We are no one without other people

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Decorative imageIt is the Christmas holiday season when many of us will be exchanging seasonal greetings and expressions of goodwill with family and friends.  In the Ubuntu philosophy, a person is a person through other people.  Genuine value arises from our connections to other people.  Life is not about the individual but about friendship, community, respect and compassion.  These interactions are experienced by our consciousness and determine who we are – our identity [see ‘Reflecting on self’ on November 23rd 2022 or ‘Is there a real you or I?’ on March 6th, 2019].  It seems unlikely that a computer could experience them in the foreseeable future [see ‘Conversations about engineering over dinner and a haircut’ on February 16th 2022 or ‘When will you be replaced by a computer’ on November 20th, 2019] so switch off your laptops and mobile phones and enjoy life.   Happy holidays!

Image: people at Pier Head Liverpool enjoying the River of Light festival.

Blockchain engineering

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Decorative imageBlockchain engineers create and maintain the decentralised digital databases that store and share information in blocks that are connected together to make up chains.  A blockchain is formed by a global network of autonomous computers communicating with one another to reach a consensus on the contents of a database or ledger.  The computers compete to be paid to validate the ledger by solving the cryptographic equations that describe a series of transactions.  The requirement for the global distribution of autonomous computers means that a blockchain is not lodged at a single location or managed by a single entity or group of entities.  This decentralisation makes the blockchain both almost incorruptible and expensive in terms of time and energy.  Digital or crypto currencies, such as bitcoin, are based on blockchains as are non-fungible tokens (NFT) which are unique digital identifiers that define the ownership of an item, usually a digital file, and are recorded in a blockchain.  Engineers in a range of fields are starting to use blockchains to authenticate digital information and update it during engineering processes in a way that allows it to be shared with regulators, clients and consumers.

Source: Matthew Ball, The metaverse: and how it will revolutionise everything, London: W.W. Norton & Co Ltd, 2022.

Image: ink drawing by Zahrah Resh owned by the author.

Virtual digitalism

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Decorative image of 10 micron spheres in nanoscopeSome months ago I wrote about the likelihood that we are in a simulation [see ‘Are we in a simulation?‘ on September 28th, 2022] and that we cannot be sure whether are or not.  For some people, this will raise the question that if we are in a simulation, then what is real?  In his book, Reality+, David J Chalmers provides a checklist of properties possessed by real things, namely: existence, causal powers, mind-independence, non-illusoriness and genuineness.  The possession of these properties could be established by answering the five questions in the box below and we would expect real objects to possess one or more of these properties.  Objects that are found in a virtual world generated by a simulation are real objects because they have at least one, and often many of these properties, such as causal powers and independence from our minds.  We can consider them to be digital objects, or structures of binary information or bits.  This leads to a form of the ‘It-from-bit’ hypothesis because it implies that molecules are made of atoms, atoms are made of quarks, and quarks are made of bits – unless of course we are not in a simulation but we will probably never know for certain.

Source: David J Chalmers, Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, Penguin, 2022.

Image shows a self-assembly of 10 micron spheres viewed out-of-focus in bright-light optical microscope.

Rotten eggs in the store

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Photograph of boiled egg for decorative purposesDo you feel like a battery hen? I ask the question because I know many of the readers of this blog are academics and in her 1995 introduction to the revised edition of her book ‘Beast and Man‘, the philosopher Mary Midgley describes the current approach to the writing and publication of academic papers as a battery-egg system in which the number of publications produced by an academic are simply counted when assessing promotion cases and grant proposals. She suggests that ‘this arrangement encourages industrious mediocrity’ such that even gifted and original researchers are forced to choose small topics for research in order to maintain their publication rate [see ‘Reasons for publishing scientific papers‘ on April 21st, 2021]. Reputable journals are supposed to be the guardians of quality through their peer-review systems; however, it matters little because the volume of papers published is so huge (more than 2 million per year) that most will never be read – no one has the time [see ‘We are drowning information while starving for wisdom‘ on January 20th, 2021]. So, Midgley predicts that journals will become ‘merely reputable cold-stores for eggs that everybody knows will never be eaten’. Unfortunately, many of the eggs are rotten because peer review systems are being undermined by disreputable authors, reviewers and editors operating ‘peer-review rings’ which have led to the retraction of hundreds of paper by publishers, including 511 papers by Hindawi & Wiley in August 2022 and 463 papers by IOP publishing in September 2022. So, if you do find time to read some journal papers, be careful what you believe because the work might be fraudulent.

Mary Midgley, Beast and Man – the roots of human nature. Abingdon, Oxon. Routledge Classics, 2002.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soft-boiled-egg.jpg