Jacopo Tagliabue

Hi all,

This is “my profile release 2.0”, including exciting updates such as a new profile picture and answers to Dan’s questions as they are posted in the homepage.

I am student of philosophy at San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy. I am a jr. researcher in “Experimental and Applied Epistemology” @ CRESA, and a jr. researcher in “Life-Span Extension Methodologies” @ iLabs. I am currently figuring out what these strange tags actually mean.

My B.A. dissertation was on foundational issues in ontology and I am still spending part of my life convincing myself that I do not exist. In my M.A. dissertation I’d like to shed some new light on the concept of “complexity” borrowing tools from formal ontology and philosophical logic. I strongly feel that a qualitative theory of information is needed to make sense of how complexity emerges from low-level simplicity, but unfortunately I now have just some vague clues of how such a theory may look like. I hope CSSS will help me figuring out if all this work makes more sense than the previous one.

'simplex sigillum veri' has always been my favorite motto since my first B.A. year, but I think I’ll switch to 'complex sigillum veri' before CSSS.

Now Dan’s questions:

1. What are your main interests?
Apart from information flow and non-standard computability (cellular automata and computation as a way to interpret the natural and physical world), I have a somewhat vague interest for qualitative models in social scenarios: probably because of my obsession with Batman, an agent-based work on crime spreading would be a nice project to work on :)

2. What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?
I have been trained as a metaphysician for the most part of my B.A., so that I may say I am skilled in “philosophical reasoning”, that is analytic rigor, clarity of exposition, a sane skepticism and lots of jokes. Actually, I have been exposed to several disciplines (statistics, microeconomics, artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences), but I wouldn’t qualify as an expert on any reasonable standard. I am a curious and very multidisciplinary person: it is where boundaries between fields become blurry that I like to do research.

3. What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?
New tools, new insights, new interests, good suggestions on how to build “a new kind of science”. And, of course, new people to work with, sharing my values and my interests.

4. Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS?
Actually, I suffer from the typical philosophical disease of being in love with the generality of the complexity approach, so that it is not easy to single out now a particular topic. I am really attracted by some topics in social sciences (crime and cheating, innovation and competion, information and markets), but I will be glad to consider (and be inspired by) any other subject that sounds interesting.

Feel free to contact me using tagliabue.jacopo@gmail.com or jacopo.tagliabue@diagramma.it.

Look forward to meeting you (as you easily guess, I am obsessed with Jack Skeleton too)