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Imagine waking up one day to the realization that everything you’ve ever known—the universe, the stars, your own thoughts—could be nothing more than an elaborate computer simulation crafted by an advanced civilization. This is the audacious, mind-bending premise explored by philosopher Nick Bostrom in “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. Through rigorous reasoning and a blend of cutting-edge technology and philosophical inquiry, Bostrom challenges our understanding of reality itself, posing that the odds we are living in a simulated world may be profoundly higher than we ever considered. As you delve into this thought-provoking investigation, you might just find that questioning the nature of your own existence becomes more thrilling—and unsettling—than any work of science fiction.

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Magnetization can be switched with a single laser pulse. However, it is not known whether the underlying microscopic process is scalable to the nanometer length scale, a prerequisite for making this technology competitive for future data storage applications. Researchers at the Max Born Institute in Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales in Madrid, Spain, and the free-electron laser facility FERMI in Trieste, Italy, have determined a fundamental spatial limit for light-driven magnetization reversal.

They report their finsings in Nano Letters (“Exploring the Fundamental Spatial Limits of Magnetic All-Optical Switching”).

Modern magnetic hard drives can store more than one terabit of data per square inch, which means that the smallest unit of information can be encoded on an area smaller than 25 nanometers by 25 nanometers. In laser-based, all-optical switching (AOS), magnetically encoded bits are switched between their “0” and “1” state with a single ultrashort laser pulse. To realize the full potential of AOS, particularly in terms of faster write/erase cycles and improved power efficiency, we thus need to understand whether a magnetic bit can still be all-optically reversed if its size is on the nanoscale.

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Gold nanoparticles have been the subject of intense research for several decades due to their interesting applications in fields such as catalysis and medicine. “Surface ligands” are organic molecules typically present on the surface of gold nanoparticles. During synthesis, these surface ligands play an important role in controlling the size and shape of the nanoparticles.

For several decades, the CIC biomaGUNE team led by Ikerbasque Research Professor Luis Liz-Marzán has studied in detail the growth mechanisms and properties of these nanoparticles. Despite numerous advances that have recognized the importance of surface ligands, many questions remain about their exact behavior during and after growth. Direct observation of surface ligands and their interface with gold nanoparticles has therefore been a long-standing goal for many scientists in this field.

Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) is the technique most widely used to investigate nanoparticles. However, the study of surface ligands by means of TEM presents significant challenges; the reason is that the ligands are sensitive to the electron beam, their contrast is limited and their structure in vacuum differs from their native state in solution.

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Researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) have demonstrated that under specific conditions, humans can treat robots as co-authors of the results of their actions. The condition that enables this phenomenon is that a robot behaves in a human-like, social manner. Engaging in gaze contact and participating in a common emotional experience, such as watching a movie, are the key.

The study was published in Science Robotics and paves the way for understanding and designing the optimal circumstances for humans and robots to collaborate in the same environment.

The research study has been coordinated by Agnieszka Wykowska, head of IIT’s Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction lab in Genova, and a on a project titled “Intentional Stance for Social Attunement,” which addresses the question of when and under what conditions people treat robots as intentional agents.

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North Carolina State University researchers have developed a kirigami-inspired mechanical computer that uses a complex structure of rigid, interconnected polymer cubes to store, retrieve and erase data without relying on electronic components. The system also includes a reversible feature that allows users to control when data editing is permitted and when data should be locked in place.

Mechanical computers are computers that operate using rather than electronic ones. Historically, these mechanical components have been things like levers or gears. However, mechanical computers can also be made using structures that are multistable, meaning they have more than one stable state—think of anything that can be folded into more than one stable position.

“We were interested in doing a couple things here,” says Jie Yin, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. “First, we were interested in developing a stable, for storing data.

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The Journal of Consciousness Studies has an issue out on the meta-problem of consciousness. (Unfortunately, it’s paywalled, so you’ll need a subscription, or access to a school network that has one.)

As a reminder, there’s the hard problem of consciousness, coined by David Chalmers in 1995, which is the question of why or how we have conscious experience, or as described by others, how conscious experience “arises” from physical systems.

Then there’s the meta-problem, also more recently coined by Chalmers, on why we think there is a hard problem. The meta-problem is an issue long identified by people in the illusionist camp, those who see phenomenal consciousness as an illusion, a mistaken concept.

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Michael Shermer has an article up at Scientific American asking if science will ever understand consciousness, free will, or God.

I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems—not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in principle, relating to how the concepts are conceived in language.

On consciousness in particular, I did a post a few years ago which, on the face of it, seems to take the opposite position. However, in that post, I made clear that I wasn’t talking about the hard problem of consciousness, which is what Shermer addresses in his article. Just to recap, the “hard problem of consciousness” was a phrase originally coined by philosopher David Chalmers, although it expressed a sentiment that has troubled philosophers for centuries.

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This essay addresses Cartesian duality and how its implicit dialectic might be repaired using physics and information theory. Our agenda is to describe a key distinction in the physical sciences that may provide a foundation for the distinction between mind and matter, and between sentient and intentional systems. From this perspective, it becomes tenable to talk about the physics of sentience and ‘forces’ that underwrite our beliefs (in the sense of probability distributions represented by our internal states), which may ground our mental states and consciousness. We will refer to this view as Markovian monism, which entails two claims: fundamentally, there is only one type of thing and only one type of irreducible property (hence monism). All systems possessing a Markov blanket have properties that are relevant for understanding the mind and consciousness: if such systems have mental properties, then they have them partly by virtue of possessing a Markov blanket (hence Markovian). Markovian monism rests upon the information geometry of random dynamic systems. In brief, the information geometry induced in any system—whose internal states can be distinguished from external states—must acquire a dual aspect. This dual aspect concerns the (intrinsic) information geometry of the probabilistic evolution of internal states and a separate (extrinsic) information geometry of probabilistic beliefs about external states that are parameterised by internal states. We call these intrinsic (i.e., mechanical, or state-based) and extrinsic (i.e., Markovian, or belief-based) information geometries, respectively. Although these mathematical notions may sound complicated, they are fairly straightforward to handle, and may offer a means through which to frame the origins of consciousness.

Keywords: consciousness, information geometry, Markovian monism.

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Ontic structural realism argues that structure is all there is. In (French, 2014) I argued for an ‘eliminativist’ version of this view, according to which the world should be conceived, metaphysically, as structure, and objects, at both the fundamental and ‘everyday’ levels, should be eliminated. This paper is a response to a number of profound concerns that have been raised, such as how we might distinguish between the kind of structure invoked by this view and mathematical structure in general, how we should choose between eliminativist ontic structural realism and alternative metaphysical accounts such as dispositionalism, and how we should capture, in metaphysical terms, the relationship between structures and particles. In developing my response I shall touch on a number of broad issues, including the applicability of mathematics, the nature of representation and the relationship between metaphysics and science in general.

Keywords: Causation; Dependence; Disposition; Metaphysics; Object; Representation; Structure.

Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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