A surprising reversal in molten iron flow beneath the Pacific is giving scientists a sharper view of how Earth’s magnetic field evolves.
Category: futurism – Page 10
Scientists just measured the smallest possible contacts for future computer chips
The rise of AI has created an almost insatiable appetite for computing power. Training and running AI systems requires vast numbers of transistors, and engineers are now racing to pack more of them onto every chip. With their existing designs, however, silicon transistors are rapidly running up against physical limits on how small they can get.
Through new research published in Nature, a team led by Ya-Ping Chiu at National Taiwan University has uncovered new details about next-generation transistors that could help push past these limits.
Microsoft testing new Cloud Rebuild Windows 11 recovery feature
Microsoft has begun testing the Cloud Rebuild recovery feature in the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview builds released for users in the Experimental channel.
First introduced at the Ignite developer conference in November 2025, Cloud Rebuild is a tool that can remotely trigger a complete system reinstall from the cloud for Windows 11 devices experiencing persistent problems or that have become inoperable.
“We’re introducing Cloud rebuild, a new recovery option that restores a Windows 11 PC to a clean, known-good state by performing a full OS reinstall, even when Windows won’t boot,” Windows Insider Communications Lead Stephen Lines said on Monday.
Legendary former Tekken boss says people don’t ‘properly evaluate’ Hidetaka Miyazaki’s ‘remarkable’ FromSoft career
“From that perspective, I can say that Dark Souls didn’t suddenly become a massive success overnight,” Harada said. “It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles.”
According to Harada, the acclaim that FromSoft enjoys feels like “almost complete reversals in attitude” compared to “the days when [Miyazaki] and his team were struggling the most.” It was a contributing factor to his own exhaustion with people who he says can only judge a game’s merits “by saying things like, ‘That title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies.’”
Stunning photos reveal the intricate beauty of fungi
The vibrant colours and delicate details of New Zealand’s fungi and slime moulds are documented in these images, taken from Jay Lichter’s new book The Secret Life of Fungi
By Alec Luhn
Eliminative Materialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In principle, anyone denying the existence of some type of thing is an eliminativist with regard to that type of thing. Thus, there have been a number of eliminativists about different aspects of human nature in the history of philosophy. For example, hard determinists like Holbach (1770) are eliminativists with regard to free will because they claim there is no dimension of human psychology that corresponds to our commonsense notion of freedom. Similarly, by denying that there is an ego or persisting subject of experience, Hume (1739) was arguably an eliminativist about the self. Reductive materialists can be viewed as eliminativists with respect to an immaterial soul.
Nevertheless, contemporary eliminative materialism—the sort of eliminativism that denies the existence of specific types of mental states—is a relatively new theory with a very short history. The term was first introduced by James Cornman in a 1968 article entitled “On the Elimination of ‘Sensations’ and Sensations” (Cornman, 1968). However, the basic idea goes back at least as far as C.D. Broad’s classic, The Mind and its Place in Nature (Broad, 1925). Here Broad discusses, and quickly rejects, a type of “pure materialism” that treats mental states as attributes that apply to nothing in the world (pp. 607–611). Like many future writers (see section 4.1 below), Broad argued that such a view is self-contradictory since it (presumably) presupposes the reality of misjudgments which are themselves a type of mental state.
Apart from Broad’s discussion, the main roots of eliminative materialism can be found in the writings of a number of mid-20th century philosophers, most notably Wilfred Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty. In his important 1956 article, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Sellars introduced the idea that our conception of mentality may be derived not from direct access to the inner workings of our own minds, but instead from a primitive theoretical framework that we inherit from our culture. While Sellars himself regarded this theoretical framework as empirically correct, his claim that our conception of the mind is theory-based, and at least in principle falsifiable, would be influential to later supporters of eliminativism.
