We must remember that this superficial "I" is not our real self. It is our "individuality" and our "empirical self" but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The "I" that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true "I'' that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown "self" whom most of us never discover until we are dead.* Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual. Far from it. This self is doomed to dis­appear as completely as smoke from a chimney. It is utterly frail and evanescent. Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this "I" is really "not I" and the awakening of the unknown "I" that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapable of commenting upon itself. It cannot even say "I" with the assurance and the impertinence of the other one, for its very nature is to be hidden, unnamed, unidentified in the society where men talk about themselves and about one another. In such a world the true "I" remains both inarticulate and invisible, because it has altogether too much to say-not one word of which is about itself.

Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. "I think, therefore I am." This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence(!) based on the observation that he "'thinks." If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some "thing" alien to himself. And he proves that the "thing" exists. He convinces himself: "I am therefore some thing." And then he goes on to con­vince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a "thing," an "object," like other finite and limited
objects of our thought!

In this first of two papers, strong limits on the accuracy of physical computation are established. First it is proven that there cannot be a physical computer C to which one can pose any and all computational tasks concerning the physical universe. Next it is proven that no physical computer C can correctly carry out any computational task in the subset of such tasks that can be posed to C. This result holds whether the computational tasks concern a system that is physically isolated from C, or instead concern a system that is coupled to C. As a particular example, this result means that there cannot be a physical computer that can, for any physical system external to that computer, take the specification of that external system's state as input and then correctly predict its future state before that future state actually occurs; one cannot build a physical computer that can be assured of correctly "processing information faster than the universe does". The results also mean that there cannot exist an infallible, general-purpose observation apparatus, and that there cannot be an infallible, general-purpose control apparatus. These results do not rely on systems that are infinite, and/or non-classical, and/or obey chaotic dynamics. They also hold even if one uses an infinitely fast, infinitely dense computer, with computational powers greater than that of a Turing Machine.

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.

[...] If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.

To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.

There is a persistent strand of thought, articulated most forcefully by Fodor (1975), that languages directly encode the categories we think in, and moreover that these constitute an innate, universal “language of thought” or “mentalese.” As Pinker (1994, p. 82) put it, “Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects.” Learning a language, then, is simply a matter of finding out what the local clothing is for universal concepts we already have (Li & Gleitman 2002).

The problem with this view is that languages differ enormously in the concepts that they provide ready-coded in grammar and lexicon. Languages may lack words or constructions corresponding to the logical connectives “if” (Guugu Yimithirr) or “or” (Tzeltal), or “blue” or “green” or “hand” or “leg” (Yelı Dnye). There are languages without tense, without aspect, without numerals, or without third-person pronouns (or even without pronouns at all, in the case of most sign languages). Some languages have thousands of verbs; others only have thirty (Schultze-Berndt 2000). Lack of vocabulary may sometimes merely make expression more cumbersome, but sometimes it effectively limits expressibility, as in the case of languages without numerals (Gordon 2004).

To the Romans, gender not only depended more on one’s ability to procreate than anything else, but it was subject to change. Greek and Roman medical texts from the time describe gender not as fixed, but fluid depending on humors like heat and moisture in the body. According to them, these factors could determine an infant’s sex during pregnancy, and they could also change one’s gender after birth. While the terminology was not there in the same way it is today, all of this points to the existence and tacit acceptance of a third gender in Ancient Rome, even if they did not have the same citizenship or property rights as their cisgender (and procreating) neighbors.

[...] Castrated or not, Gallai throughout the Roman Empire dressed, worshiped, and lived as women. They were noted for their saffron gowns, long hair, heavy makeup, and extravagant jewelry. They existed in every part of the Greco-Roman world at every level of society and were mentioned by Ovid, Seneca, Persius, Martial, and Statius as a common sight in the first century. Apuleius even described them in The Golden Ass:

“The following day they went out, wearing various colored undergarments with turbans and saffron robes and linen garments thrown over them, and every one hideously made up, their faces crazy with muddy paints and their eyes artfully lined.”

Toward the end of his distinguished career, the renowned British mathematician G.H. Hardy eloquently laid out a justification for a life of studying mathematics in A Mathematician’s Apology, an essay first published in 1940. At the center of Hardy’s defense is the thesis that mathematics is an aesthetic discipline. For Hardy, the applied mathematics of engineers and economists held little charm. “Real mathematics,” as he referred to it, “must be justified as art if it can be justified at all."

This second paper of the pair presents a preliminary exploration of some of this mathematical structure. Analogues of Chomskian results concerning universal Turing Machines and the Halting theorem are derived, as are results concerning the (im)possibility of certain kinds of error-correcting codes. In addition, an analogue of algorithmic information complexity, “prediction complexity”, is elaborated. A task-independent bound is derived on how much the prediction complexity of a computational task can differ for two different reference universal physical computers used to solve that task, a bound similar to the “encoding” bound governing how much the algorithm information complexity of a Turing machine calculation can differ for two reference universal Turing machines. Finally, it is proven that either the Hamiltonian of our universe proscribes a certain type of computation, or prediction complexity is unique (unlike algorithmic information complexity), in that there is one and only version of it that can be applicable throughout our universe.

Chomsky, in his initial work on formal grammars, suggested that the descriptive apparatus chosen to model language should be just sufficient and not more powerful than is required – in that way, some match to cognition may be achieved. From then on, in the generative tradition there has been a systematic conflation between the language of description and what is attributed to the language learner and user: “the brains of all speakers represent a shared set of grammatical categories” (Berent), and “formal universals in phonology are constituted by the analytic elements that human minds employ in constructing representations of sound structure” (Nevins).

[...] This conflation of the metalanguage with the object of description is a peculiar trick of the generative tradition. By going down this path, it has opened up a huge gap between theory and the behavioral data that would verify it. The complex representational structures look undermotivated, and covert processes proliferate where alternative models deftly avoid them (see the discussion of Subjacency and covert movement in sect. R6.8).

A biologist does not assume that a snail maintains an internalized representation of the mathematical equations that describe the helical growth of its shell. Even for the internal characterization of a mental faculty, the strategy is odd: computer scientists interested in characterizing the properties of programming languages use a more general auxiliary language to describe them, as in Scott-Strachey denotational semantics. Once explanatory theories hook external factors (e.g., psycholinguistic or evolutionary factors) into the account, this conflation of cognition and metalanguage must be dropped.

For the Reality, he is as the pupil is for the eye through which the act of seeing takes place. Thus he is called insan [meaning both man and pupil], for it is by him that the Reality looks on His creation and bestows the Mercy [of existence] on them.

“In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea. I liked the Irish way better.”

Establishment of shape during embryonic development, and the maintenance of shape against injury or tumorigenesis, requires constant coordination of cell behaviors toward the patterning needs of the host organism. Molecular cell biology and genetics have made great strides in understanding the mechanisms that regulate cell function. However, generalized rational control of shape is still largely beyond our current capabilities. Significant instructive signals function at long range to provide positional information and other cues to regulate organism-wide systems properties like anatomical polarity and size control. Is complex morphogenesis best understood as the emergent property of local cell interactions, or as the outcome of a computational process that is guided by a physically-encoded map or template of the final goal state? Here I review recent data and molecular mechanisms relevant to morphogenetic fields: large-scale systems of physical properties that have been proposed to store patterning information during embryogenesis, regenerative repair, and cancer suppression that ultimately controls anatomy. Placing special emphasis on the role of endogenous bioelectric signals as an important component of the morphogenetic field, I speculate on novel approaches for the computational modeling and control of these fields with applications to synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, and evolutionary developmental biology.