tech Companies32:00 Open Source: Opportunities and Challenges35:19 The Future of AI Inference and Hardware43:24 Optimizing Inference: The Next Frontier49:23 The Commercial Viability of AI ModelsKey Insights1. Data Architecture Evolution: The industry has evolved through bronze-silver-gold data layers, where bronze is raw data, silver is cleaned/processed data, and gold is business-ready datasets. However, this creates bottlenecks as stakeholders lose access to original data during the cleaning process, making metadata and data cataloging increasingly critical for organizations.2. AI Democratizing Data Access: LLMs are breaking down technical barriers by allowing business users to query data in plain English without needing SQL, Python, or dashboarding skills. This represents a fundamental shift from requiring intermediaries to direct stakeholder access, though the full implications remain speculative.3. Economics Drive AI Architecture Decisions: Token costs and latency requirements are major factors determining AI implementation. Companies like Meta likely need their own models because paying per-token for billions of social media interactions would be economically unfeasible, driving the need for self-hosted solutions.4. One Model Won't Rule Them All: Despite initial hopes for universal models, the reality points toward specialized models for different use cases. This is driven by economics (smaller models for simple tasks), performance requirements (millisecond response times), and industry-specific needs (medical, military terminology).5. Inference is the Commercial Battleground: The majority of commercial AI value lies in inference rather than training. Current GPUs, while specialized for graphics and matrix operations, may still be too general for optimal inference performance, creating opportunities for even more specialized hardware.6. Open Source vs Open Weights Distinction: True open source in AI means access to architecture for debugging and modification, while "open weights" enables fine-tuning and customization. This distinction is crucial for enterprise adoption, as open weights provide the flexibility companies need without starting from scratch.7. Architecture Innovation Faces Expensive Testing Loops: Unlike database optimization where query plans can be easily modified, testing new AI architectures requires expensive retraining cycles costing hundreds of millions of dollars. This creates a potential innovation bottleneck, similar to aerospace industries where testing new designs is prohibitively expensive.

Ontologies are suddenly everywhere but they didn’t come out of nowhere. In this episode, Juan and Tim chat with Professor Oscar Corcho, who has been doing ontology engineering since the early 2000s (check out his book Ontological Engineering from 2003), to demystify what ontologies actually are, where they came from, and why that history still matters today. If you’re new to ontologies or feeling lost in the current hype, this episode gives you the grounding you didn’t know you needed to understand where the field has been and where it should be going next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Free ZWILLING Four Star Chef's Knife on your 3rd box ($144.99 value) + 10 Free Meals and your first box ship free with code CURTJHFZWL at https://hellofresh.yt.link/4u4Vh7m! This is an interview with Oxford's Timothy Williamson. He's one of the most cited living philosophers, and simultaneously one of the most controversial (yet respected). He dismantles physicalism, solipsism, and reductionism––explaining why consciousness is philosophically overrated and why AI in its current form likely lacks genuine mental states. This will be a tour‐de‐force episode into all things related to looking deeply and fundamentally. If you're interested in consciousness, free will, art, language, and meaning, I believe you'll love this episode. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe SUPPORT: - Support me on Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Support me on Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - Support me on PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 JOIN MY SUBSTACK (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com LISTEN ON SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Vagueness & Sorites Paradox - 00:07:12 - Identity, Physicalism, Non-Physicals - 00:22:30 - Realism vs. Anti-Realism - 00:29:50 - The Problem of Skepticism - 00:35:40 - Cognitive Heuristics & Doubt - 00:43:00 - Solipsism's Appeal & Pitfalls - 00:50:00 - Solipsism: A Critique - 00:57:30 - Pluralism & Consciousness - 01:06:00 - AI, Mental States, Ontology - 01:15:50 - Mind, Knowledge, Meaning - 01:26:00 - Philosophical Heuristics - 01:32:00 - Counterfactuals & Logic - 01:38:00 - Personal Philosophy LINKS MENTIONED: - Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy [Book]: https://www.amazon.com/Overfitting-Heuristics-Philosophy-Rutgers-Lectures/dp/0197779212 - Timothy Williamson's Published Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IH-44VwAAAAJ&hl=en - Sorites Paradox: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ - Philosophical Investigations [Book]: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/0631205691 - I Do Not Exist [Paper]: https://academic.oup.com/book/53296/chapter-abstract/422023005 - O'Shaughnessy Ventures: https://www.osv.llc/ - Barry Loewer & Eddy Chen [TOE]: https://youtu.be/xZnafO__IZ0 - Bas Van Fraassen [TOE]: https://youtu.be/lhpRAWxvY5s - Matthew Segall [TOE]: https://youtu.be/DeTm4fSXpbM - Jennifer Nagel [TOE]: https://youtu.be/CWZVMZ9Tm7Q - Leo Gura [TOE]: https://youtu.be/YspFR9JAq3w - Iain McGilchrist [TOE]: https://youtu.be/M-SgOwc6Pe4 - The Consciousness Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/65yjqIDghEk - Karl Friston [TOE]: https://youtu.be/uk4NZorRjCo - Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE - Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY - Ben Goertzel & Joscha Bach [TOE]: https://youtu.be/xw7omaQ8SgA - Claudia de Rham [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ve_Mpd6dGv8 - Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/0YRlQQw0d-4 - Elan Barenholtz & Will Hahn [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ca_RbPXraDE - Greg Kondrak [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FFW14zSYiFY - Robert Sapolsky [TOE]: https://youtu.be/z0IqA1hYKY8 SOCIALS: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs Guests do not pay to appear. Theories of Everything receives revenue solely from viewer donations, platform ads, and clearly labelled sponsors; no guest or associated entity has ever given compensation, directly or through intermediaries. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices