Blog
join us as we explore paradox as praxis ... we are three individuals on different paths. we have different orientations to study & scholarship. we’re exploring our tensions creatively. join us if this speaks to you. — Andrea, Marcus, and Yogi This post was originally published on Andrea's Substack. Please comment and like there! Life is paradoxIn every cell of our bodies, since the…
Text: Johannes JaegerArtwork: Marcus Neustetter This essay is now also available on Love & Philosophy! Please help us gain visibility by liking and commenting there.A PDF version of this essay for offline reading can be downloaded here. This argument was presented as an invited talk for the “Hybrid Minds” symposium — organized by the Telos Circle at the Medical University of…
I've been writing on my next large blog post ("The Cyborg Myth") for weeks now, and I'm thinking: this is turning (once again) into a fully fledged philosophical argument, almost an academic paper (just without the hassle of the peer-review process). Is this really the point of having a blog? I don't know. Maybe I have to let go of my cherished ideas that each post here must be a long, polished…
von Johannes Jäger und Marcus Neustetterhier gibt es die PDF Version Das Original dieses Artikels wurde auf Englisch für den Substack Love & Philosophy geschrieben. Bitte dort liken und kommentieren! Manchmal kommt uns die Menschheit vor wie eine riesige, zerstrittene Familie.Wir kommen nicht miteinander aus. Wir reden aneinander vorbei. Dennoch sind wir gezwungen, denselben, zunehmend…
by Johannes Jaeger and Marcus Neustetterdownload a PDF version of the essay This is a reprint of an essay we wrote for Love & Philosophy. You can find the original here. Please like and post comments over there, not here! Sometimes, humanity feels like an enormous squabbling family. We just can’t seem to get along. We talk past each other constantly. Yet, we are forced to share the same…
in love, we may be confusing 'having' with 'being' This is a reprint of an essay I wrote for Love & Philosophy. You can find the original here. Please like and post comments over there, not here!Thanks a lot to Andrea Hiott for commissioning it. It was a lot of fun to write! Original artworks by Marcus Neustetter. The jaded cynic in me first thought that “Love and Philosophy” was a…
Today is my birthday. Obviously, it marks a date that is easy to remember for me. And I remember exactly how I felt on this day last year, on Mar 17, 2024. Concentrating, and just being myself in general, required an immense effort. Simple day-to-day activities, like personal hygiene or cooking a meal, became enormous projects. More complex tasks, especially those requiring any kind of non-trivial…
Drawings by Marcus Neustetter. A graveyard of zombie concepts. I’ve done it. I’ve read the entire 43 pages of Mike Levin’s “Technology Approach to Mind Everywhere” (TAME) paper. Carefully. Yes, you may pity me. Indeed, I like to suffer. But I also like my suffering to be productive. So I’ve decided to write up a philosophical take-down of the massive theoretical…
This blog post arose out of a conversation between myself, Eduard Willms, Tobias Luthe, and Daniel Christian Wahl, as part of the Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems teaching platform. Drawings by Marcus Neustetter. It accompanies a little video I made together with artist Marcus Neustetter, which explains the difference between living and non-living systems: 1. What are living systems, and…
... but it doesn't quite do what its inventors say it does. Disclaimer: I am currently funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). If you'd like to know more about my research project, you can find lots of information (and my book draft) here. I'm perfectly open about being funded by them and have no problem with it. I am a lifelong (in fact, second-generation) atheist and the research I'm…
The future of evolutionary-developmental systems biology https://meetings.embo.org/event/23-evolution-venice Every two years, I co-direct a theoretical summer school on topics related to evolutionary developmental and systems biology at the Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli in Venice. My current partner in crime is philosopher of science James DiFrisco. Future editions of the school will be…
Twice now, in the short span of one week, I've been reminded on social media that I should be more humble when arguing — that I lack epistemic humility. Occasion 1: I was criticizing current practices of scientific peer-review, which systematically marginalize philosophical challenges to the reductionist-mechanistic status quo in biology. My arguments were labeled "one-sided," my…
Yann LeCun is one of the "godfathers of AI." He must be wicked smart, because he won the Turing Prize in 2018 (together with the other two "godfathers," Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton). The prize is named after polymath Alan Turing. It is sometimes called the Nobel Prize for computer scientists. Like many other AI researchers, LeCun is rich because he works for Meta (formerly Facebook) and has…
This week, I was invited to give a three-minute flash talk at an event called "Human Development, Sustainability, and Agency," which was organized by IIASA (the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). The event framed the release of an UNDP report called "Unsettled times, unsettled…
II. A Naturalistic Philosophy of Biology This three-part series of blog posts is based on a talk I held at the workshop on "A New Naturalism: Towards a Progressive Theoretical Biology, " which I co-organized with philosophers Dan Brooks and James DiFrisco at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in October 2022.This part of the series heavily draws on a paper (available as a preprint here) that is…