Ralph Abraham (1936-2024)
Good bye Ralph! Rest in peace in the cosmic memory of the Akashic field.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
I’m now Senior Editor at Mindplex Magazine.
Mindplex is part of the SingularityNet ecosystem led by the one and only Ben Goertzel. Ben has been and remains one of my main inspirations, so how could I say no to this?
I’ll mostly be writing short pieces about news. I’ll focus on timely reporting and commenting really important news (those of the ‘WOW, awesome!’ kind) in fundamental science and game-changing technologies. I’ll also write longer commentaries and stories now and then.
So most of my writings on sci/tech will be in Mindplex Magazine. I encourage you to subscribe.
I’ll post links and excerpts here, and my writings on the more metafysikal aspects and implications of sci/tech will remain here.
Some of my latest Mindlpex posts:
Biochemist and AI researchers win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Researchers in computational protein design and protein structure prediction assisted by AI have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
AI pioneers win the Nobel Prize in Physics. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, two pioneers of machine learning and artificial neural networks, have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Scientists map an entire fly brain. Scientists have mapped the entire brain of an adult fruit fly. This is by far the most complex brain that has been entirely mapped so far.
Photons that seem to travel in negative time. According to a group of experimental physicists, photons have been found to exit a material before entering it.
Large World Models with spatial intelligence. An AI that understands and operates in the 3D physical world.
In her book “Existential Physics” (see my short review), Sabine Hossenfelder said that, if you trust our mathematics, the information about your dead grandmother “is still there, somewhere, somehow, spread out over the universe, but preserved forever. It might sound crazy, but it’s compatible with all we currently know.”
Now Hossenfelder said in an interview:
“since the information about you cannot be destroyed, it is in principle possible that a higher being someday, somehow re-assembles you and brings you back to life. And since you would have no memory of the time passing in between - which could be 10¹⁰⁰ billion years! - you would just find yourself in the very far future.”
Kudos to Hossenfelder for saying this loud and clear. This concept of resurrection provides a bridge between science and religion and offers the existential hope that we need for happiness.
Mark your calendar for the Terasem Colloquium on December 14, the anniversary of the last day astronauts have been on the Moon. In the next newsletter I’ll post the list of confirmed speakers. See this post for a list of videos of previous Terasem Colloquia.
The Colloquium will explore recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cyberconsciousness. A related issue of Terasem’s “Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness” (Vol. 12, Issue 1 - 2024) will be published in December.
And now, Ralph. My friend Ralph. The late and very lamented Ralph Abraham.
I took these pictures of Ralph in 2018 in Santa Cruz.
I’ve written a tribute to Ralph, published in Mindplex Magazine:
In memory of Ralph Abraham, mathemagician extraordinaire. Ralph Abraham was a pioneer of chaos theory and consciousness studies, and an enlightened spiritual teacher.
My tribute to Ralph is published with a nice piece of artwork and a commentary from Ben, insightful and inspiring as usual. This is Ben’s conclusion:
“What an amazing, creative, always-way-ahead-of-his time mind Ralph Abraham was! It is a shame to lose him from this dimension, but one of the lessons one takes from his work is that he will still be with us in some sense, resonating nonlinearly in the Akashic field, which his fascinating math helps describe!”
Rest in peace in the cosmic memory of the Akashic field, Ralph, and I’m sure we’ll meet again.