It seems to me that the ethical problems are adequately framed by Kant when he says that the domain of the moral code is outside ‘pure reason’, i.e. human behavior is not knowable: there can be no science of it as we… Read More ›
Episteme
Il Dio dei matematici
Questa intervista al grandissimo Enrico Bombieri e’ molto profonda. A un certo punto B. dice: “Il Dio che viene dal pensiero di Gauss, così come il riferimento ‘il cielo stellato sopra di me’ di Kant, che pur non essendo un riferimento a Dio… Read More ›
M. Escher, or breaking the Kantian spell
In Late Middle Age, the position of the stars in navigation maps was programmatically out of sync with the Ptolemaic predictions. Further refinements in observations led to the abandonment of the geocentric picture altogether. Get the priority right: navigation needs… Read More ›
Deflation of human agency
One of the premier Art Deco buildings in London, the famed Senate House (above) keeps resonating in my mind every time I wander inside it. Especially overnight. Vastly different in concept but equally capable of impressing with its geometry, the… Read More ›
Anthrax, strychnine and the fallacy of Antigone’s argument
One should feel grateful to Princeton molecular biology professor Lee Silver for this wonderful video, detailing the main points of friction between the full materialism of contemporary biology and the hidden resurgence of metaphysical thinking sub specie of the idea… Read More ›
Recursion: Cortázar and Antonioni
Continuity of the Parks, by Julio Cortázar He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it aside because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again on his way back to the estate by… Read More ›
Software engineering & competence without knowledge
While writing software and endlessly refactoring to reach the ‘ultimate’ structure, one finds oneself often wondering that truly Dawkins’ ‘blind watchmaker’ metaphor must be correct, that competence without knowledge is a fact of life, and no amount of speculation on… Read More ›
Popper on demarcation and the power of epicycles
Suppose you had a standard Fourier series representing an arbitrary function. Suppose now this function is the periodic movement of some celestial body. As the following video explains, what the Fourier coefficients stand for are the usual Ptolemaic epicycles. A… Read More ›
“Galileo was no idiot” (or “Wir werden wissen”)
What is the exact meaning of Hilbert’s famous remark that: “Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom – that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself”? Why… Read More ›
Community life and chipped silicon
“If you open a modern computer case and stare at the mother board, it really appears like downtown Detroit” (the image above is aptly a painting by computer pioneer Konrad Zuse). This insightful comment by a friend of mine conceals… Read More ›
rtraba 