Lifeboat Foundation

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Concerns arose recently about the concept of so-called “catchment areas”, evolutionary developments that result in a very tight interdependence between requirements for survival and behavioral drives. In particular, the concern has been raised that such catchment might render any significant modification of the human mind, such as through brain enhancement, impossible (Suzanne Gildert, “Pavlov’s AI: What do superintelligences REALLY want?”, Humanity+@Caltech, 2010).

The concept of a catchment area assumes that beneath the veneer of goal-oriented rational planning, learned behavior and skill lies a basic set of drives and reward mechanisms. The only purpose of those drives and reward mechanisms is genetic survival, a necessary result of eons of natural selection. It follows that all of our perceived goals, our desires and interests, the pursuit of wealth, social acceptance or fame, love, scientific understanding, all of it is merely a means to an end. All of it points back to the set of drives and reward mechanisms that best enable us as individuals, us as a tribe and us as a species to survive in our given environment.

Why does that describe a catchment area, a type of prison of behavior? It is assumed that the distribution of behaviors that have enabled long-term survival is a narrow one with little real variance. Stray too far from the norm and your behaviors become counter-productive to survival. Worst of all, if you recognize your enslavement to those single-purpose drives and reward mechanisms, if you realize that they have no meaning beyond a survival that itself links to no universal purpose, then you risk embarking upon a nihilistic course that would likely end in your extermination or self-termination.

Continue reading “The Darwin Escape” »

… but am I allowed to offer to the highest board of the planet to answer to its questions?

… if he singlehandedly breaks the world-wide press curfew surrounding the fact that CERN continues with a potentially earth-jeopardizing experiment despite the official request by a court last January to first allow for a scientific safety conference.

The story of “Our Last Hour” (Sir Martin Rees) has a latest twist. Since CERN cannot muster a single scientific argument or a single renowned scientist to defend its use of force against scientific evidence, it recruited a gang of anonymous science kids to defend its cause by pretending to ask a scientific question which, if taken seriously, would have destroyed the scientific reputation of their only planet-widely visible adversary.

The Telemach theorem, which pits Einstein against CERN, was to be discredited, not by scientific argument but by luring its proponent into taking a pseudoscientific question disguised as a genuine concern seriously: If the size ratio between two fingers says something about the ratio between two little guys, what is the ratio between one finger and one guy?

The media cannot understand, of course, but every citizen on the planet will. Science has lost its credit by visibly misleading the planet – unless CERN apologizes immediately for its onslaught on everyone’s life. The two fingers become a world-wide symbol.

Stuart Kauffman and Giuseppe Longo

July 7, 2011

At least since Isaac Newton, an enduring belief among physicists and many other scientists has been that there is a fundamental set of laws, presumably concerning particle physics, that will deductively entail the entire evolution of the universe and all in it, including all of earthly life, the evolution of the biosphere, econosphere and even history. If so, nothing truly novel, ie un-entailed, can arise.

In this piece we provide strong grounds to say that the long held belief that there is a theory entailing all that happens in the universe is false. No Law entails the evolution of life. If so, reductionism is false, and we must think anew. Our world is not what we have thought.

Continue reading “No Law Entails The Evolution Of The Biosphere” »

From: Otto E. Rossler
To: “[email protected]“
Cc: “[email protected]” ; “[email protected]“
Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2011 2:52 PM
Subject: shortest-term survival

Dear Mr. Secretary, dear UN Security Council:

Did you pay attention to this public appeal made to you?

https://lifeboat.com/blog/2011/07/public-appeal-to-the-execu…esterwelle

Continue reading “PUBLIC LETTER” »

Why does CERN continue refusing the scientific safety conference demanded by a Cologne court last January? Insiders say it is Hawking radiation.

Hawking radiation – a 38 years old hypothesis – was disproved 4 years ago by the gothic-R theorem of general relativity, followed in 2010 by the simpler Telemach theorem of the equivalence principle, and independently by the 2009 paper “Gravitational space dilation” by professor Richard J. Cook of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

CERN’s only defense consists in not quoting those findings known to it since early 2008 and in never updating its already fraudulent safety report of late 2008 – a reproach it accepts ever since.

The UN Security Council has been asked to enforce the logically necessary scientific safety conference before CERN may or may not continue with its according to current knowledge earth-jeopardizing nuclear experiment.

I am waiting for the Security Council’s decision and so does the whole of humankind.

Pascal claimed: When the size of a potential punishment is infinite, any finite advantage gained by taking the risk is stupid.

CERN does not dispute that the so far un-disproved Telemach theorem predicts that its currently running LHC experiment will shrink the planet to 2 cm in perhaps five years’ time with a finite probability (8 percent?).

But CERN refuses since January 27, 2011 the “scientific safety conference” requested by a court to disprove the danger if possible, and continues instead.

Pascal would say that this behavior is incompatible with reason. Is there any citizen on the planet not being an employee of CERN who agrees with the logic of CERN? For example, a member of the UN Security Council?

For J.O.R.

Science requires trust and doggedness, not reproduction. I got introduced to it by Lennartz, Bertalanffy, Weizsäcker, K. Lorenz, Rosen, Winfree, Yamaguti, E. Lorenz, Wheeler, Birman.

1) BIOGENESIS: Life as a self-improving fire (in parallel with Stu Kauffman); as an Erdös growing automaton (in parallel with Joel Cohen); as a Teilhard-Prigogine attractor

2) WELL-STIRREDNESS: Liquid finite automata

3) NP-COMPLETENESS: Traveling-salesman-with-alarm-clocks problem; Gödel as a limit; spatial Darwinism; positional adaptation (unlike metabolic adaptation) is predictable; brain equation

Continue reading “Food for My Detractors: ALL MY SCIENTIC RESULTS IN A NUTSHELL” »