One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data.

Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us.

This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life.

The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.

More at: www.amazon.com

Read the full book at: link.springer.com

By Mariusz Stanowski

The book Theory and Practice of Contrast completes, corrects and integrates the foundations of science and humanities, which include: theory of art, philosophy (aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, axiology), cognitive science, theory of information, theory of complexity and physics. Through the integration of these distant disciplines, many unresolved issues in contemporary science have been clarified or better understood, among others: defining impact (contrast) and using this definition in different fields of knowledge; understanding what beauty/art is and what our aesthetic preferences depend on; deeper understanding of what complexity and information are in essence, and providing their general definitions. Complexity means integration, value and goodness – concepts that seem to be neglected today.

More at: www.routledge.com

Francis Heylighen

The present course intends to answer the question of what it means to be human. This question has traditionally been the subject of a domain known as “philosophical anthropology”. Anthropology is the science that studies humans—just as entomology studies insects, and herpetology studies reptiles. It does this by carefully observing the physical, social and cultural properties that characterize human beings. This includes the evolution of humans out of their ape-like ancestors. It also includes the behaviors that different groups of humans exhibit in their more “natural state”, for example as hunter-gatherers living in the rainforest as yet unaffected by our highly technological civilization. Philosophical anthropology complements these concrete observations and the resulting theories by studying what has been called the “human condition”. This concerns more existential questions about the meaning of human life:
Ø Who are we?
Ø What are we living for?
Ø What is our fundamental human nature?
Ø What are human values?
Ø What sets humans apart from other beings?

Read the full book at: researchportal.vub.be

Dapp, Marcus M., Helbing, Dirk, Klauser, Stefan (Eds.)

This Open Access book outlines ideas for a novel, scalable and, above all, sustainable financial system.

We all know that today’s global markets are unsustainable and global governance is not effective enough. Given this situation, could one boost smart human coordination, sustainability and resilience by tweaking society at its core: the monetary system? A Computational Social Science team at ETH Zürich has indeed worked on a concept and little demonstrator for a new financial system, called “Finance 4.0” or just “FIN4”, which combines blockchain technology with the Internet of Things (“IoT”).

What if communities could reward sustainable actions by issuing their own money (“tokens”)? Would people behave differently, when various externalities became visible and were actionable through cryptographic tokens? Could a novel, participatory, multi-dimensional financial system be created? Could it be run by the people for the people and lead to more societal resilience than today’s financial system (which is effectively one-dimensional due to its almost frictionless exchange)? How could one manage such a system in an ethical and democratic way?

This book presents some early attempts in a nascent field, but provides a fresh view on what cryptoeconomic systems could do for us, for a circular economy, and for scalable, sustainable action.

Read the full book at: www.springer.com