Mike Smith

Programmer; aspiring fiction writer; interested in science, philosophy, history, speculative fiction, skepticism

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

For All Mankind and Star City

I was leery of the show For All Mankind for a long time. The promotional material made it sound more like a political drama than a space adventure. And sure enough, the first time I tried to watch it a few years ago...
https://t.co/bfy2OWRyI0

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

The Astropolis trilogy

In the last post I discussed my recent exploration of Reddit. The one conversation I’ve started so far was a request for posthuman space opera recommendations, particularly ones without FTL, stories that envision what...
https://t.co/U4ZgCCEKXF

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Social networks and exploring Reddit

It’s been a while since I’ve done a social media post, something I did more often back in the days of Twitter’s convulsions and as people fled to various other platforms.

For a long time, I held out hope that...
https://t.co/aMKrHlaGY9

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

The Faith of Beasts

The Faith of Beasts is the second book of The Captive’s War trilogy, authored by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo: Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, best known as the authors of The Expanse. This book continues the...
https://t.co/dcq1YXpVBf

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Children of Strife

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time books are about exploring different types of minds. In the first book he looked at spider minds, specifically uplifted Portia spiders. In the second it was octopuses and an alien group mind...
https://t.co/ixlgENs1m1

[Hic Rhodus Hic Salta @PageLyndon]

"Perceptual qualities exist, at least in a representational and relational sense. This shouldn’t be a problematic admission for a physicalist."

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Is the eliminative stance productive?

A number of recent conversations, some I’ve been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that...
https://t.co/qPmtaFSIoK

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Slow Gods

Claire North’s Slow Gods is a grim look at what happens to far future human societies in the vicinity of a supernova. It’s a novel with a strong literary feel, one that explores a number of very distinct cultures, including...
https://t.co/hOtpgnqrPA

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Project Hanuman: information as the fundamental reality

Stewart Hotston acknowledges that his Project Hanuman is inspired by Iain Banks’ Culture novels. The society he describes, known as the Archology, is very similar to the Culture in many respects...
https://t.co/7lbrxYKD6N

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

The attitude of physicalism

Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue...
https://t.co/bpNroDRide

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Halcyon Years

Alastair Reynolds’ new novel, Halcyon Years, starts off as a murder mystery that takes place on an interstellar generation ship, a sealed O’Neill cylinder type environment, with cities, rivers, lakes, and forests. The ship is ruled by...
https://t.co/LTz8F0WMhL

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Excession

Excession is one of the novels I missed years ago when reading Iain Banks’ Culture series. The main reason, I think, is that for a long time it wasn’t published in ebook format, I suspect due to formatting complexity. It just came out in...
https://t.co/OtNwQViJsL

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Chill about metaphysics

This week I had to block a couple of people on different platforms. Neither seemed able to make their point without lacing in insults. One seemed to be on a mission to make me feel as bad about my outlook as possible. The...
https://t.co/BvYhTjhVBw

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Pushing Ice

I have a pet theory about good science fiction stories (and maybe fantasy ones). A good story needs to have both a wonder and a conflict element. A lot of classic SF only have the wonder one. Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories fit in...
https://t.co/yZN7GI4kTU

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

If usefulness isn’t a guide to what’s real, what is?

Seems like I’ve been writing a lot about quantum mechanics lately. Apparently so have a lot of other people. One thing that keeps coming up is the reality or non-reality of the quantum wave function...
https://t.co/YJ19I3EW9P

[Chad Orzel @orzelc]

If you've heard of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and thought "Well, that's clearly crazy nonsense," here's an attempt to convince you otherwise: https://t.co/J3rn5fv4cs (next-day repost)

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Biological computation and the nature of software

A new paper is been getting some attention. It makes the case for biological computation. Characterizing the debate between computational functionalism and biological naturalism as camps that are...
https://t.co/5xlT2f5E6N

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Why I’m a reductionist

The SEP article on scientific reductionism notes that the etymology of the word “reduction” is “to bring back” something to something else. So in a methodological sense, reduction is bringing one theory or ontology back to a...
https://t.co/0dLjmdDEW7

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

@kudara6540 ...David Deutsch talks in terms of parallel universes diverging instead of splitting. Main thing is, these are all different ways of describing the same reality: the universal wave function, or what Vedral calls, everything-is-a-quantum-wave.

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

Everything is a quantum wave?

In the last post, I discussed Amanda Gefter critique of Vlatko Vedral’s view that observers have no special role in reality. Conveniently, Vedral published an article at IAI discussing his view: Everything in the universe...
https://t.co/ugTW0PnpzP

[Mike Smith @SelfAwarePatter]

@kudara6540 Hi. In std MWI the universe isn't really replicated, more split, where the energy from the unsplit universe gets div'd up into the new ones. Everett himself didn't talk that way. Like Vedral, he talked in terms of a single universe. Although he didn't object to multiverse talk.