Author Archives

• Engineering initial conditions (some words of thanks)

  By rtraba on March 24, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  The human civilization stumbled first upon metric geometry (the Greeks), then it invented projective geometry (Italian Renaissance) and finally conquered topology (the XIX century), as the study of continuous transformations. See the master himself, here. The human being, in his/her… Read More ›

• Competence without knowledge: a new reading of a page of Solaris

  By rtraba on March 24, 2015 • ( 0 )

  The following is from chapter “The Old Mimoid”, in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem “But you don’t know what I was thinking about! Tell me something. Do you believe in God?” Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction: “What? Who still… Read More ›

• One, two, three, four, many

  By rtraba on March 24, 2015 • ( 0 )

  “A squire was determined to shoot a crow which made its nest in the watch-tower of his estate. Repeatedly he had tried to surprise the crow, but in vain; at the approach of man the crow would leave its nest…. Read More ›

• Democracy and Education

  By rtraba on March 20, 2015 • ( 1 )

  One of my all time favorite sentences by legendary MIT linguist (whose opus is now preserved here) is the following (from Introduction to D. Guerin. “Anarchism”). It describes what our ‘practical reason’ target should be in life. “At every stage… Read More ›

• Golem xiv: the poverty of Antigone

  By rtraba on March 20, 2015 • ( 2 )

  The best explanation I know about transhumanism, and the poverty of Antigone’s appeal to the ‘unwritten laws of the gods’, is the novel Golem xiv by great Stanislaw Lem. The frame of reference is Princeton molecular biologist Lee Silver’s marvellous… Read More ›

• Make video of (Markovian) density transition

  By rtraba on March 19, 2015 • ( 0 )

  Suppose one has managed to numerically compute the forward transition density of 2-dimensional Markov process under some finite difference algorithm (or finite elements). Of course at each time slice, there is going to be a surface of data. How about… Read More ›

• The Grand Design – Roger Sperry

  By rtraba on March 18, 2015 • ( 1 )

  There is a precious little book, which contains some hidden gems. It was written by the late great Nobel prize-winner Rita Levi Montalcini. Its title (“Abbi il coraggio di sapere”) is a bold reminder to the justly famous pamphlet by… Read More ›

• Zauberberg, 1929: on Infinity and Kants Einbildungskraft

  By rtraba on March 15, 2015 • ( 0 )

  “We reject the thesis of the categorical finiteness of man, both in the atheistic form of obdurate finiteness which is so alluringly represented today in Germany by the Freiburg philosopher Heidegger, and in the theistic, specifically Lutheran-Protestant form, where it… Read More ›

• The concept of limit

  By rtraba on February 27, 2015 • ( 0 )

  

  In the introduction to “Anarchism” by D. Guerin, Chomsky stresses the existence of a cultural tradition going back to Rousseau (“Discourse on Inequality, 1754), Von Humboldt, “The Limits of State Action” and chiefly Immanuel Kant on the French Revolution remarking that freedom… Read More ›

• “What is the logical form of this?” on Sen, Gramsci, Sraffa and Wittgenstein

  By rtraba on February 27, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  In a perceptive book, Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google, and responsible for the Hidden Markov Model that stays behind much of today speech and text recognition software (like Siri), restates  the position of the Logical Neopositivism as the following:… Read More ›