What are the odds that a populous tribe of bipedal primates, who all evolved specifically to experience and interpret the world in terms of whatever best contributes to their comfort and well-being, would have reached a stage of knowing that all possible phenomena can be explained in terms of their evolved worldview? Very low I'd say.
What we know from history is the tendency of worldviews to confirm only their own assumptions over time to the point of not even acknowledging any other phenomena that conflicts with them. The Middle Ages for example is full of accounts of strange and anomalous phenomena that the authorities on the ruling Christian paradigm of the day simply dismissed or outright condemned as the work of the Devil. Levitating saints and French werewolves and witches and alchemists and vampires and fairy abductions and rains of blood and flesh and UFO dogfights in the sky! It's how paradigms maintain their power and control. Thru denial and demonization. Until they are replaced by another self-confirming model for reality.
Is this not true even in our time, where the paradigm of scientific physicalism, which is really a school of metaphysics and not science at all, enforces itself by encouraging similar kneejerk dismissal and condemnation to the point of soliciting sophomoric ridicule from most of its socially-revered spokesmen? Yet never has there been more credible accounts of strange and anomalous experiences happening to people all over the world. Again what are the odds that OUR dominant paradigm got it all right and has granted us final and complete knowledge of all reality? And again, very small to say the least! We don't even know what our own minds are or how they could even exist--a vast mysterious netherworld of paradoxes and surreal unknowns and epistemic hurdles we have yet to find any coherent theories for. Meanwhile the "unconceived of" keeps knocking on our door in a hundred different ways, like a long lost brother finally coming home. Dare we open it and find out who is there?
“…The more deeply we plumb the psyche, the deeper the well appears to go. Somewhere down in there, it would appear that there is a place where the line between the physical and nonphysical blurs, where imagination and reality somehow converge, and events unfold that are not yet understood at all. It is the realm of Jeff’s ‘imaginal’, where the electrons of thoughts somehow converge into the molecules of things. But how? The mind knows, but not, perhaps, in ways that it can articulate.."---Whitley Strieber
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1120021
EXCERPT: For decades, archaeologists believed that symbolic uses of clay in Southwest Asia emerged only with farming and the Neolithic way of life. This study and the recent discovery of a clay figurine in Nahal Ein Gev II overturns that assumption.
Instead, it shows that a “symbolic revolution” began earlier, during the first stages of sedentarization, when communities were still hunting and gathering but beginning to live in permanent settlements. Clay ornaments became a way to express identity, affiliation, and social relationships, visually and publicly.
“These objects show that profound social and cognitive changes were already underway,” said Prof. Leore Grosman. “The roots of the Neolithic lie deeper than we once thought.”
By documenting one of the world’s oldest traditions of clay adornment, the study reframes the Natufians not just as forerunners of agriculture, but as innovators of symbolic culture, people who used clay to say something about who they were, and who they were becoming.... (MORE - missing details, no ads)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119863
INTRO: A new study on ancient societies from around the world is rewriting what we thought we knew about democracy. A team of researchers analyzed archaeological and historical evidence from 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and found that shared, inclusive governance was far more common than was once believed.
“People often assume that democratic practices started in Greece and Rome,” said Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center. “But our research shows that many societies around the world developed ways to limit the power of rulers and give ordinary people a voice.”
In an autocracy, just one person or a small group holds all the power; examples of autocracy can include absolute monarchies and dictatorships. In a democracy, decision-making power is shared among the people. Elections often go hand-in-hand with democracy, but not always—many autocrats have been freely elected.
“Elections aren’t exactly the greatest metric for what counts as a democracy, so with this study, we tried to draw on historical examples of human political organization,” says Feinman. “We defined two key dimensions of governance. One of them is the degree to which power is concentrated in just one individual or just one institution. The other is the degree of inclusiveness—how much the bulk of the citizens have access to power and can participate in some aspects of governance.”
Feinman and his colleagues examined 40 cases from 31 different political units across Europe, North America, and Asia, spanning thousands of years. These societies all had different methods of record-keeping, and not all of them left behind written records. So, the team had to find different ways to infer what the governments in these historical contexts were like.
“I think the use of space is very telling,” says Feinman. “When you find urban areas with broad, open spaces, or when you see public buildings that have wide spaces where people can get together and exchange information, those societies tend to be more democratic.”
On the other hand, some architectural and city-planning remnants indicate a society where fewer people concentrated power. “If you see pyramids with a tiny space at the top, or urban plans where all the roads run toward the ruler’s residence, or societies where there’s very little space where people could get together for exchanging information, those are all proxies for more autocratic cases,” says Feinman.
The team examined the 40 cases that had been documented by generations of archaeologists and historians, and systematically analyzed different aspects of the places' architecture, art, and urban planning... (MORE - details, no ads)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0342824
PRESS RELEASE: In a survey study of U.S. teens, more than half (55.3%) reported that they had created at least one image using nudification tools, which use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to show what an individual may look like without clothing. Chad Steel of George Mason University, Virginia, U.S., presents these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on March 18, 2026.
Prior research has suggested that the creation and distribution of sexualized images—whether or not GenAI is involved—have become normalized among U.S. adolescents. GenAI can be used for sexual exploitation, such as the non-consensual creation of sexualized images of individuals. Reports of GenAI misuse by adolescents have risen, with victims experiencing consequences similar to the impacts of other forms of child sexual exploitation material, such as a sense of dehumanization and permanent life disruptions.
However, the overall prevalence among adolescents of GenAI usage in regards to sexualized images has been unclear. To help deepen understanding, Steel analyzed online survey results from 557 English-speaking U.S. residents aged 13 to 17. The survey was anonymous and conducted with parental consent. It included questions about participants’ experiences with creating, sharing, and viewing of sexualized GenAI images—both of themselves or others, and consensually or non-consensually.
Of the teens surveyed, 55.3 percent reported that they had used nudification tools to create at least one image of themselves or others, and 54.4 percent reported that they had received such an image. In addition, 36.3 percent reported that at least one sexualized GenAI image of themselves had been created by someone else without their consent, and 33.2 percent reported that at least one sexualized GenAI image of themselves had been non-consensually distributed.
Steel found that these results were largely similar across demographic categories, including age. Although usage was widespread for both male and female participants, male participants reported higher rates of creating and distributing sexualized GenAI images of themselves and others, whether consensually or non-consensually.
These findings could help inform legal policies and educational efforts to promote safe use of GenAI tools. This was an exploratory study, and future research could provide further insights, such whether similar results hold true for adolescents in other countries.
Steel adds: “Teens are no longer just digital natives but AI-natives. ‘Nudification’ and GenAI apps are their new ‘sexting’, only with more challenging issues surrounding consent.”
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/38
INTRO: Over the past century, we have mostly gotten used to the concept of quantum superposition: A particle can exist as a combination of multiple states at once, as famously dramatized by Schrödinger’s cat. But quantum mechanics may allow for an even more mind-boggling type of superposition, called “indefinite causal order,” where the superposition is not between states but between a sequence of events. A few experiments have delivered hints of indefinite causal order, but they all had several “loopholes”—assumptions that leave room for classical explanations.
Now Carla Richter of the University of Vienna and colleagues have devised and performed a new experiment intended to reduce the number of assumptions involved [1]. While some loopholes remain open, the experiment is a useful step toward showing that “we actually have this superposition of orders that cannot be explained classically,” Richter says.
The ideas behind indefinite causal order emerged in the mid-2000s and early 2010s in pioneering work by Lucien Hardy, Giulio Chiribella, Ognyan Oreshkov, and others, says Lee Rozema of the University of Vienna. In this framework, two events can occur in a coherent superposition of one happening before the other and vice versa, so that no single causal order is well-defined—defying the roots of our classical intuition.
The concept evokes baffling thought experiments that echo Schrödinger’s cat. Imagine making a cake. In the classical world, “I mix the ingredients, I bake them, I let the cake cool down, and then I eat it,” says Krister Shalm of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, who was not involved in the work. “In quantum mechanics, in some cases, you can still be mixing the ingredients and already be eating [the fully baked cake].” (MORE - details)
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-flat/
KEY POINTS: The shape of the Universe didn’t have to be flat; it could have been positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere or negatively curved like a higher-dimensional horse’s saddle. The reason space can be curved is that its shape is not absolute, but rather determined by a mix of factors like its mass and energy distribution, as well as its expansion rate. Nevertheless, when we measure it, we find that our Universe really is flat. Here’s what we can learn from that, and why, from a cosmic perspective, it matters so much.
EXCERPTS: Right now, we’ve only measured the curvature to a level of 1-part-in-400, and find that it’s indistinguishable from flat. But if we could get down to these ultra-sensitive precisions, we would have the opportunity to confirm or refute the predictions of the leading theory of our cosmic origins as never before. We cannot know what its true shape is, but we can both measure and predict its curvature.
[...] Although the Universe appears indistinguishable from flat today, it may yet turn out to have a tiny but meaningful amount of non-zero curvature. A generation or two from now, depending on our scientific progress, we might finally know by exactly how much our Universe isn’t perfectly flat, after all, and that might tell us more about our cosmic origins, and what flavor of inflation actually occurred, than anything else ever has... (MORE - missing details)
https://uwaterloo.ca/news/media/top-ai-c...four-times
PRESS RELEASE: New research from the University of Waterloo shows that artificial intelligence (AI) still struggles with some basic software development tasks, raising questions about how reliably AI systems can assist developers. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly incorporated into software development, developers have struggled to ensure that AI-generated responses are accurate, consistent, and easy to integrate into larger development workflows.
Previously, LLMs responded to software development prompts with free-form natural language answers. To address this problem, several AI companies, including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, have introduced “structured outputs”. These outputs force LLM responses to follow predefined formats such as JSON, XML, or Markdown, making them easier for both humans and software systems to read and process.
A new benchmarking study from Waterloo, however, shows that the technology is not yet as reliable as many developers had hoped. Even the most advanced models achieved only about 75 per cent accuracy in the tests, while open-source models performed closer to 65 per cent. The study evaluated 11 LLM models across 18 structured output formats and 44 tasks designed to assess how reliably the systems followed structured rules.
“With this kind of study, we want to measure not only the syntax of the code – that is, whether it’s following the set rules – but also whether the outputs produced for various tasks were accurate,” said Dongfu Jiang, a PhD student in computer science and co-first author on the research. “We found that while they do okay with text-related tasks, they really struggle on tasks involving image, video, or website generation.”
The study was a collaborative effort involving Waterloo’s Jialin Yang, an undergraduate student, and Dr. Wenhu Chen, an assistant professor of computer science, and incorporated annotations from 17 other researchers at Waterloo and around the world.
“There have been a lot of similar benchmarking projects happening in our labs recently,” Chen said. “At Waterloo, students often begin as annotators, then organize projects and create their own benchmarking studies. They’re not just using AI in their studies – they’re building, researching and evaluating it.”
While LLM-structured outputs are an exciting step for software development, the researchers say the systems are not yet reliable enough to operate without human oversight. “Developers might have these agents working for them, but they still need significant human supervision,” Jiang said.
The research, “StructEval: Benchmarking LLMs’ Capabilities to Generate Structural Outputs,” appears in Transactions on Machine Learning Research and will be presented at ICLR 2026.
Thought of this word last night as a sort in-between state arising between the object and the subject. So I looked it up on Google and lo and behold that is exactly what it means. The state arises out of the dynamic interaction of object and subject (or the agent and the enviroment)--an iterative or feedback loop that is a third mode of being or relatedness.
"Transjectivity is a concept developed by Dr. John Vervaeke that describes a co-created, relational reality existing between the subject (observer) and the object (world), rather than being solely inside the mind (subjective) or solely in the world (objective). It focuses on the dynamic interaction and feedback loop between an agent and its environment.
Key Aspects of Transjectivity
Definition: Co-created relatedness where the agent and the world shape each other.
Examples: Common examples include the meaning of a tool (e.g., a hammer's "hammer-ness" relies on a human hand and a physical object), falling in love, danger, or the "home" feeling.
The "Transject": Instead of a static subject or object, a "transject" is a property or pattern of connectedness that emerges from this reciprocal interaction.
Meaning Crisis: Vervaeke uses this concept to address the meaning crisis by arguing that meaning is not purely subjective (in our heads) nor purely objective (in the physical, scientific world), but lies in the "transjective" relationship between us and the world.
John Vervaeke: Coined as a crucial tool for understanding cognition, consciousness, and meaning in his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Connection to Metaxu: Vervaeke notes a similarity between his concept of the transjective and philosopher William Desmond’s idea of the metaxu (the middle ground).
Posthumanism: The concept is also applied in Critical Posthumanism Network studies to understand how human identity and technology interact.
This concept effectively bridges the gap between inner experience and outer reality, highlighting that true understanding is inherently interactive."
Both Heidegger and M Merleau-Ponty understood this idea of transjectivity in the very nature of being. For Heidegger the objects we are constantly surrounded with are used FOR specific intents, like machines and tools and utensils and implements. We encounter these objects in the mode of being in the world, habituated towards using them in a state he called equipmental comportment. The objects are thus always "ready at hand", as transjects, but only become "present at hand", or objects, when they break or malfunction or don't fit. That's when we become aware of them as objects. Like the glasses one wears, always being experienced THRU and never objectively AT until they break at which time they become objects present to us.
M Merleau-Ponty saw perception itself as a transjective form of being. He realized that it only is ever happening while our bodies are moving about and appropriating the various qualities of our environment. Even the body itself is a transject, neither wholly objective nor subjective, and appears in our experience as the enworlding medium or "transparence" thru which phenomenal being manifests itself. It is out of the transjectivity of the body, as being the energetic nexus of all ongoing interactions, that we encounter the world as the split domain of objective and subjective being.
