“The Red Pill” has become a pervasive metaphor since the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between taking a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill has come to signify difficult and unpleasant truths, while the blue pill has come to signify the comfortable and comforting lies with which most people are pacified.

There is a relationship between the idea of the red pill and Vaclav Havel’s conception of “living in truth.” An individual may not be able to change a dishonest society, but one can still choose to live in truth…

An interesting twentieth century perspective on the expansion of scientific knowledge was provided by Harlow Shapley:

“After seven years of work with large instruments on questions concerning the globular star clusters — their structure, relationships, stellar content — I realized that we were relatively more ignorant about them than when I had started my investigation. I had added more to the unknown than to the known.” (Harlow Shapley, The View from a Distant Star, p. 17)

This is clearly a tendentious way to characterize the results of scientific research. Shapley noted that, “…we were relatively more ignorant about [globular star…

In Reticulate Science I argued that the large scale structure of science in historical time is likely to be a simultaneous progression of division into narrower specializations and a synthesis into greater wholes that seek to provide a big picture understanding of the world that is not to be found in the more precise and compartmentalized knowledge derived from specialization. …

Over the past few decades a number of ideas that I call “big picture research programs” have appeared — big history, astrobiology, the overview effect, existential risk, SETI, the Drake equation, the Fermi paradox, the Anthropocene. Many of these are neither “sciences” nor “disciplines” in the conventional sense, but they represent the effort of scientists and philosophers to recover a comprehensive approach to knowledge in the wake of scientific specialization since the scientific revolution.

Is it possible to constitute a new science at this late date in the development of science? And is it possible to constitute a “big picture”…

After the 2013 Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress a number of those of us who participated continued to correspond about interesting ideas that came out of the conversations, and one of these ideas was that of the Rezabek Ratio. During a discussion of METI (active messaging of extraterrestrial intelligence) by Jim Benson, Heath Rezabek suggested that someone opposed to unregulated METI could broadcast a static or random signal as a masking counter-signal to a METI signal and essentially silence the outbound METI signal. Formally, this can be expressed such that the factors of the Drake equation, which terminates with the number…

The issue of Science for 25 September 2020 features a crow on its cover with the headline “Avian Awareness: Carrion crows display sensory consciousness.” There are three articles in the journal on this theme, “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird” by Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert, “A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain” by Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, Hermann Wagner, Markus Axer, Katrin Amunts, and Onur Güntürkün, and “Birds do have a brain cortex — and think” by Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Everyone who has watched crows carefully knows that they are intelligent…

In A Counterfactual on Central Nervous System Development I speculated on the possibility of an evolutionary trajectory in which central nervous system (CNS) clusters developed supervening upon sensory organs, so that the organisms of such a counterfactual biosphere had “smart” sensory organs — smart eyes, for example — and perhaps the entirety of a sophisticated brain evolved supervening directly upon sensory organs. …

Ever since I first became interested in futurism in the 1970s, and I began to read everything I could find on futurism, I noticed the almost exclusive interest in world government as the political paradigm of futurism, and even at the time I thought it was odd. I still find it odd today, and so I have gone looking for explanations for the political monoculture of futurism. …