Antonia Moran is leading a funding proposal in our UT Dallas’ ArtSciLab, on Compassion Science. She is focusing on the role of literature and narratives. She will be applying her work to teaching her high school teaching colleagues, and her students, the methodologies of compassion based on contemporary neuroscience.
Tsou is the director of our Bass School Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology. He happens to have written a deep study of technological ethics and The Social Construction of Human Categories. Review of Ásta, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Metascience 2021 – Book Review
Positive Eugenics
This connects with the work I am collaborating on, as a PhD committee member, with John Varghese, which is centered on contemporary understanding of Eugenics. He just taught me the concept of “positive eugenics”, which I was unfamiliar with.
Pre-announcement of the Center for Emergence Studies at UT Dallas
One of my current interests is CSS or Coincidence, Synchronicity, and Serendipity. This is a methodology that we are using in our new Center for Emergence Studies which will soon open at UT Dallas. Yes, ants, compassion, and emergence do cross-connect by accident but our mind is a pattern-finding machine and often creates fake patterns to feel OK. I just happened to read Ants perform amputations to save injured nestmates (phys.org):
“Saving lives through surgery is no longer exclusive to humans. In a study published July 2 in the journal Current Biology, scientists detail how Florida carpenter ants, a common, brown species native to its namesake, selectively treat the wounded limbs of fellow nestmates—either by wound cleaning or amputation. An ant-assisted amputation takes at least 40 minutes to complete. Experimental testing demonstrated that with tibia injuries if the leg was not immediately removed post-infection, the ant would not survive.”
Center for Emergence Studies cofounder geologist Robert Stern and co-author Taras Gerya of ETH Zurich just published an article arguing that the emergence of advanced civilizations capable of communicating across our galaxy requires plate tectonics and the co-existence of large continents and oceans. This is so rare that none of the 8000 exoplanets discovered so far are likely to have any such civilizations, and certainly none of the other planets or moons in our solar system. We have no idea how common life is in the universe but nearly all of this could be very simple, microbial, like it was on Earth before the emergence of plate tectonics in the past billion years. Because the presence of all three conditions: life, continents and oceans, and plate tectonics is so unusual, there may be very few advanced civilizations in our galaxy. More read.
So perhaps this means that compassion exists in all life forms on our planet, but maybe not elsewhere in the universe, unless they have ants.
Anti-Non-Center for Emergence Studies
Just to complete this narrative. We are about to start the Center for Emergence Studies under the leadership of poet Fred Turner, Geologist Robert Stern, and me (if you would like to be involved, contact us). Paul Fishwick and Tina Qin have joined the emergent team and bring very different perspectives, methods, and objectives from predicting future catastrophes to applying metaphor theory to data visualization in banks.
We already published a theoretical article and podcast on what we mean by ‘emergence’, mostly autopoietic bottom up, but also up and down and oscillating.
Our second article is on the emergence of the arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Our university was founded as a technoscientific institute last century with no plan, strategy, or intent to include the arts and humanities. But by accident, our university became a refugee center for experts in A and H who could not stay in their current jobs or find other work. Our Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, is now emerging, and yes arts humanities, AND technology.
If you would like a pre-publication copy, contact us.
Paul Fishwick and the gang are reworking our Aesthetic Computing manifesto from last century. Fred Turner is now a maestro in writing AI-generated poetry, but he says.
“First, the good news. The program noticed that I like quatrains, though I work in many different forms and often vary even the quatrain form, replacing the expected pentameter line at the end of each stanza of a poem with a tetrameter, or vice versa, or such like undermining of expectations to suggest a change of feeling. The AI seems to be trying to give no offense, to tell the reader what it expects the reader will want to hear. There’s no hint of the tragedy, bitterness, caustic reversal of expectations, metaphysical questioning, moral paradox, sardonic glee, and acceptance of existential punishment that informs much of my work and other poets. Its appearance of mellow goodwill would feel false if it were not automatic.”
researchgate.net
So, coming back to the start of this blog post: does AI exhibit compassion?
I have not used AI in generating this text, or maybe it happened behind my back. And I got the ok of all mentioned humans to go ahead and publish this text online, but how do I know they weren’t bots that replied to me permitting me?
Roger F. Malina
Physicist | Astronomer | Executive Editor
Roger Malina is a physicist, astronomer, Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications at MIT Press, distinguished professor at UT Dallas, and Associate Director of Arts and Technology. His work focuses on connections among digital technology, science, and art. He is an Associate Director of the ATEC Program at The University of Texas at Dallas.
