• 5 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2019

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  • It’s obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.

    In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.

    For people like Dennet, which I’m not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.




  • ITT: very little pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don’t really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.