Academia

I added the additional quote to the title in order to add context

A 2000 study that concluded the well-known herbicide glyphosate was safe, widely cited since then, has just been officially disavowed by the journal that published it. The scientists are suspected of having signed a text actually prepared by Monsanto.

Related news:

• Trump admin backs Monsanto effort to limit Roundup lawsuits over glyphosate

A very important article. Everyone should read it.

The author is a respected scholar. Jan-Werner Mueller is probably the world's best expert on populism.

TL;DR: ICT treats matter as fixed information, consciousness as the rate of informational change, and time as the structuring of this change. The model unexpectedly drew interest from researchers in information physics (feedback below) and includes three concrete falsifiable experiments.

1. Core Idea

ICT is based on three relations:

1. Matter = fixed information M = I_fixed

2. Consciousness = rate of informational change in time C is proportional to dI/dT (meaning: consciousness grows when informational updates per unit time increase)

3. Reality = interaction of stable and flowing information R = function(I_fixed, dI/dT)

This aligns with:

Landauer’s limit (energy cost of changing information)

Friston’s free-energy principle (entropy/information gradients)

Bekenstein bounds (informational density limits)

integrated-information ideas (but without assuming a biological substrate)

Key shift: Information is not an abstraction — it is the actual substrate of physics.

2. Time as an informational process

In ICT, time is defined as:

“The transition of potential information into structured experience.”

This connects:

subjective/phenomenological time

physical/relativistic time

computational/informational time

Consciousness shapes this transition — creating a local arrow of time through patterns of information change.

3. Experimental roadmap (all falsifiable)

Experiment 1 — C ∝ dI/dT (neuroenergetic test)

Task: multilevel oddball or sequence-learning with strict entropy control. Measurements: EEG or MEG + metabolic markers. Prediction: higher informational update-rate (dI/dT) increases both energetic cost and long-range neural integration.

Experiment 2 — R = f(I) (“structure without energy”)

Equal power input, but different informational structure: compressible vs pseudorandom signals, in sensory streams or light patterns. Prediction: informational form changes neural / behavioral / physical outcomes, even when energy is identical.

Experiment 3 — M = I_fixed (energy of fixation)

Measure energy thresholds for stable information across substrates: DRAM, Flash, PCM/memristors, spintronics, and possibly neural cultures. Prediction: matter behaves as stabilized information with substrate-dependent fixation thresholds.

4. External feedback

A researcher specializing in information physics and the nature of time — background:

MSU’s “Institute for Time Nature Explorations”

electrical engineering

information science

systemic research

interdisciplinary time studies

left a detailed review on Academia.edu.

Key excerpts:

"The author proposes an interesting approach to the relationship between matter, consciousness and information, incorporating the complex concept of time."

"'Matter as fixed information' opens a path toward an information physics of consciousness."

"The experimental framework is clear and promising."

— Irina L. Zerchaninova, researcher in information physics & time studies

5. Why posting on Beehaw

ICT sits at the intersection of:

physics

computation

information theory

philosophy of mind

AGI research

This is an early-stage but testable model. Technical critique is welcome.

Links

Preprint (equations + experimental criteria): https://www.academia.edu/s/8924eff666

Main publication (open access): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17584783

PDF: https://www.academia.edu/144946662

As I read in the Wiki, "Researchers have criticized Elsevier for its high profit margins and copyright practices. The company had a reported profit before tax of £2.295 billion with an adjusted operating margin of 33.1% in 2023. Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to accusations of rent-seeking, boycotts against them, and the rise of alternate avenues for publication and access, such as preprint servers and shadow libraries."

Are there other high-score but more ethical publishers? Is Springer Nature better in this sense? I mean the subscription publishing options, not a paid open-access.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6498593

To summarize:

• Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
• Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
• Social Sciences by 50–70%
• History by 60%
• Biology by 75%
• The German department will lose all PhD seats
• Sociology from six PhD students to zero

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6322801

Tens of thousands of students walked out of classrooms in cities and towns across Spain on Thursday to protest Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide in Gaza and abduction of Global Sumud Flotilla members, dozens of whom are Spanish.

The National Students’ Union organized Thursday’s protests under the slogan “stop the genocide against the Palestinian people.” Demonstrations, which took part in at least 39 cities and towns, varied in size from small groups to thousands who turned out in Barcelona and the capital Madrid, where students held banners with messages like “Stop Everything to Stop the Genocide,” “All Eyes on the Global Sumud Flotilla,” and “Free Palestine!”

“We’re not going to look the other way,” the union said in a statement. “The Palestinian cause is the cause of the youth and the millions who stand for human rights and social justice. That is why... we called the general student strike to empty the classrooms and fill the streets with dignity.”

Full article

The ending in particular:

The task of the university in our digitally mediated world is more vast than collecting, commenting, and editing, and there are many other ways to conduct data analysis or learn how to navigate information online. But reading and writing are now unremitting. In earlier generations, small groups of people wrote letters, constantly. This is, in fact, a topic of study among humanities scholars. In our time, everyone is constantly reading and writing—through email, Facebook, TikTok, X, Instagram, and so on. We are caught up in a semiotic exchange. Media literacy is a learning outcome in many schools. Universities have a unique responsibility and capacity for teaching the kinds of thinking that will deepen and transform widely accessible information.

One of the new tasks for the humanities, specifically, is to revise and recast our traditions of scholarship for this new context. If you’ll forgive the pun, we should take a page from the humanists. We need to design new protocols to engage our students’ insatiable desire to read and write in these new environments so they will learn how to reflect and search for new knowledge. The challenge is speed. The current reading pace is fast—even though the time it takes a person to read a whole text might be quite long because they’re constantly jumping to other windows, following chains of connection away from the original text.

The kind of reading and thinking and writing that scholars pursue takes time. Perhaps, in part, what university education needs to do is slow reading and writing down. We now have rapid access to sources—which means we have more time for thinking and questioning. But having more time for reflection, rereading, revising, and rewriting is in tension with current views on efficiency and productivity. Going slowly might yield greater long-term benefits. Fostering habits of reflection, exploration, and discernment that lead to more valuable comments—this is a task for the university.