https://medium.com/unified-theory-of-kno...4742162fd5

"We are scientists. We believe that there is only one world, the natural world. We also believe in the power of the scientific enterprise to yield deep truths about the nature of the universe that transcend the knowledge of “local” cultures.

We believe in a deep ontological continuity across the stack of complexification. We believe science has traced that ontological continuity in a convincing manner, both “back” to the origins of our observable universe at the Big Bang and “down” into molecules and atoms into particles and, finally, quantum fields.

And we believe that psychology and cognitive science should be consistent with biology which, in turn, should be consistent with chemistry which should be consistent with physics. We also believe in the causal closure of physics and that everything that is real ultimately “supervenes” on the physical.

And, yet, despite all these assertions and commitments, we reject the label physicalism (as well as materialism) to describe our views.

Instead, we are ontological naturalists. More specifically, we are Extended Naturalists (EN). As we have laid out in the Cognitive Science Show Transcendent Naturalism, EN is a new philosophy of mind and science. To see why we reject the label physicalism, we need to zoom out and see the current state of our knowledge and consider how we got here..."
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I respect that EN seeks to complexify it's scientific worldview beyond the binary of physical vs mental of physicalism, being open to a broader or multi-layered ontology that actually includes information, life, culture, and the mind. Metaphysically speaking it bears a resemblance to pluralism. Will it solve the Hard problem though? Time will tell..

"Metaphysical pluralism is the philosophical doctrine that reality is composed of multiple, distinct, and irreducible substances, types of being, or fundamental truths, rather than a single unified substance (monism). It posits that the universe is a "many" rather than a "one," often including diverse categories like matter, mind, space, time, and value."

Just recently it has come out that the farm labor movement leader Cesar Chavez who is a cultural icon of many liberal and Latino groups actually raped and sexually assaulted a number of women in his life. The accusation is based on the claims of one woman who knew him and worked beside him and who herself admits he raped her too. Now all across the country people are scrambling to rename their streets and schools and parks and the special day dedicated to him on March 29th.. I think it's kind of amusing to watch the all-powerful cancel culture suddenly saddled with such an urgent fiasco. What happens when your own revered and widely memorialized hero turns out to be a dirty rotten scoundrel? Such are the ironic times we are all living in.

Cesar Chavez statue in Fresno CA:

Yeah, just from his "speech" you can tell he is... a Trump supporter. Either that or being what "anti-establishment" is for this century.

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Spot on with Link Lauren
https://youtu.be/I5Ow6TU2wxk

VIDEO EXCERPTS: The Oscars were on, and they were so terrible and so boring. By about the 3-hour mark, you guys, I had to take a Tylenol. I'm sorry, Bobby Kennedy. I had such a bad headache. There was something about the shrill voices. There was no entertainment value. No humor. I didn't know who half of these people were.

Back in the day at the Academy Awards, remember, you would know who every single celebrity. You would have seen probably 80% of the movies.

I did a poll on my Instagram story, okay? 99% of people said they don't care about the Oscars anymore. Out of tens of thousands of people who voted on my Instagram story, only 1% said they even cared about the Oscars. Then I asked how many of you have actually seen any of the films. Have you seen one nominated film? I think 90% of people said no. 90% said no. So only 10% had seen one of the movies.

Okay. For me, I was not really into the Oscars films. I'm going to be honest with you. [...] it was just a pretentious clown parade of celebrities who wanted to feel important and self-indulgent and pat themselves on the back.

But these are people who over the last year, the past 364 days, they told us, "Democracy is under attack. We're not going to have a country anymore. We have to support the migrants. Even if they're illegal migrants, even if they're criminals, we can't have a border."

Meanwhile, these people are sitting in a theater surrounded by a wall, a border, closed off streets, armed guards, and they had to show ID to get in there. So, these people are hypocrites. You can't take any of them seriously.

And then they say they care about the little guy. All these celebrities say they care about the little guy. We're going to protect the homeless. We're going to check this. You guys stepped over the homeless on Hollywood Boulevard to get into the Dolby Theater where the Oscars were being held.

And then we have a picture of how these celebrities left the aisles in the theater. Look at this. Look at all the trash these degenerate celebrities left behind at the Oscars. No one could go to a trash can. I would never leave a movie theater like this. If I went to the AMC, I wouldn't leave the theater like this ever. Just leaving trash thrown about.

This is who these people are and God knows what they're taking. They're on uppers and downers and who knows what. Probably drinking out the wazoo. These are celebrities no one should look up to. Okay, no one should be looking up to any of these celebrities.

And the fact that they left the aisles like that is absolutely disgusting. Okay, you know who's going to have to clean the aisles? Most of those are immigrant workers. So these celebrities like Jane Fonda and all of them who claim they care about this, you know, the migrants and get ICE out of our cities, they're wearing the ICE out pins. Y'all had no problem just leaving trash behind for them to come and clean up...

Oscars prove celebs aren't relatable, push woke DEI quotas, disrespect cleaning crew at theater ... https://youtu.be/I5Ow6TU2wxk
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/I5Ow6TU2wxk

Albeit in actor rather than director context, it's reminiscent of originally choosing Geneviève Bujold to play Janeway in Voyager, who had zero experience with television productions.

Inside Chloé Zhao’s failed ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ reboot: A close reading of the script, directed by Chloé Zhao, may give clues to why Hulu passed on the show, which has caused an ongoing uproar online from the “Buffy” faithful eager to see their favorite character return to television. ... Buffy has but one line in that original script.

[...] Why the absence of Buffy in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot wasn’t flagged as a potential problem from the beginning is a mystery. Sources say, though, that Hulu is still hopeful that a new creative team can revive the revival sometime in the future. But one well-placed source close to the show said the pilot process wasn’t more difficult than launching any other television show — yet it was made “all the more difficult” by Hulu, which ultimately had “no idea what they really wanted.”

[...] On paper, there’s never been more of a slam dunk than “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale.” [...] Somehow, the stakeholders figured out how do it without Whedon, who’s considered too toxic to hire after allegations of abuse have sidelined his career. And most significantly of all, Gellar had finally — finally! — agreed to return as Buffy, after being convinced to do it by Oscar-winning director Zhao, who helmed the pilot. With Gellar and Zhao — who’s professed her love of “Buffy,” and has said she “watched religiously” — serving as stewards, what could go wrong?

[...] The issues with the pilot seem to be manifold. [...] despite her love of the original series, Zhao proved to be a mismatch for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale.” ... Those sources say that Zhao’s prodigious skills as a director didn’t lend themselves to a television pilot that requires a lot of exposition. It was undershot ... The performances from the actors playing the new characters, who need to make a strong impression as they’re introduced, were under-directed, the sources said. That Armstrong, the new Slayer, has a very young appearance — she turned 16 on March 10 — contributed to the whole enterprise playing too young.

Nerdrotic Daily
https://youtu.be/byAu3EwbNYw

VIDEO EXCERPTS: [...] So Sarah Michelle Geller is out there blaming the Hulu executive right now and they're naming this guy, which is just unbelievable....

[...] People are trying to protect Chloé Zhao. Hulu wanted to go forward with a season. They were paying up out the ass to keep the pre-production going cuz the contract stated that people in pre-production would still get paid.

They couldn't nail Chloé Zhao down to commit to a time frame to film this and then decided to ultimately just cut the neck off it. Maybe the release of the script is an effort to protect Chloé cuz maybe nobody ever believed in this script, and after you read it, you can sort of see why.

[...] Yeah, that script was something. It's making the rounds now and people understand why it was cancelled, but there might be a lot more to this story.

[...] Behind her, a second wraithlike figure crawls from the sand. Its skin is dead and stretched like a corpse with stringy hair and dirty clothes that might identify it as female. ... and Nova says, "Oh my god, a girl died."

And someone else says, "Well, we shouldn't assume her gender."

Leaked Buffy reboot script is painful ... https://youtu.be/byAu3EwbNYw
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/byAu3EwbNYw

Ridley: Ehrlich's anti-human legacy
https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack...man-legacy

INTRO: The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable because in 1970 he forecast that within the coming decade “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death” and “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people”. Furthermore, by 1980 the life expectancy of the average American would have fallen 42 years as a result of cancer caused by pesticides.

Yet he not only lived more than 50 years longer than 42; he lived to be one of more than 8 billion people in a world where global life expectancy has increased at the average rate of seven hours per day since he forecast it would collapse. Meanwhile, famine has all but gone extinct, with death rates from mass starvation down to a tiny fraction of what they were in the 1960s. Here are the astounding numbers: in the 1960s, 29.7 million people out of a population of 3 billion died in famines that killed more than 100,000 people each. In the 2010s, 1.1 million out of a population of more than 8 billion died in such episodes: a decline of 99% in the death rate.

In short, Ehrlich was wrong. Not, as the New York Times said in its obituary this week, “premature”, but radically, completely, spectacularly wrong. He was wrong as soon as he put pen to paper and went on being wrong for decades afterwards. He shot to fame with a best-selling book in 1968, The Population Bomb, whose prologue dismissed all hope for humankind: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Yet something did prevent that. Even as he wrote these words, the world’s population growth rate was falling. New strains of wheat and rice developed by agronomists like Norman Borlaug were starting to transform the productivity of agriculture and India was on the way to banishing famine and becoming a food exporter within a few short years. The amount of food available has increased faster than population on every continent over the last 60 years even as the land area devoted to farming has begun to fall. As so often with environmental pessimism, Ehrlich’s warning was already out of date when it was made.

For the rest of his life Ehrlich remained adamant that he was not so much wrong as…right... (MORE - details)

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-p...sants.html

EXCERPTS: Psychedelic-assisted therapy may be no more effective than traditional antidepressants when patients know what drugs they are actually taking, according to a first-of-its kind analysis that compared how well each type of drug worked for major depression.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has resisted placebo-controlled testing methods—the gold standard in clinical trial design. Due to their powerful subjective effects, nearly everyone in the trial knows whether they received a psychedelic or the placebo even if they are not told. But in trials of antidepressants, participants may not figure out whether they have received the drug or a placebo, which makes it hard to compare them with psychedelics. To get around this problem, researchers from UC San Francisco, UCLA, and Imperial College, London tried a different approach...

[...] The findings both surprised and disappointed them: there was virtually no difference.

"Unblinding is the defining methodological problem of psychedelic trials. What I wanted to show is that even if you compare psychedelics to open-label antidepressants, psychedelics are still much better," said Balázs Szigeti, Ph.D., a clinical data scientist at UCSF's Translational Psychedelic Research Program, who led the study. "Unfortunately, what we got is the opposite result—that they are the same, which is very surprising given the enthusiasm around psychedelics and mental health."

Szigeti is the co-first author of the paper with Zachary J. Williams, MD, Ph.D., of UCLA; Hannah Barnett, MSc, of Imperial College, London is also an author. The study was published March 18 in JAMA Psychiatry.

The hype around the use of psychedelics like psilocybin, or "magic mushrooms," and LSD, to treat such conditions as depression and addiction has grown in recent years as an increasing number of studies have shown promising results, particularly for people who haven't responded to traditional antidepressants.

The new findings don't mean that psychedelic therapy does not work—just that it does not work better than traditional antidepressants. Patients improved substantially from both types of treatments, reducing depression scores by about 12 points on a standard scale.

[...] "Psychedelics may still be a valuable treatment option," Szigeti said. "But if we want to understand their true benefits, we have to compare them fairly—and when we do that, the advantage over standard antidepressants is much smaller than many people, including myself, expected." (MORE - missing details)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/scien...=url-share

EXCERPTS: Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos, house finches in Mexico and song thrushes in New Zealand have all developed a curious habit: They put cigarette butts in their nests. Some songbirds in Britain are even nesting in outdoor ashtrays.

A new study adds evidence for why urban birds have picked up this preference, at least in one species: The toxins in tobacco may keep parasites at bay in the nests of blue tits, colorful birds that are found across Europe.

Cigarette butts contain about 4,000 chemical compounds, including nicotine, arsenic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals. These compounds could ward off pests that harm birds and their offspring. The study was published this year in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Blue tits are cavity nesters, building nests in natural hollows or human-built boxes. Their nests are also prime habitat for bloodsucking parasites like ticks, fleas and blowflies that can exploit their captive targets — adults brooding eggs, and helpless nestlings.

So, when it came to cigarette butts and nesting in outdoor ashtrays, the researchers wanted to know whether blue tits could benefit from the pesticidal impacts of tobacco.

[...] The researchers in Mexico City have also shown that the impact of tobacco on nests isn’t limited to parasites. Dr. Suárez-Rodriguez showed that hatching, fledging and immune response in finch chicks improved alongside an increase in butts. But blood cells from nestlings showed evidence of genetic damage from cigarette butt exposure, with the long-term impacts unknown... (MORE - details)

https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/...sychology/

EXCERPT: More than 130 years after the term parapsychology was coined, there is no proof of the existence of parapsychological phenomena. Compare this to the progress of biology, physics, chemistry, and other sciences.

Therefore, today, we do not know what psi is, if it is anything at all. Is it some kind of energy? If so, what kind of energy is it? Nobody knows. No scientific instrument has ever detected such “energy.”

Other experiences, such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, dowsing, etc., have been associated with psi phenomena. The first two have explanations provided by neuroscience. The last one persists in the inconsistency of its results, as parapsychological experiments do.

In short, parapsychological research has fallen into decline from what once promised to be a cutting-edge science. And yet, a few researchers, increasingly fewer in number, insist on holding onto the hope of obtaining some proof that psi phenomena are a reality... (MORE - missing details)