The 15th century was of tremendous importance to European affairs. It was the beginning of the expansion of "western civilisation" across the globe, through Renaissance and the Age of Discoveries. During the same time, the Greek Empire of Byzantium fell to the Turks - in 1453 - and most of the historical Greek lands...
Blog
Noetics: A proposal for a theoretical approach to consciousness
Abstract The study of consciousness has intensified over the past few years. New technological developments in measurement and computer simulation have enabled the closer investigation of one the most “mysterious” phenomena in nature, namely the subjective experience of awareness. Neuroscience, aspiring to provide a complete theoretical framework for brain dynamics,...
Humaness redefined
During 2005 and 2006, I was national facilitator for Greece, in the European project «Meeting of Minds. European Citizens Deliberation on Brain Sciences», a pioneering project in science governance, first of its kind in Europe, where citizens from 9 countries discussed the impact of brain sciences in society. Their recommendations...
Saltations
Complexity theory studies non-linear emergent phenomena whereby networked interactions produce self-organization at ever higher levels. At certain threshold values of network interactivity certain “jumps” occur – called “saltations” – and the system changes behaviour. Despite the many advocates of complexity theory, the idea is facing many obstacles and often fails...
What banged?
Until recently scientists and priests seemed to be in awkward agreement. Genesis started with a bang! It happened 13.7 billion years ago; and questions like “what caused it?” or “what was there before?” were considered a scientific no-man’s land where no decent, career-minding, physicist dared to venture. After all science...
Eugenics in the 21st century
Synopsis for a Café Scientifique delivered in Thessaloniki) Eugenics was a liberal vision because, at the time of Sir Francis Galton, it was radical and against the Victorian class system. By going beyond the class structure, eugenics envisioned a future world of enhanced humans irrespective of class background. It was...
A Wh(ITER) elephant?
Imagine a machine that you can throw in a few grams of hydrogen – which abounds in the Earth’s oceans – crank it a few times, and harvest massive amounts of cheap energy. And all that thanks to fusion, a physical process where the nuclei of two elements (for example...
The political anticlimax of climate change
Our planet is warming up. Scientists agree that global average temperature is about 0.6oC higher than it was a century ago and that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen by about 30 percent over the past 200 years, mostly because of the burning of fossil fuels. Although the causal...
Our post-scientific era
Counterknowledge, the corpus of pseudofactual narratives that dominate much of today’s discourse, shocks many in the scientific community. I often talk to scientists who cannot comprehend why intelligent people, some with science degrees, are so gullible that they take homeopathy drugs, read their horoscopes and believe that aliens frequently visit...
Cyborgs and free will
Augmenting physical ability by making use of techno-prostheses is as instinctive to primates as the sticks that some chimpanzees use to extract termites from their nests. The whole edifice of technological civilization has been exactly that, to implement knowledge collected on natural processes in order to achieve supernatural ends. It...