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We are products of complexity,
but our evolution has focused our
understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the
African savanna.
As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact
the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend
them. So this web frame
explores significant real world complex
adaptive systems (CAS):
- Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the
wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of
stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and
retirement savings of the working class. The
assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
- The US nation was built
from two divergent political
views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also
reflects the development
of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and
Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall
Street into a position of power, while the middle and
working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing
financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions
helped hide the shift.
- Most US health care is still
operating the way cars built in the 1940s did.
Geisinger is an example of better solution. But
transforming the whole network is a challenge. And
public health investment has proved far more
beneficial.
- Helping our children learn to be
effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have
created a robust but deeply flawed education system.
Better alternatives have emerged.
- Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our
good ideas to
become a second genetic material.
- The emergence
of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent
development;
It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all
have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and
explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It
outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.
Example systems frame |
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and
manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these
systems can have disastrous consequences for their human
managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties
psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental
strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage
CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
- Effective iterative planning and
- Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he
reviews.
Complexity catastrophes |
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to
date and explains how the two systems can coexist most
effectively.
Adaptive ecology |
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President
Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and
energy goals.
US vds alignment |
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite
and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly
executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their
successful strategy used the credibility of conservative
religious leaders to:
- Demonstrate religious issues
with the New Deal.
- Integrate the corporate
elite and evangelicals.
- Use the power of corporate
advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American
people to view the US as historically religious and
the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious
socialism.
- Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham.
- Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower.
- Add religious elements to
mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
- Push for prayer in
public school
- Push Congress to promote prayer
- Make elections more
about religious positions.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends
on persistence.
Inventing Christian America |
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
Financial WMD |
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic
alignment of the American justice system. The result
he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into
resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as
it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a
potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to
extract profits and leave the victim deflated.
Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the:
activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes,
prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are:
Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare
recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the
justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and
responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to
win.
Aligned justice |
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of
staff.
Mechanics of power |
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and
libertarianism.
Libertarianism |
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their
organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs.
He promotes strategies
that help OKR success: Focus,
Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance
reviews, and provides illustrative success
stories.
Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's
view that employees are adaptive and will
respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them
framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture
is tailored for the startups KPCB
invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all
CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the
association to planning.
Startup PDCA |
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take
hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces
including famine and
oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured
that thoughtful leaders
were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the
crisis.
Voltaire's disruptive network |
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges
during the enlightenment.
It was a poem
encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a
humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and
reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the
foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms
are discussed.
Constraining happiness |
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of
web services to explore Ada
Lovelace's ideas about thinking
machines and poetic
science. He highlights the value of computer
augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to
fulfill the process.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and
collaboration are discussed.
Arts technology & intelligence |
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of
consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on
the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he
describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the
potential and challenges of associative neural
networks.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the
additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling
evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that
Haikonen's neural
architecture, Smiley's Copycat
architecture and molecular biology's intracellular
architecture leverage the same associative properties.
Associatively integrated robots |
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Developing ideas |
A government sanctioned monopoly
supported the construction of a superorganism
American Telephone and
Telegraph
(AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of
three networks:
- The evolving global scientific
network.
- The Bell telephone network. And
- The military
industrial network deploying 'fire and missile
control' systems.
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation
engine.
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing
ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent
opposition and enable the creation and growth of new
ideas.
Once the monopoly was
dismantled, AT&T disrupted.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are
discussed.
Strategic innovation |
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of
BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory and
reviewed.
BREXIT |
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google
are monopolists that
trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues
should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle
class.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments
assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).
While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts
with relevant CAS history and theory.
Monopoly job killers |
The IPO of Netscape is
defined as the key emergent event of
the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary
of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.
New economy |
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of
rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was
enabled by the experience of Keynes
and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard,
the necessity of improving
the situation between the wars and the opportunity created
by the catastrophe of the Second
World War.
He describes how it was planned
and developed. How it
emerged from the summit.
And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy.
Like all plans there are
mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as
best it could.
And then Conway describes the period after
Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed
and also compares the relative performance of the various
periods before during and after Bretton Woods.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS)
theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and
infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.
He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and
against the development
and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a
key piece of the history of our global economic CAS.
Bretton woods |
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008
housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential
mortgage value delivery system (VDS)
by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS
was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one
incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.
Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Housing amplifiers |
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Derivative systems |
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt
provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as
creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate
different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the
eighteenth century administrations of England and France.
The US embodies two different political and economic systems which
approach the national debt differently:
- Taxes to support a sinking
fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in:
Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social
programs; Starting with Hamilton,
Lincoln & Chase,
Wilson, FDR;
- Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by
individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison,
Reagan,
George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US
government does. They argue that the conflicting
sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in
the middle' with a future problem.
And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help
assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the
future.
They conclude the question is still political. They hope
it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed
explanations. They ask who is willing to
push all the coming risk onto individuals.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery
system, key CAS features are highlighted.
National debt |
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
American growth |
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of
money based on the attractive features of precious metals.
He compares the potential for government edicts to create money
but sees them as lacking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that
precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.
Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
- Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy
transaction intermediates and
- Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in
supporting survival and replication in the currently
accessible niches.
Emergence of money |
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith
developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do
this he replaces traditional
economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an
economy is a system in
equilibrium, with complexity
economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex
adaptive system (CAS).
He introduces Sugerscape
to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he
explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics,
Agents, Networks, Emergence, and
Evolution.
Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to
the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces
map strategies to instances of physical and
social
technologies. And he identifies the interactors and
selection mechanism of economic
evolution.
This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition
of wealth.
In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of
adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance,
& Politics
& Policy.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions
and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we
leverage.
Economic complexity |
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the
growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and
their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global
commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for
the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land
and labor to work it including slaves.
He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for
industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of
the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly
copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized
cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to
operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages
and the ways found to
mobilize industrial labor.
Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton
CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.
Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all
prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when
the US civil war
blocked access to the major production nodes in the
American Deep South the CAS began adapting.
Beckert describes the global
reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways
of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion
further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation
states. Beckert explains how other countries responded
by copying the colonial strategies and creating the
opportunities for future armed conflict among the original
colonialists and the new upstarts.
Completing the adaptive
shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in
the colonized global south and how over time they joined
the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing
nodes and creating the current global CAS
dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart
pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers,
spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each
other on cost.
Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers,
pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a
highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over
time: of military force, global transportation and communication
networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The emergent
system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of
extended phenotypic alignment.
Globalization from cotton |
The structure and problems of the US
health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory.
The network:
- Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the
conflict between two
opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net
or low tax without. The emergence
of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further
constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of the network.
- The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous
levels of: salt,
sugar, cigarettes,
guns, light, cell phones, opioids,
costly education, global travel,
antibacterials, formula, foods including
endocrine disrupters;
- Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's
offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress,
amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of
walking, microbiome
collapse;
- Globalization connects disparate environments in a network. At the edges,
humans are drastically altering the biosphere. That
is reducing the proximate natural environment's
connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and
far less diverse. This disconnects predators from
their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that
transform the local parasite
network and their reservoir and amplifier
hosts. The situation is setup so that man is
introduced to spillover
from the local parasites' hosts. Occasionally, but
increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming
broadly infected. The evolved
specialization of the immune system
to the proximate environment during development
becomes undermined as the environment transforms.
- Is incented to focus on localized competition generating
massive & costly duplication of services within
physician based health care operations instead of proven
public health strategies. This process drives
increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope
for each new technological breakthrough.
- Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation
and indirection of service development,
provision, reimbursement and payment.
- Is impacted by the different political strategies for
managing the increasing
cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.
- Is presented with acute
and chronic
problems to respond to. As currently setup the network
is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions
with patients tend to be transactional.
- Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure
which is:
- Costly and inefficient
- Structured around yearly
contracts which undermine long-term health goals and
strategies.
- Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT
which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has
entrenched commercial EHR
products deep within the hospital systems.
- Is maintained, and kept in
alignment, by massive network
effects across the:
- Hospital platform
based
sub-networks connecting to
- Physician networks
- Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA
narrow network legislation
- Hospital clinical supply and food
production networks
- Medical school and academic research network and NIH
- Global
transportation network
- Public health networks
- Health care IT supply
network
Health care |
Deaton describes the wellbeing
of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public
health strategies and the effect of growth in
material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of
aid.
Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. The situation he describes is complex including
powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap
broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The
biosphere, Politics, Economics,
Philosophy and Health care.
Improving wellbeing |
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations
of the major problems afflicting US
health care as of 2006.
Problems of US health care |
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the
modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse
following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the
business, they describe how a calamity
unfolding around them supported building a vision of a
better US health care network. And they explain:
- How they planned
out the transformation,
- Leveraging an effective
governance structure,
- Using a strategy
to gain buy in,
- Enabling
reengineering at the clinician patient
interface.
- Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic
& hot
spot care; to help the patients and help the
physicians.
- Geisinger's leverage of biologics.
- Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.
- Where Geisinger is headed next.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory.
E2E insured quality care |
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader
and son who know that the current health care network interacts
with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that
caused his father's death. But he is confident that these
problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he
asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated,
collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their
patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be
made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical
errors and make care more cost effective.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
including synergistic examples of these systems in
operation. The health care network is built out of
emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals
they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker
explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and
hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh
Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson
highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives.
Bad medical models |
US healthcare is ripe for
disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that
technologies are emerging which will support low cost business
models that will undermine the current network. Applying
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist
these progressive forces.
Disrupting health care |
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent
improvement in quality in medicine by organizing
to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic
plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists.
With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates
the effects of
complexity and how to organize to cope with it.
Following the short review RSS
additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of
complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within
the network of US health care,
contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping
his various examples and reviewing facets of complex
failures.
Complexity checklists |
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on
1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman
starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects'
lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking
broadly across each subject's: Personality,
Education, Parental impacts,
Energy
levels, Partnering,
Careers, Religion,
Social networks,
Gender, Impact from war and
trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways,
which each individual could be seen to select and travel
along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long
life. Others were problematic. The models imply that
the US approach to health and
wellness should focus
more on supporting
the development and selection of beneficial pathways.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most
applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support
necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving
to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may
be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network,
starved of resources.
Promoting longevity |
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots
of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping
with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on
aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to
show how technology has amplified
this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the
independent self, living fully while aging with the
support of the extended family. Central
planning responded to the technological and societal changes
with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But
Gawande then contrasts the power of
bottom up innovations created by experts responding to
their own family situations and belief
systems.
Gawande then explores in depth the challenges
that unfold currently as we age and become infirm.
He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will
have to understand the dilemma of
integrating medical treatment and hospice
strategies. He notes that all parties
involved need courage to cope.
He proposes medicine must aim to assure
well being. At that point all doctors will practice
palliative care.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death,
evolution, cooperation and adaptations
to new technologies are discussed.
Agent death |
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles
mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are
infected each year with malaria and one million die.
Malaria |
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution
of medical science.
Medical science events |
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex
systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of
design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies
that generate complexity
within systems. They do this through a focus on
modularity.
Modular designed systems |
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the
strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer
company IBM.
Compartmented systems |
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer
software design.
Object based systems |
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for
creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data
types and inheritence make object orientation a superior
methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy
to the use of objects.
Software construction |
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved
dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
Tools |
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the
World. He highlights:
- A list of
preconditions resulting in
- Additional niche
capture & more free time
- Building a network
to interconnect memes processes & tools which
- Enabling inter-generational
transfers
- Innovations
that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil
fuels
Memetic trading networks |
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported
the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man
building cultures and
later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson
identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these
are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a
change of approach.
He:
- Explores creativity:
how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer,
enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the
evening around the campfire. He notes the power of
fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing
signature of aesthetic
surprise.
- Looks at the current limitations of the
humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.
- Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and
culture:
- Ultimate causes viewed
through art, & music
- The bedrock of:
- Ape senses and emotions,
- Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied
by humanities,
&
- Exponential change in science and
technology.
- How the breakthrough from
our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat,
supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory &
language.
- Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.
- The impact on human nature.
- Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are
destroying.
- Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes,
exploration, irony, and
considers the potential for a third enlightenment,
supported by cooperative
action of humanities and science
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
- The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework
for representing the cultural CAS while
- Wilson's desire
to integrate the humanities and science gains support from
viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS.
Evening campfire rituals |
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the
economy. They argue it has generated exponential
growth. This has been due to innovation.
It has created a huge bounty of
additional wealth.
But the wealth is spread unevenly across
society. They look at the short and long term implications of
the innovation bounty and spread
and the possible future of
technology.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory.
Brilliant technologies |
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative,
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
Education versus guilds |
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The
Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed
by CAS theory and reviewed.
What drives success |
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires
developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining
the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin
shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth
rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the
summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
is used to augment Turchins findings.
Warrior groups |
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael
Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory highlights the value of evolutionary
testing of the food chain.
Natural systems |
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can
take hold. Various social insects have developed
strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable
available niches. Like humans they invest in
specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped
competitors.
Insect superorganisms |
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
Computationally adapted mind |
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the
impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span:
conception, infantile
puberty, girlhood,
juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are
described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in
how emotions are processed
by women compared to men.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with
the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and
behavioral CAS.
Evolved female brain |
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky
developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time
spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology,
psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he
outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for
scientific research on behavior.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's
details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured
to successfully enter niches we now occupy.
CAS behavior |
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
Emergence of time |
Conscious access |
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's
brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With
imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the
retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters?
What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound
like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene
explains the importance of
education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as
well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But
he notes the reading
networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved.
And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing
reading and culture.
He explains the cultural
engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that
enable and constrain reading and culture.
Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural
complex adaptive system (CAS) are
related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use
his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading
and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge.
Evolved reading |
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In
particular he explains how:
- Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that
allow
- Life changing real-time
decisions to be made, and how
- Schematic structures provide
encodings of computable control
structures which operate through and on incomputable,
schematically encoded, physically active structures and
operationally associated production
functions.
Receptor indirection |
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific
investigation of meditation's
impact on the brain. They introduce
the book by describing their experiences with meditation,
science and the research establishment, their friendship, how
meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered
traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which
the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to
back them up.
Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology
graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds
work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern
tradition of exploring and altering the mind.
Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model
of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at
Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of
consciousness. It took over twenty years for
scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align
with this model. Much of the prior
experimental data had to be abandoned.
They introduce meditation's
impact on the amygdala
responding to pain and stress.
They look at the changes in:
- Stress
- Compassion
- Attention
- Self-awareness; and the
potential for use of mediation
in psychiatry.
And they warn of the occurrence of dark
nights.
They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters,
starting with Mingyur Rinpoche,
and detect meditation altering
traits.
Finally they discuss the potential
benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it
broadly to a busy America.
Meditating neurons |
Tara Brach was worried from
a young age that there was something terribly wrong with
her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded
by developing Radical
Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in
applying it: pause,
greet what happens next with unconditional
friendliness; allowing us to:
- Initially attend to the sensations
of our body,
- Accept the
wanting self and discover its source of boundless
love.
- Welcome
fear with a widening
attention, accept the pain of death and become
free.
- Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves
and others.
- Focus on
our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed,
towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in
everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness.
- Leverage
friendships to understand more about our shared nature
and strengthen Radical Acceptance.
- Realize our Buddha nature.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of
the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic
code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist
presence.
Compassionate CAS |
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.
Enneagrams define personality
types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever,
Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast,
Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of
childhood driven wounds.
The Enneagram becomes
a tool to enable interested people to transform from the
emotionally wounded base, hidden within
the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence.
Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each
of us adopts an induced Basic Desire
of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will
support presence and
undermine the identification
that supports the armor of the type.
The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type
armor:
- Triadic self
revealing: Instinctive,
feeling, thinking; childhood needs
that became significant wounds
- Social style
groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for
managing inner conflict
- Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for
defending childhood wounds
Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual
distortions reflected in the interests of the variants.
The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development:
unhealthy, average, healthy,
liberation; including their
current center of gravity,
steriotypical social role,
wake-up call, leaden rule, red
flag, and direction
of integration and disintegration.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models
presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures
in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven
by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family
and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be
constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies.
Enneagram strategies |
Antonio Damasio argues
that ancient
& fundamental homeostatic processes,
built into
behaviors and updated by evolution
have resulted in the emergence
of nervous systems and feelings. These
feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general
systems supporting enteric
operation, are later ubiquitously
integrated into the 'images'
built by the minds of higher animals
including humans.
Damasio highlights the separate
development of the body frame in the building of
minds.
Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds
supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of
emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the
end-to-end
integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers
hard problem of consciousness.
Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures
and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the
cultural creative process, linking culture to
homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the
development of tools
to improve our lives. But the results of the
creative process have added
stresses to our lives.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Each of the [super]organisms
discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
- Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns
well with CAS theory.
- Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS
examples.
Emergence of feelings |
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John
spent a lot of time alone
during his childhood.
He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the
Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot
training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam;
so the US paid for him to attend University
of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training
corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to
Mary Bruce.
Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a
combat ready pilot in
the Korean War.
While the US Air Force focused on
Strategic bombing, Boyd loved
dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was
rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new
ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers
by using them in the F-100.
He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top
pilots from around the US and allied base network, his
reputation spread. But he needed to get
nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to
Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at
Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training
and mentored Ronald Catton.
While there he first realized the
link between energy
and maneuverability.
At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie,
he developed tools to model the link. They developed
comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US
aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney
was briefed on
the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111.
Sent to the Pentagon
to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to
pressure procurement into designing and
building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a
lightweight maneuverable
fighter. The navy aligned with
Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the
F-X and force the F-14 on
the Air Force. Boyd saved
the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring
the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the
freedom to compromise
on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to
retire, in disgust.
Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd
and Sprey secretly
developed specifications for building prototype lightweight
fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16;
and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.
David Packard
announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on
prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a
short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to
prototype.
Boyd was transferred to Thailand
as Vice Commander of Task
Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity
training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he
started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction
and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was
apparently abandoned and sent to run
a dead end office at the Pentagon.
The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd,
Christie, Schlesinger,
and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the
lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's
requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force
threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's
concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired
from the Air Force.
Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable
creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain
the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then
highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their
infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he
explains with the O-O-D-A Loop.
Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney
to expose the systemic cost overruns
of the military procurement process. The military
hierarchy moved to undermine the
Spinney Report and understand the
nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive
mentor to Michael
Wyly, who taught the
Marine Corps about maneuver
warfare, and Jim Burton.
Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have
beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during
the First Gulf War.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of
air-to-air combat within a CAS framework.
Air warrior |
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent
van Gogh in Arles.
Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven
to create, and successfully
invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and
especially portraits. Vincent
worked hard to allow artists like him-self
to innovate. But
Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis.
Nemeczek also provides a brief history of
Vincent's life.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Vincent creates |
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious
memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his
immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer
songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse
and eventual recovery.
Elton stresses the serendipitous nature
of his emergence as a musician. He describes
the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's
sister, and her mother Ivy;
who formed his early
childhood proximate environment which prepared
him for a job in entertainment: he
developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a
commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs;
entering a network based around Dick James Music.
And he almost got married.
DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing
while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session
work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the
food. A first album supported touring and the formation of
a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an
overnight sensation. And during this period of time
Elton's testosterone
level ramped. Life changed
dramatically.
Stardom provided many rewards but there
were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was
befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of
success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated.
His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and
foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly
in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him.
But he was saved by the challenge of
transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He
retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life.
Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints,
Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he
hopes will bring him happiness:
trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the
quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying
Renata.
He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is
frightened by a cancer
scare, AIDS, inspired by
Ryan White, angered by the
Sun, and saddened at
breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's
final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton
about his string of addictions.
Elton finally agreed he had a problem.
He went to rehab, stopped hating himself,
gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a
higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other
people.
It seemed the higher force was
supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the
Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all;
they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni
was murdered. Princess Diana
died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral.
He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina
Turner. While his new records sold well he found
himself in debt and terminated the management relationship
with John Reid
Enterprises.
Elton and Bernie improved their
situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped
turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton
to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David
entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with
his seminal influence: Leon
Russell.
Elton and David became parents of
two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate
mother and network in California. They quietly get married
when the UK allows.
Elton's mum remains
difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many
at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents
increases the long-term
stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys.
But Elton needs to go out with a bang!
And everyone helps.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details
of the creative process from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
My song |
Richard Feynman
outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story.
Richard's personality
encouraged him to patiently
seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles
with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and
practice through building and fixing radios.
Leonardo's life inspired him to try
innovation, which he
concluded was hard. He played
with the emotion
in communications, a skill
which he used later at
Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following
orders at MIT. Working during
the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and
practice.
Feynman enrolled as a graduate
student at Princeton, where the successful
approach to science was just like his.
His approach was based on
patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for
qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental
techniques. He would test
the assertions in articles with amusing investigations;
with his mind aligned by
feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized.
He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being
taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer
recess he explored biology.
Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his
creativity. And his practical
orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway,
supported his desire for choices
and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural
pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he
developed different approaches to problems than the
standard strategies provided by mass education.
Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very
different?
While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about
the implications of the European war. After a friend
enlisted he decided to dedicate his
summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the
Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he
experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the
physics of the project, him on Niels
Bohr; but was
freed from them by Von
Neumann. The records & reports of the project
were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of
the locks and safes deployed to secure these
secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft
board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally
unfit.
After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell.
He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match
expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his
recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on
fun. He enjoyed knowing
about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to
use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate
and approximate a value the fastest.
Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a
physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much
fun for Richard. So he used
the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet
beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque
frequenting one, and later
ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he
drank with to sleep with him.
Richard reflects on various times when he made government
officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape;
Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more
things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both
institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making,
but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste
of time and he saw risks in
a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech
and stay there.
Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in
Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little
Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse
effectively, but stops when he
finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his
individualism.
Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He
felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the
latest details, fearful that
he could not cope; as the community
worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But
Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity
premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused
on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of
reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang
discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard
felt terrified and could not understand what they said.
His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student
having fun, read every
line and equation of their paper; he would understand it.
And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what
was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He
reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard
returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with
Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of
Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay.
Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply
describing the details of beta decay. He had identified
the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel
prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize
and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip,
where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese
ambassador.
Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling
it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of
experiences.
Richard lobbies for integrity
in science.
In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science,
Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his
help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to
their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the
logistical details of planning. He loved percussion,
playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He
eventually discovered art could be
fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying
mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great
art teacher. But he discovered although he could
eventually draw well he did not understand art.
Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful,
who were interested in integrating art and science, did not
understand either subject. He found the situation was
similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and
economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the
strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects
made him angry and
disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed
ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing
culture to the physicists!
He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets
involved in the California public school text
book selection process which he concluded was totally
broken, but also reveals how his father
provided him with a vision of how our world works,
inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical
theory.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported
his creative development from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Richard draws |
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life,
expanded from his own highlights:
- His naughty
childhood,
- Wasted
schooldays,
- Apprenticeship with Grant,
- His extramural
activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow,
life with FitzRoy on the
Beagle,
- His growing
love for science,
- London: geology, journal and Lyell.
- Moving from
Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other
books.
- He reviewed his position on
religion: the long
dispute with Emma, his
slow collapse of belief
- damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction
being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's
advice; while describing Emma's side of the
argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate
his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self &
Cross-fertilization his strength will be
exhausted.
Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed
evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose
complementary skills helped drive the innovation.
Darwin emerges |
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations
of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the
accumulation of small advantageous changes.
Accumulating small changes |
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and
the emergence of agents.
Autonomous emergence |
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can
induce emergent phenomena
which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are
sustained. The mechanism enables
the development of Darwinian competition.
Constraint based phenomena |
|
|
Conscious access
Summary
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for
centuries. Now it is finally being characterized
scientifically. That required a transformation of
approach.
Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist
Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. .
In the book he outlines the limitations of previous
psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective
assessments opened the
window to contrast totally unconscious
brain activity with those
including consciousness.
He describes the research methods. He explains the
contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the
psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to
specific neural activity.
He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal
workspace' to position all the experimental details into a
whole.
He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and
treatment of real world mental illnesses.
The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent
consciousness research are outlined.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. and
operation introduce constraints which are discussed.
Consciousness and
the Brain
In Stanislas Dehaene's book
'Consciousness and the Brain' he describes a transformation in
our ability to study consciousness scientifically.
Following Descartes he notes any science of consciousness must
be able to resolve two issues:
- Our capacity to report thoughts using speech.
- Our flexible reasoning. Descartes could not see how
this could be performed by any automaton. Consequently
he developed Cartesian
dualism is an assumed separation of the mind and body. It has a long history. Descartes's Cartesian dualism assumes the mind and body are two clocks in synchrony but otherwise unrelated. John Locke commented 'It is impossible to conceive that matter, either with or without motion, could have, originally, in and from itself, sense, perception, and knowledge; as is evident from hence, that then sense, perception, and knowledge, must be a property eternally separable from matter and every particle of it.' Chalmers describes this explanatory gap as the hard problem of consciousness. Damasio explains that the construction of feelings requires there be no duality, and he shows how it then emerged due to the structure of affect in humans.
attributing the flexible reasoning to the soul is an ancient concept that was eternal according to Plato. In his cave analogy he promotes the ideal and the sensory which highlights the dualism of soul and body. The soul was eternal - being simple, pure and generated by the creator. Bodies were associated with souls by gods at birth. Epicurus argued that souls were constructed from atoms, were complex and died. CAS theory likens: - 'souls' to schematic strings, and 'bodies' to organisms, and
- 'souls' to the mind's well known entities: amygdala, insula etc, and the 'bodies' to the percepts & representations that the well known entities become conscious hubs for; which agrees in part with both positions.
based in the pineal
gland.
Realizing that consciousness was ill defined Dehaene and others
characterized and focused on conscious access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. .
They succeeded in developing a new science of
consciousness.
Consciousness
enters the lab
He explains how:
- A change of definition - setting aside the over-loaded suitcase word have multiple attached meanings which encourage us to think in different ways about the word. Suitcase words are reviewed by Marvin Minsky.
consciousness Dehaene focused on vigilance is the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep or wake up. For Goleman & Davidson it also reflects maintaining a constant level of attention as time goes on, through controlling habituation. Their vigilance includes alerting - being ready to respond to whatever is encountered. , attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. and conscious access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. .
- A reevaluation of subjective assessments - Dehaene
realized that these assessments were legitimate as
experimental data about the subjective experience. The
experimenter could then search for brain correlates of the
subjective report.
- Introduction of fMRI is functional magnetic resonance imaging. Seiji Ogawa leveraged the coupling of neuronal circuit activity and blood flow through the associated glial cells to build a 3 dimensional picture of brain cell activity. As haemoglobin gives up its oxygen to support the neural activity it becomes magnetic and acts as a signal detected by the fMRI. fMRI easily visualizes the state of activity in the living human brain at millimeter resolution, up to several times a second but it cannot track the time course of neural firing so it is augmented with EEG.
supported by EEG is electroencephalography, the recording of brain waves. With 256 electrodes it provides high-quality digital recordings of brain activity with millisecond resolution over the whole head. It tracks the time course of neural firing. It complements fMRI. MEG is considered analogous but even better. The awake brain emits a variety of frequencies classified in EEGs as alpha (8-13 hertz), beta (13 - 30 Hz), gamma (30 and higher) and theta (5 cycles a second). Visual stimuli result in enhanced gamma-band activity within 200 milliseconds. For consciously perceived stimuli it remained sustained while it died out over time for unseen masked stimuli. Theta band is used by the cortex for long distance messaging. and MEG is magnetoencephalograthy the very precise recording of the miniscule magnetic waves that accompany the discharge of currents in cortical neurons.
, and
- Elegant psychology experiments - use various processes to
manipulate consciousness including: distracting attention, binocular rivalry is a visual illusion caused by presenting each eye with a different image. Consciously we perceive alternately one of the images and then the other. It was first discovered by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. Logothetis & Schall found some neurons respond to the physical image. Other neurons respond to the representation of it, which requires memory. Logothetis & Schall subsequently found the number of neurons attuned to representations increases further up the visual processing chain.
,
attentional
blinks is an experimental technique to create a minimal contrast between conscious and unconscious processing. A brief period of invisibility of an image is created by saturating the conscious mind with attention on letters within a stream of symbols which are mostly digits. A first letter is perceived. A second letter presented in close succession (100 milliseconds) is completely missed by conscious perception. The delay can be adjusted until 50% of the time the second letter is perceived allowing sensors to look at the differences in brain activity between the two minimally different situations. The blink is associated with an increase in pleasure inducing neural signals. Goleman & Davidson note that, after a three month vipassana meditation retreat, the blink time reduces 20% due to the neural response being more subdued. , local-global
test detects conscious access. It consists of presenting repeatedly, many times, an identical sequence of five sounds. When the last sound differs from the first four, unconscous auditory areas react with a 'mismatch response'. Consciously the brain quickly adapts to the repeating melody. After adaptation, it is the absence of the final novelty that triggers a response to novelty. This higher-order response seems to exist only in conscious patients and is associated with Dehaene's signatures of consciousness. ; have revealed key details about the operation of
consciousness.
The conscious image is found to be amplified. When and
where this occurs is the new science of consciousness. A
new experimental strategy was devised to achieve the goal of
creating a minimal contrast between the conscious and
unconscious operations. This allows a clear determination
of what changes during conscious access.
Crick's
leverage of psychological forces
The strategy is based on
Francis Crick and Christian Koch's observation that visual
illusions provide scientists with the means to track the fate of
conscious versus unconscious stimuli in the brain. Even
though the data is subjective the results are
reproducible. There are lots of sensory items
being processed by the unconscious. Conscious access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others.
makes the currently salient, Douglas Hofstadter controlled the amount of attention a Workspace object in Copycat would receive from codelets via its salience. The more descriptions, analogous to geons, an object has and the more highly activated the nodes involved therein, the more important the object is. Modulating this tendency is any relative lack of connections from the object to the rest of the objects in the Workspace. Salience is a dynamic number that takes into account both these factors. In Smiley the instantaneous salience of a Workspace's objects is calculated by itsalience. In the brain salience is modeled by the salience networks.
aggregate object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas. available
to awareness. Attention is an unconscious filter that uses
the brain's current goals to select the most salient, Douglas Hofstadter controlled the amount of attention a Workspace object in Copycat would receive from codelets via its salience. The more descriptions, analogous to geons, an object has and the more highly activated the nodes involved therein, the more important the object is. Modulating this tendency is any relative lack of connections from the object to the rest of the objects in the Workspace. Salience is a dynamic number that takes into account both these factors. In Smiley the instantaneous salience of a Workspace's objects is calculated by itsalience. In the brain salience is modeled by the salience networks. unconscious
aggregate object. Attention depends on the brain being
vigilant.
Dehaene notes that with many unconscious processors and the
brain dividing up processing over Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time
self knowledge is no longer mysterious. A 'strange loop'
can be setup allowing a self-object defined by associations of
unconscious processors access to consciousness.
There are many experimental manipulations which create Bernard
Baars's minimal contrasts between unconscious and conscious
states. The attentional
blink is an experimental technique to create a minimal contrast between conscious and unconscious processing. A brief period of invisibility of an image is created by saturating the conscious mind with attention on letters within a stream of symbols which are mostly digits. A first letter is perceived. A second letter presented in close succession (100 milliseconds) is completely missed by conscious perception. The delay can be adjusted until 50% of the time the second letter is perceived allowing sensors to look at the differences in brain activity between the two minimally different situations. The blink is associated with an increase in pleasure inducing neural signals. Goleman & Davidson note that, after a three month vipassana meditation retreat, the blink time reduces 20% due to the neural response being more subdued. leverages attention's refractory period to mask a
second image. By adjusting the time that attention focuses
on the first item the second can be perceived 50% of the
time. This situation has no difference in the unconscious
processing of perceived and masked items. Any differences
must relate to the operation of consciousness.
Fathoming
unconscious depths
Dehaene explains that virtually all the brain's regions are
observed experimentally to participate in both conscious and
unconscious thought. This is contrary to earlier
philosophical and psychological proposals that separated the
brain into conscious and unconscious processing regions.
Subliminal priming flashes a subliminal word or picture, the prime, immediately before another visible item, the target. Experiments demonstrate that the presence of the subliminal prime speeds up conscious processing when the prime is represented consciously within a second of the initial showing.
speeds up the processing of the signal seen consciously.
The prime can be abstractly related to the conscious signal -
say red and RED indicating that the brain performs abstract
associations unconsciously. Chess masters who have over
learned chess positions can be primed by a single glance at a
realistic piece payout. Unconscious processes operate in
massive parallelism. Processing of dangerous signals by
the amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral. It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion. It connects strongly to attention focusing networks. It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes. It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors. During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning. It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required. Its central nucleus projects to the BNST. It signals the locus ceruleus. It directly signals area 25. The amygdala: - Promotes aggression. Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage. It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.
- Participates in disgust
- Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these. In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months. Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments).
- Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids. Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more.
- Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted. It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations. The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment. The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color. The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion. The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon.
- Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain.
- Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure.
- Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens. The amygdala turns off during orgasm.
- Uses but is not directly involved in vision.
is
performed extraordinarily quickly and unconsciously.
Blindsight is a condition induced by lesions in the primary visual cortex. It deprives sufferers of their concious vision and they behave as though blind. But they respond unconsciously to the objects that are no longer processed by consciousness. and spatial neglect is a characteristic of a form of right hemisphere brain damage, typically in the area of the inferior parietal lobe, which prevents the sufferer from attending consciously to the left side of space. While their conscious judgements and reports are significantly impaired these patients are not truely blind in the left visual field. Their retinas and early visual cortex are perfectly functional. are
other forms of experimentally demonstrable subliminal
priming. They allowed researchers to show that information
about the size, location and shape of objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas. was proceeding
unconsciously through the occipital of the cerebral cortex includes the primary visual cortex area V1. It performs early stages of visual analysis supporting recognition of shapes, colors and objects. and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex is at the back of the brain divided into two. It associates sensory signals of various modalities with: - Details about the location of the body: supramarginal gyrus; and
- Models interpreting touch, visual signals, language and mathematics.
.
High level models are able to contribute signals to the low
level processing chain.
The Mcgurk effect is an illusion, described by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, where a video shows a person speaking, and saying 'da da da da'. But on closing your eyes you hear what is being said as 'ba ba ba'. The illusion is generated by setting up conflicting signals: The mouth is moving to say 'ga'; while the sound is 'ba'. the brain resolves the conflict into a single intermediate percept 'da'. The illusion demonstrates how late in the processing chain and reconstructed our conscious experience is. Imaging indicates the illusion is constructud in the frontal lobes and or superior temporal sulcus and is then sent back to the early sensory regions.
demonstrates that multi-modal signal integration is performed
unconsciously. Imaging indicates the effect occurs in the
frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain. It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex. Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task. It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success. It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower. The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information. The frontal cortex tracks rules. Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity. Once it tires, responses become less prosocial. But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum. The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations. The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies. The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation. It does not complete development until the mid-20s. It includes spindle neurons. It is easily damaged. Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. and is
then sent back to the early sensory regions. It requires overlearning dedicates neurons to unconsciously recognizing a frequently experienced object. This automatic binding into dedicated brain circuits operates differently to the processing of a new sentence, which requires consciousness. .
Modeling occurs continuously with many interpretations built in
parallel which attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness.
samples. Once attention focuses elsewhere sampling
stops. The binding
of new words into a sentence uses a different
consciousness dependent process.
What is
Consciousness Good For?
Dehaene argues consciousness presents an instantaneous selection
of the current best fit of the salient, Douglas Hofstadter controlled the amount of attention a Workspace object in Copycat would receive from codelets via its salience. The more descriptions, analogous to geons, an object has and the more highly activated the nodes involved therein, the more important the object is. Modulating this tendency is any relative lack of connections from the object to the rest of the objects in the Workspace. Salience is a dynamic number that takes into account both these factors. In Smiley the instantaneous salience of a Workspace's objects is calculated by itsalience. In the brain salience is modeled by the salience networks. unconscious
models. He notes the brain's unconscious circuits appear
ideally organized for developing statistically accurate
inferences from sensory inputs. The massive parallel
modeling of sensory signals must use Bayesian statistics is an iterative form of statistics invented by Thomas Bayes. It uses a 'prior' statistic to represent the prior situation and then performs a calculation that integrates the probability of new events occurring into a 'posterior' probability. This posterior becomes the prior for the next iteration with the application of the Bayesian identity xpost = xprior*y/(xprior*y + z(1-xprior)). The magic in Bayesian statistics is in accurately generating the prior xprior and the current event probabilities y and z. R. A. Fischer was so skeptical of the legitimacy of the prior that he advocated an alternative statistical framework and experimental process. to
infer the most likely models from the ambiguous low level
inputs. Consciousness slowly samples from the alternatives
and over Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time can support global
feedback. Area MT is the middle temporal motion area MT (V5) located in the occipital lobe. It contains many neurons detecting motion. Each neuron suffers from aperture problems but consciousness resolves the ambiguity with a most likely current Bayesian sampling. The resolution takes time. Neuronal recordings show the inference may take a tenth of a second. In the meantime MT neurons see only local motion. Subsequently they encode the global direction. Subjective consciousness sees only the end result. The global resolution requires consciousness vanishing under anesthesia. Consciousness enables the iterative exchange of modeling results resulting in eventual agreement.
neurons, for example, suffer from aperture problems is the ambiguity introduced by sampling through a narrow peephole. It is impossible to resolve direction of motion of a item sampled through the peephole for example. ,
but with conscious support the models are slowly improved and
resolve to an inferred global best fit.
When the inputs are made ambiguous the unconscious reports
(primes) the alternatives with likelihoods and the conscious
brain presents each alternative for a duration corresponding to
the alternative's likelihood.
Dehaene notes that consciousness condenses the sensory signals,
removing gaps and ambiguities. He argues the output is
'compact enough' to be useful to working memory is a dominant function of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the areas it connects with. Prefrontal neurons implement an active memory continuing to fire after the signal is gone for potentially dozens of seconds from the inferior temporal cortex (multi-sensory integration area) and lower level sensory neurons characterized by Hubel & Weisel, while the short-term memory task continues. If the prefrontal cortex gets distracted the memory is lost from consciousness. Earl Miller argues the prefrontal cortex implements the rules that decide which working memory neurons will fire (Spring 2017). Working memory develops from childhood through the late teens, and depends on pyramidal neurons within the PFC. .
Lesions of the prefrontal
cortex (PFC) is - The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It evolved most recently. During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum. The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior. It regulates feelings. Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice. The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions. It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory. It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels. It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat. Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it. Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.
: hemineglect is the perturbed awareness of one half of space - typically the left side. ,
abulia is an incapacity to generate voluntary actions. , akinetic mutism is an inability to generate spontaneous verbal reports. Repetition is often still possible. , anosognosia is unawareness of a major deficit, including paralysis. , autonoetic memory is the ability to recall and analyse one's own thoughts.
impairment; result in planning deficiencies.
Consciousness
and learning over time
Dehaene argues that consciousness enables learning over Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time. Memory trace conditioning is an experimental procedure where there is an empty gap between the deliveries of a classical conditioning signal, a tone which precedes a puff of air streamed at a rabbit's eye. The procedure requires conscious access unlike the alternative delayed conditioning procedure.
experiments require the hippocampus is a part of the medial temporal lobe of the brain involved in the temporary storage or coding of long-term episodic memory. It includes the dentate gyrus. Memory formation in the cells of the hippocampus uses the MAP kinase signalling network which is impacted by sleep deprivation. The hippocampus dependent memory system is directly affected by cholinergic changes throughout the wake-sleep cycle. Increased acetylcholine during REM sleep promotes information attained during wakefulness to be stored in the hippocampus by suppressing previous excitatory connections while facilitating encoding without interference from previously stored information. During slow-wave sleep low levels of acetylcholine cause the release of the suppression and allow for spontaneous recovery of hippocampal neurons resulting in memory consolidation. It was initially associated with memory formation by McGill University's Dr. Brenda Milner, via studies of 'HM' Henry Molaison, whose medial temporal lobes had been surgically destroyed leaving him unable to create new explicit memories. The size of neurons' dendritic trees expands and contracts over a female rat's ovulatory cycle, with the peak in size and cognitive skills at the estrogen high point. Adult neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus (3% of neurons are replaced each month) where the new neurons integrate into preexisting circuits. It is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors explains Sapolsky. Prolonged stress makes the hippocampus atrophy. He notes the new neurons are essential for integrating new information into preexisting schemas -- learning that two things you thought were the same are actually different. Specific cells within the hippocampus and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer's disease. It directly signals area 25.
and prefrontal cortex. Dehaene writes the unconscious
operations generate decaying exponential signals.
Consciousness maintains its signals.
Experiments suggest two-step operations require conscious
support. He sees consciousness as analogous to a Turing machine, a machine specified by mathematician Alan Turing which is the blueprint for the electronic programmable computer. It consists of an infinite tape on which symbols can be written. A movable read/write tape head which can move about the tape and write on or read symbols from the tape. A set of rules that tell the head what to do next. .
It applies strategies in series. Intermediate results are
persisted in working memory and slowly dispatched to an army of
unconscious production rules. Dehaene concludes we can't
reason strategically on an unconscious hunch. It must
obtain conscious
access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. .
A social sharing
device
Consciousness is needed to communicate to others through
speech. Dehaene argues the compacted stream generated by
consciousness helps make communication via speech viable.
It's a multisensory, viewer invariant durable synthesis that
other minds will find useful. Dehaene notes that a
categorical answer accompanied by a valuation of confidence is
particularly useful for building collective decisions. The
brain uses the frontal pole and midline of the ventromedial (vmPFC) is: - Focused on the impact of emotion on decision making
- A participant in limbic system operations
- Many human behaviors involve interactions between the vmPFC, the limbic system & the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Part of decision making is for the limbic system to internally simulate (often with the help of the sympathetic nervous system) what alternative outcomes of a decision will feel like with the results of these somatic marker analyses being reported to the vmPFC.
- Damage to the vmPFC results in bad decision making: Poor judgement in choosing friends & partners, Failure to respond to negative feedback; because they can't feel the issues; and are overly controlled by the logical contribution of the DLPFC.
prefrontal cortex (PFC) is - The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It evolved most recently. During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum. The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior. It regulates feelings. Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice. The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions. It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory. It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels. It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat. Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it. Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.
,
along with the precunius and regions
at the junction is the temporoparietal juncture: left, right; where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, an area of the cortex with projections from the thalamus, limbic system, visual, auditory and somatosensory networks. It supports modeling of self and others. of the temporal of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe. and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex is at the back of the brain divided into two. It associates sensory signals of various modalities with: - Details about the location of the body: supramarginal gyrus; and
- Models interpreting touch, visual signals, language and mathematics.
to
perform these operations. Dehaene notes its a distributed
network with the prefrontal cortex as a central node.
He notes the frontal pole and venteromedial prefrontal cortex
encode our knowledge of our self and others. Dehaene
argues that our 'self' is just a database that gets filled in
through our social experiences, in the same format which we use
to understand others.
Dehaene concludes a key evolutionary step was to open the
workspace to others.
The
signatures of conscious thought
Four signatures of conscious access have been identified:
- Sudden ignition of the parietal of the cerebral cortex is at the back of the brain divided into two. It associates sensory signals of various modalities with:
- Details about the location of the body: supramarginal gyrus; and
- Models interpreting touch, visual signals, language and mathematics.
and prefrontal (PFC) is - The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It evolved most recently. During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum. The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior. It regulates feelings. Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice. The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions. It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory. It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels. It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat. Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it. Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.
circuits. MEG is magnetoencephalograthy the very precise recording of the miniscule magnetic waves that accompany the discharge of currents in cortical neurons. and EEG is electroencephalography, the recording of brain waves. With 256 electrodes it provides high-quality digital recordings of brain activity with millisecond resolution over the whole head. It tracks the time course of neural firing. It complements fMRI. MEG is considered analogous but even better. The awake brain emits a variety of frequencies classified in EEGs as alpha (8-13 hertz), beta (13 - 30 Hz), gamma (30 and higher) and theta (5 cycles a second). Visual stimuli result in enhanced gamma-band activity within 200 milliseconds. For consciously perceived stimuli it remained sustained while it died out over time for unseen masked stimuli. Theta band is used by the cortex for long distance messaging. of attentional blink is an experimental technique to create a minimal contrast between conscious and unconscious processing. A brief period of invisibility of an image is created by saturating the conscious mind with attention on letters within a stream of symbols which are mostly digits. A first letter is perceived. A second letter presented in close succession (100 milliseconds) is completely missed by conscious perception. The delay can be adjusted until 50% of the time the second letter is perceived allowing sensors to look at the differences in brain activity between the two minimally different situations. The blink is associated with an increase in pleasure inducing neural signals. Goleman & Davidson note that, after a three month vipassana meditation retreat, the blink time reduces 20% due to the neural response being more subdued.
situations record a series of waves: P1 at 100 ms then N1 at
170 ms, each progressing through the hierarchy of visual
areas. But a subsequent
- P3 is the third large positive neural wave in the processing chain of perception in the brain after stimulus is presented. It is specifically associated with conscious access, breaking through the barrier around the frontal and parietal networks. It starts around 270 milliseconds and peaks between 300 and 500 milliseconds. It appears to exclude further P3 waves limiting attention of further stimuli the longer it persists. It reflects the brain's global ignition.
wave only occurred for
perceived instances. And it was the presence of a P3
wave for the initial stream of letters that stopped the
development of a second P3 wave creating the attentional
blink. The signature shows that consciousness always
lags behind the This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which
supports the emergence of complex
adaptive systems (CAS). Kauffman describes the mechanism
by which the system expands across the space.
environment and
attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. increases
the delay. To cope we have unconscious mechanisms:
- Autopilots respond to low level sensory stimuli.
- Anticipation compensates for the sluggishness of our consciousness. Almost all sensory and motor areas contain temporal learning mechanisms that anticipate external events.
,
- Error
perception in the human brain is a two stage process: appraisal followed by ignition. Initially, during the first one-fifth of a second, the cortex reacts virtually identically to conscious and unconscious errors. An autopilot system in the cingulate gyrus notices that the motor plan does not unfold according to instructions and fires vigorously to signal the error--even when it remains unconscious. This initial brain response is fully unconscious. If the error becomes perceived consciously it correlates with a late strong positive wave (Pe) detectable on the top of the scalp which is virtually indistinguishable from P3 wave of conscious access.
;
- A late and sudden burst of high-frequency oscillations
Dehaene terms global
ignition is when the large pyramidal neurons in the upper layers of the cortex broadcast their excitation to a large audience of receiving neurons. Dehaene argues it occurs when broadcast excitation exceeds a threshold and becomes self-reinforcing. The brain is exhibiting a phase change. The neurons that are strongly connected burst into self-sustained state of high level activity. . Even when the signal was only to one
side of the visual
system supports processing of visual data into what and how. To do this it has two distinct paths: The ventral path and the dorsal path.
the global ignition reached into both
hemispheres. Epilepsy treatment requires deployment of
electrodes deep within the patient's brain. These
additional sensors indicated that gamma rhythms are observed as 40 Hz neural activity waves associated with conscious access. They link different brain regions during alignment and integration of emergent memories aggregated from models in different cortical regions: occipital, temporal, somatosensory, insula, olfactory; meshing 'images' of sight, smells, taste, feel and sound into a single experience. Yogi's gamma rhythms can last for over a minute, instead of the more typical fifth of a second explain Goleman and Davidson. are
amplified and persist for perceived signals but collapse for
unconscious ones.
- Synchronization of information exchanges across distant
brain regions. Dehaene argues synchronization (as
illustrated by Granger
causality analysis is a method invented by Clive Grainger to determine when two time series are related so that one may "cause" the other. ) facilitates the transmission of
information because neurons across the whole brain will be
ready at the same time to accept signals, back and forth
across the network, from one another.
Dehaene notes these signatures are not just indicators of attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. . They are
causal:
- They map to the high level consistent stable modelled
representations, such as cells in the posterior
cingulate (PCC) is a brain region where invariant-location cells dwell. It is closely connected to the parahippocampal gyrus. It activates during self-focused thought. University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mindfulness research director, Judson Brewer, sees the PCC participation in: distraction, wandering attention, thinking about ourselves, liking an immoral choice, feeling guilty, and craving. Its activation was reduced by mindfulness meditation explain Goleman & Davidson.
and the place cells are neurons which fire whenever a higher animal occupies a certain location in space. Place cells are highly invariant over a variety of sensory cues, and they even maintain their space-selective firing as the animal wanders around in full darkness. They encode where the animal thinks it is. And the same cells associate a time stamp with the memories. of the
parahippicampal
gyrus is a rich club hub next to the hippocampus and is where place cells reside. for example which model where an animal thinks
it is. Not the shifting sense data, processed by the primary
visual cortex is the visual gateway into the cortex. for example, from which they are
built. "I
detect Bill Clinton's model" neurons have been found
experimentally which correlate with the signatures!
And by use of TMS is transcranial magnetic stimulation uses a set of accumulators to suddenly deliver a strong electric current to a coil placed on top of the head. An induced magnetic field discharges at a target place in the cortex. Virtually any region of the cortex can be stimulated with precise timing.
experimenters showed
- These brain operations cause the conscious
perceptions. Researchers modified the high level
signals via TMS is transcranial magnetic stimulation uses a set of accumulators to suddenly deliver a strong electric current to a coil placed on top of the head. An induced magnetic field discharges at a target place in the cortex. Virtually any region of the cortex can be stimulated with precise timing.
and the
subjects reported changes in what they perceived. Disrupting
global ignition affected consciousness but left the
unconscious flows intact. Disrupting local closed
loops impacted unconscious and conscious processing.
- Consciousness requires the 'synchronization' flows.
Stimulation of a high level area, MT/V5 is visual cortex area 5 also called area MT. , generates a
perception but additional stimulation of the primary visual
cortex inhibits the perception by getting in the way of the
synchronization flows building the percept.
Dehaene writes that additional experimental tools: optogenetics is an experimental technique that drives neurons by light rather than synaptic transmission. The genes for light sensitive opsins are genetically engineered and then deployed via a viral vector into a higher animal's brain adding a new photoreceptor to the brain's toolkit. The opsin integration allows laser targeting of specific neurons and millisecond precision to selectively activate or inhibit brain circuits. The tool supports a vision of reading all the neurons in a brain, to allow mapping of all the connections. and brain-computer
interfaces use custom silicon chips with thousands of electrodes can be implanted in the cortex of experimental animals to increase the bandwidth of connections between the brains and researchers' computers. will support further advances in understanding
of how brain operations generate perceptions.
Dehaene's
global neuronal workspace
Dehaene has built upon prior theories of consciousness to
develop his 'global neuronal workspace'. He views this as
a global information broadcasting, amplifying and flexible
routing system within the cortex includes the paleocortex a thin sheet of cells that mostly process smell, archicortex and the neocortex. The cerebral cortex is a pair of large folded sheets of brain tissue, one on either side of the top of the head connected by the corpus callosum. It includes the occipital, parietal, temporal and frontal lobes. . It
arises from a neural network tasked with massive sharing
throughout the brain.
Dehaene argues the architecture explains how ideas become
incorporated into future plans. The global neuronal
workspace is implemented by a special set of neurons - giant pyramidal cells are critical to the function of working memory. They also support global ignition. Well-functioning pyramidal cells will have extensive dendritic spine outgrowth. Kandel explains that these spines begin to form in the third trimester of pregnancy and they and the number of synapses on them expand rapidly for the first few years of life. Starting at puberty, synaptic pruning removes dendritic spines that are not being used. The pruning is most active during adolescence.
with long axons, a long extension of a neuron which has a membrane constructed to support the uni-directional flow of action potential from the dendritic tree and cell body to the synaptic terminals. and immense
dendrites with specialized spines - that criss-cross the cortex
into an integrated whole. He notes it provides an internal
space for thought experiments detached from the external
world. Information can be passed flexibly to other mental
processes within the brain. And using language it can be
reported to others.
He argues the global neuronal workspace thus removes the need
for Cartesian dualism is an assumed separation of the mind and body. It has a long history. Descartes's Cartesian dualism assumes the mind and body are two clocks in synchrony but otherwise unrelated. John Locke commented 'It is impossible to conceive that matter, either with or without motion, could have, originally, in and from itself, sense, perception, and knowledge; as is evident from hence, that then sense, perception, and knowledge, must be a property eternally separable from matter and every particle of it.' Chalmers describes this explanatory gap as the hard problem of consciousness. Damasio explains that the construction of feelings requires there be no duality, and he shows how it then emerged due to the structure of affect in humans. .
The
ultimate test of consciousness science
Dehaene relates how the research program has changed our
understanding of coma and related medical problems. Locked-in syndrome describes a person who is conscious but because of brain stem damage became unable to control his body. Only the eyes remain integrated with the brain.
was impossible to diagnose until recently. That left
sufferers waiting for months totally isolated until a loved one is an emotion, which generates a feeling of pleasure at a genetic relative's well-being and pain in their harm. An inseminated human female is genetically a full relative of her partner since she carries his germ-line gametes. From any of their pooled gene's perspective the offspring have a one-in-two chance of including the specific gene. Hence love supports kin selection driven by the selfish actions of genes. Emotions, including love and anger, help drive the interactions between people. Compassionate love also supports the symbiotic partnership of true friends built on fairness and trust. Sapolsky notes the opposite of love is indifference, not hate. The amygdala's projection into the locus ceruleus drives autonomic intensity. highlighted the life are emotions that are induced in response to other people's signals, are implemented by specific brain regions including: Prefrontal cortex, Insula cortex, Anterior cingulate cortex, Amygdala; receive lots of projections from interoceptive networks. Sapolsky asserts in the moments just before we prioritize a consequential act the process is less rational and autonomous than we assume. There are many significant signals from the prior seconds to minutes that effect social emotions: - Our brains respond subliminally to skin color very quickly: Amygdala activates, Fusiform face area activates; prior to the conscious stream activating the anterior cingulate and DLPFC which then inhibit the amygdala.
- Social dominance is culture independent and accurately subliminally assessed after a 40-millisecond exposure. Stable status relations activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and DLPFC, while a dynamic situation also activates the amygdala.
- People who are subliminally judged attractive by the medial orbitofrontal cortex are considered kinder, smarter and more honest. They are given more breaks.
- Faces and eyes in particular are most important subliminal cues. They are monitored by the fusiform. People respond more appropriately under the subliminal influence of eyes.
- Olfactory sensors send more direct projections to the limbic network than other sensory networks. Pheromones signal fear activating the amygdala.
- Observing pain responses in others results in empathy even among young children.
- Words are important emotional signals providing unconscious priming of social responses. Kahneman & Tversky demonstrated how the phrase '95% survival rate' is found to be a more acceptable choice than '5% death rate'. Sapolsky notes that prosocial word priming fosters cooperation with antisocial word priming doing the opposite.
- Cultural objects such as visible: flags, team badges; subliminally modify in-group outgroup decisions.
- The presence of women in a situation alters the responses of men: Increased risk-taking, more focus on luxuries, increased aggression; in circumstances where conflict is already encouraged but not when status is achieved prosocially.
- Physical environment shapes behavior as demonstrated by Philip Zimbardo and leveraged in broken windows policing.
- Bodily adjustments to sensory structures introduce adaptive complexity, with the brain being influenced to become more sensitive and alter the sensor networks to make some more sensitive. But these adaptations also vary culturally. Collectivist cultures focus on a visual scene's surrounding contextual information while people from individualistic cultures focus on the focal object!
in their eyes is a region of the brain which supports advanced mechanisms of shape recognition and implements the early stages of reading. Subliminal priming with words did not depend on the shape of the word. The fusiform gyrus was able to process the abstract identity of a word without caring if it was upper or lower case. While high up in the cortex it can operate below the level of conscious experience. It contributes to social emotions with: - Its face area being more activated by faces with in-group skin color.
- It activating when shown pictures of cars in automobile aficionados.
- It activating when shown pictures of birds in birdwatchers; since it really recognizes examples of items from an individual's emotionally salient categories.
.
It was similarly difficult to identify if a brain damaged
individual in a vegetative state was conscious. Now the
research tools: fMRI is functional magnetic resonance imaging. Seiji Ogawa leveraged the coupling of neuronal circuit activity and blood flow through the associated glial cells to build a 3 dimensional picture of brain cell activity. As haemoglobin gives up its oxygen to support the neural activity it becomes magnetic and acts as a signal detected by the fMRI. fMRI easily visualizes the state of activity in the living human brain at millimeter resolution, up to several times a second but it cannot track the time course of neural firing so it is augmented with EEG. , MEG is magnetoencephalograthy the very precise recording of the miniscule magnetic waves that accompany the discharge of currents in cortical neurons. and EEG is electroencephalography, the recording of brain waves. With 256 electrodes it provides high-quality digital recordings of brain activity with millisecond resolution over the whole head. It tracks the time course of neural firing. It complements fMRI. MEG is considered analogous but even better. The awake brain emits a variety of frequencies classified in EEGs as alpha (8-13 hertz), beta (13 - 30 Hz), gamma (30 and higher) and theta (5 cycles a second). Visual stimuli result in enhanced gamma-band activity within 200 milliseconds. For consciously perceived stimuli it remained sustained while it died out over time for unseen masked stimuli. Theta band is used by the cortex for long distance messaging. ; used with tests such as local-global detects conscious access. It consists of presenting repeatedly, many times, an identical sequence of five sounds. When the last sound differs from the first four, unconscous auditory areas react with a 'mismatch response'. Consciously the brain quickly adapts to the repeating melody. After adaptation, it is the absence of the final novelty that triggers a response to novelty. This higher-order response seems to exist only in conscious patients and is associated with Dehaene's signatures of consciousness. can
detect conscious
signatures.
The program has also provided an improved understanding of
coma. The frontal
cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the front of the brain. It includes the: prefrontal cortex, motor cortex. Sapolsky asserts it makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. The frontal cortex supports working memory to sustain focus on a task. It also coordinates the strategic actions necessary to achieve success. It provides impulse control, regulation of emotion, and willpower. The prefrontal cortex maintains focus by deprioritizing currently irrelevant streams of information. The frontal cortex tracks rules. Over a lifetime, that builds into a costly activity. Once it tires, responses become less prosocial. But practice shifts operation of tasks to the cerebellum. The frontal cortex signals the tegmentum and accumbens with the conclusions of its expectancy/discrepancy calculations. The frontal lobe provides executive function, considering bits of information, assessing patterns and then prioritizing the strategies. The frontal lobe is the most recent part of the brain to evolve and involves a disproportionate percentage of primate-unique genes in its development and operation. It does not complete development until the mid-20s. It includes spindle neurons. It is easily damaged. Sapolsky (Nauta) notes that its ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a quasi-member of the limbic system. , striatum (basal ganglia) is a brain region, including the nucleus accumbens, which is important in learning motor habits, including addictions. To do this the ventral striatum assigns values to winning. ,
pallidum has two parts: the dorsal globus pallidus and the ventral pallidum involved in the planning and inhibition of movements. and thalamus has all the main inputs to the cortex passing through it. It is massively supplied with return innervations from the cortical regions it routes too. It does not stand on the route of the main exits from the cortex. The parafascicular nucleus of the rat thalamus contains relatively high levels of D5 dopamine receptors. For human vision the primary system connects to the neocortex via, a small part of the thalamus, the LGN. operate in a
closed loop that allows the brain state to move between sleep facilitates salient memory formation and removal of non-salient memories. The five different stages of the nightly sleep cycles support different aspects of memory formation. The sleep stages follow Pre-sleep and include: Stage one characterized by light sleep and lasting 10 minutes, Stage two where theta waves and sleep spindles occur, Stage three and Stage four together represent deep slow-wave sleep (SWS) with delta waves, Stage five is REM sleep; sleep cycles last between 90-110 minutes each and as the night progresses SWS times reduce and REM times increase. Sleep includes the operation of synapse synthesis and maintenance through DNA based activity including membrane trafficking, synaptic vesicle recycling, myelin structural protein formation and cholesterol and protein synthesis. Sleep also controls inflammation (Jan 2019) Sleep deprivation undermines the thalamus & nucleus accumbens management of pain. , vigilance is the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep or wake up. For Goleman & Davidson it also reflects maintaining a constant level of attention as time goes on, through controlling habituation. Their vigilance includes alerting - being ready to respond to whatever is encountered. and
consciousness. The neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a: - Receptive element - dendrites
- Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
- Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.
of the striatum are easily damaged. Once they stop
constraining the pallidum it becomes free to inhibit the
thalamus and consequently the frontal cortex.
Understanding the mechanism it is hoped to be able to
functionally replace the damaged striatum to kick the vegetative
patient back into consciousness.
Dehaene notes that medical innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
must still occur to allow general hospital
doctors to detect consciousness diagnostically.
Dehaene's
future of consciousness
Dehaene uses the techniques and theoretical architecture he has
described to resolve a variety of questions about consciousness:
- When do babies become conscious? - While they cannot speak
babies respond to Dehaene's research protocols. They
respond to the auditory local-global test detects conscious access. It consists of presenting repeatedly, many times, an identical sequence of five sounds. When the last sound differs from the first four, unconscous auditory areas react with a 'mismatch response'. Consciously the brain quickly adapts to the repeating melody. After adaptation, it is the absence of the final novelty that triggers a response to novelty. This higher-order response seems to exist only in conscious patients and is associated with Dehaene's signatures of consciousness.
and their whole
cortex includes the paleocortex a thin sheet of cells that mostly process smell, archicortex and the neocortex. The cerebral cortex is a pair of large folded sheets of brain tissue, one on either side of the top of the head connected by the corpus callosum. It includes the occipital, parietal, temporal and frontal lobes.
responds actively to language. And they
demonstrate global
ignition is when the large pyramidal neurons in the upper layers of the cortex broadcast their excitation to a large audience of receiving neurons. Dehaene argues it occurs when broadcast excitation exceeds a threshold and becomes self-reinforcing. The brain is exhibiting a phase change. The neurons that are strongly connected burst into self-sustained state of high level activity. during the perceived 50% of visually masked
faces (analog of the attentional blink is an experimental technique to create a minimal contrast between conscious and unconscious processing. A brief period of invisibility of an image is created by saturating the conscious mind with attention on letters within a stream of symbols which are mostly digits. A first letter is perceived. A second letter presented in close succession (100 milliseconds) is completely missed by conscious perception. The delay can be adjusted until 50% of the time the second letter is perceived allowing sensors to look at the differences in brain activity between the two minimally different situations. The blink is associated with an increase in pleasure inducing neural signals. Goleman & Davidson note that, after a three month vipassana meditation retreat, the blink time reduces 20% due to the neural response being more subdued. ).
They appear to have conscious access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others.
but everything operates two to three times slower than in
adults as would be expected since many of their neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a: - Receptive element - dendrites
- Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
- Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.
have not become
myelinated is the fatty insulating material deployed by Schwann cells & oligodendrocytes, both types of glial cells, around axons to improve their conduction rate. In humans it is still occurring 25 years after birth. It has great impact on long axons, in neurons that project over long distances, where it helps brain inter-region signalling. The long development time of myelination allows for the later myelinated brain regions to be particularly shaped by the proximate environment. yet.
- Conscious animals? - Monkeys can't talk but they can be
trained to signal 'did' or 'did not' with a keyboard and so
report binocular
rivalry is a visual illusion caused by presenting each eye with a different image. Consciously we perceive alternately one of the images and then the other. It was first discovered by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838. Logothetis & Schall found some neurons respond to the physical image. Other neurons respond to the representation of it, which requires memory. Logothetis & Schall subsequently found the number of neurons attuned to representations increases further up the visual processing chain.
, local-global detects conscious access. It consists of presenting repeatedly, many times, an identical sequence of five sounds. When the last sound differs from the first four, unconscous auditory areas react with a 'mismatch response'. Consciously the brain quickly adapts to the repeating melody. After adaptation, it is the absence of the final novelty that triggers a response to novelty. This higher-order response seems to exist only in conscious patients and is associated with Dehaene's signatures of consciousness.
detection, masking and with appropriate lesions of the primary
visual cortex is the visual gateway into the cortex. show blindsight is a condition induced by lesions in the primary visual cortex. It deprives sufferers of their concious vision and they behave as though blind. But they respond unconsciously to the objects that are no longer processed by consciousness. .
Dehaene notes that Macaques generalize the did or did not
signal from a sensory test to a memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected. test illustrating
that they have enough self-consciousness to ponder the prior
memory for several seconds with the parietal of the cerebral cortex is at the back of the brain divided into two. It associates sensory signals of various modalities with: - Details about the location of the body: supramarginal gyrus; and
- Models interpreting touch, visual signals, language and mathematics.
and prefrontal (PFC) is - The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It evolved most recently. During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum. The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior. It regulates feelings. Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice. The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions. It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory. It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels. It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat. Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it. Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.
lobes and then map it to the new scenario.
- Diseases of consciousness? - Dehaene notes that key
features of schizophrenia is a chronic, psychotic, brain disorder impacting thinking and decision making that affects 1.1 percent of the adult U.S. population. It is characterized by hallucinations, delusions: paranoid, feel they are being sent special messages, feel have special powers; disorganized and unusual thinking, social withdrawal, lack of motivation and cognitive decline: executive functions & working memory; that begins with the first episode and continues throughout life. Children who eventually struggle with schizophrenia have normal working memory at age seven but are found with impairments by age 13. MRIs show that people with schizophrenia have lateral ventricles that are enlarged, a thinner cerebral cortex and smaller hippocampus. The default mode network is disrupted. It seems to be caused by over pruning of prefrontal cortex pyramidal neurons (Jan 2016), hippocampal pyramidal cells and sometimes thalamus neuron dendrites. A dopaminergic network is impacted: mesolimbic; suggesting too much dopamine signalling. Columbia University psychiatrist Franz Kallman found that a person with schizophrenia is much more likely, than non sufferers, to have a parent or sibling with the disorder. And identical twins are even more likely to share the disorder. Swedish researchers studying thousands of families in 2009 showed a strong hereditary link between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which was corroborated in 2012. Many of the genes associated with schizophrenia act on the developing fetal brain. MHC C4 gene supports immunity and synaptic pruning where it tags the synapses to be pruned. Variant C4-A is associated with schizophrenia where too many synapses are tagged. DISC1 translocation mutations have greatly increased the risk of schizophrenia. DISC1 supports the migration of neurons during development. There is evidence that some cases occur because of particular CNVs in the DNA of the sufferers: ZNF804A. Autism and schizophrenia risk increases with one particular chromosome 7 CNV. And de Novo mutations increase the risk. Treatments include: psychotherapy, chlorpromazine which blocks dopamine receptors of the mesolimbic pathway removing 'positive' characteristics of schizophrenia but it also impacts the nigrostriatal pathway target receptors inducing Parkinson's disease like symptoms;
can be explained via damage to the long distance network
that provides global synchronization for unconscious
modelling.
- Conscious machines? -
Dehaene views his global neuronal
workspace and many special-purpose programs operating
in parallel with inputs from within the system as a good
foundation for a conscious computer. He sees current
computers as lacking: flexible communications, plasticity in computer programs is the ability to learn as they operate according to Dehaene. and autonomy is decision making based on careful weighting of the pros and cons before committing to a course of action according to Dehaene. . He
sees no logical reason why computers can't reflect the
architecture of our brains. He adds "it is the brain's
dynamics which embed its present inputs into a tapestry of
past memories and future goals, adding a layer of personal
experience to raw sensory inputs."
CAS
constraints on consciousness
Complex adaptive system This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
(CAS) theory
applies directly to both the architecture and operation of the
brain and the scientific approach Dehaene describes.
Dehaene notes
how Francis Crick and Cristian Koch highlighted
the opportunity to use psychological
factors to overcome the powerful This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
phenotypic
alignment constraints
on researching consciousness. Crick and Koch were This page looks at how scenarios allow people to relate to the
possible evolution of the business and its products and
services. The Long view process is highlighted.
Value based customer
segmentation is reviewed. Keirsey's psychological
categorization and 'crossing
the chasm' are highlighted.
Three alternate systems are framed as long view scenarios (1)
development of a billing
mediation business, (2) development of the Grameen Bank the
first micro loan bank and (3) some classic chess games.
Some of the scenarios will be referenced in the SWOT and planning
pages of this frame. In particular the complex adaptive
system (CAS) goals used will be
referenced by the planning pages schemetic
goals.
deeply involved in the research program,
advancing To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible. Being
sensitive to environmental signals
agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their
competitors.
flexibly from the Strategy gives way to tactics.
If you your company or other emergent
system collapse
there is no further possibility of strategic action. This
page discusses the importance of sustaining the base of
operations to support subsequent strategic action.
firm base of biochemistry, molecular
biology and the psychology of seeing, towards the This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the
dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
central battleground. Dehaene
and others were able to leverage the opened
lines.
The revealing experimental approach described by Dehaene
characterizes conscious
access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. . Dehaene associates the P3 is the third large positive neural wave in the processing chain of perception in the brain after stimulus is presented. It is specifically associated with conscious access, breaking through the barrier around the frontal and parietal networks. It starts around 270 milliseconds and peaks between 300 and 500 milliseconds. It appears to exclude further P3 waves limiting attention of further stimuli the longer it persists. It reflects the brain's global ignition. wave as a signpost of conscious access is, argues Stanislas Dehaene, when some attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others. .
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
Emergent This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolution
constrains our forebears to be coherent and competitive.
Some mechanism was facilitating the global coordination and
planning needed to operate and compete however rudimentary the
mechanism was. Dehaene shows that access to the neocortex is the main part of the cerebral cortex in mammals. It was originally thought to exist only in mammals but is also present in reptiles and birds buried behind other areas of the for-brain. The for-brain develops based on a genetic plan consistent across all vertebrates. The neocortex processes vision in the visual hierarchy V1, V2, V3 .. V5 ... V20; and language with areas including Wernicke's and Broca's with sensors in the inner ear. Primate species with bigger social groups have larger cortices. Human cortex size suggests traditional human cultures had an average size of 150 people. is important
for awareness in his experimental scenarios. We wonder do
emotional signals such as fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
inducing pictures of snakes, or sexually charged material also
enter consciousness through the same route. Do the fast
routes to the older superior colliculi are a pair of structures at the top of the brain stem that contribute to the visual system. They are called the optic tecta in lower vertebrates. In mammals and especially primates much of this visual processing operates in the neocortex. The superior colliculi in mammals still support eye movement, including involuntary eye movements. Neurons in the superior colluculus code the location of auditory stimuli in eye-centered reference frame.
have an impact? If not why don't they?
We assume the encoding of memetic Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
schemata
in the brain will strategically resemble other schematic
representations. Schematic attributes will allow Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic
operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.
The nature of the operations is described.
genetic operations to proceed. Neuronal, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a: - Receptive element - dendrites
- Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
- Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.
agents should be
able to use the memetic structures to support state
representation, and The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
model and Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.
This page reviews how these events become signals associated
with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS signals emerge from
the Darwinian information
model. Signals can indicate decision
summaries and level of uncertainty.
signal generation. The long term
representations may be prion is a protein with the unusual property of having two highly stable configurations. DNA generally encodes only one of the stable configurations of the prion. The other form once present converts the rest of the local prion to its configuration which is very stable. The generation of prions and their configuration shifts are used by neurons to represent long term state.
based.
A minor point of confusion arises from a difference between our
view (functionalist
following Fodor) and Dehaenes regarding phenomena. Dehaene
appears to be a reductionist
who views epiphenomena as correlates that do not truly represent
experimental variables. This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
Emergence
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and
the emergence of agents.
suggests that all high level
variables are epiphenomena
modeling underlying phenomena in aggregate.
As Dehaene makes clear neuronal models can be quite
abstract. CAS development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
constraints additionally require that only very low level epiphenomena can be
directly genetically encoded. Most other aspects must be
modelled based on associations between these epiphenomena based
building blocks and internal positional structures, connections
and local signals. Further the neurons must use local
positional signalling, and glial tracks support neurons: Creating the initial structural tracks along which the neurons travel, Insulating them by deploying the myelin sheath - an activity which is influenced by sleep, Storing energy for them and removing debris from damage to neurons. Robert Sapolsky notes Glial cells outnumber neurons ten to one. They include various subtypes. They greatly influence how neurons speak to one another, and also form glial networks that communicate completely differently from neurons. to define
how they differentiate during development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. . Once
in position they can represent associations based on neuronal
transmissions in local models. As such evolution can over
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time associate critical high level object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.
multi-modal experiences with particular structural
addresses.
Network wide state representations in CAS are often
necessary. The second messenger, provide an amplified form of signals within a cell. Since cells need to stabilize their overall state with many operations happening in parallel second messengers are useful in clarifying the signals effect. The second messenger strategy is seen repeatedly in CAS including: neuro-transmitter guidance signals such as dopamine distribution in the brain, corporate positioning email messages in response to new situations, newspaper articles aligning the population;
can be seen to provide this facility at the level of cellular
agents (enzymes, a protein with a structure which allows it to operate as a chemical catalyst and a control switch. ).
Dehaene's mechanism of brain wide state
coherence seems analogous. Indeed it does not seem
dissimilar to the method used by UK
ministers to coherently represent the aggregate views of their
various constituencies.
Learning
must involve gathering of signals from the This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which
supports the emergence of complex
adaptive systems (CAS). Kauffman describes the mechanism
by which the system expands across the space.
environment that can be later used as
flags. But which inputs from the environment are worth
recording? Dehaene shows consciousness involved with
associating relevance with the stream of signals that are
reviewed during sleep. Most are abandoned but the loudest
get represented in longer term memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected.
agents.
Dehaene argues the self is a
database of representations built from our social experiences.
CAS The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
learning models suggest that the
self must be used to bootstrap the process. Subsequently This page discusses the interdependence of perception and
representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter
and Mitchell's research with Copycat is
reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well
known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed
as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and
abstractly.
perception and representation must go
hand in hand.
In our understanding of Dehaene's global neuronal
workspace it seems inconsistent with the neuron, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a: - Receptive element - dendrites
- Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
- Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.
based agent This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex
adaptive system (CAS). Small
world and scale free networks are considered.
networks we see setup during the
brain's development
and the subsequent operational formation and destruction of
neurons and connections. In both Dehaene and our
architectures Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agents use The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
models to describe their The complex adaptive system (CAS)
nature of a value delivery system is first introduced. It's a network
of agents acting as relays.
The critical nature of hub agents and the difficulty of altering
an aligned network is reviewed.
The nature of and exceptional opportunities created by platforms are discussed.
Finally an example of aligning a VDS is presented.
environment. But we think a Von Neumann, John was a brilliant Hungarian mathematician who published the earliest paper specifying architecture for digital computing. It ensured this computing architecture was not patentable. The architecture has a central processing unit (CPU), random access storage addressable by the CPU and a sequencer. The architecture encourages a serial software architecture that matches the logic of the sequencer and processing operations on program and data. Von Neumann, his history, computing architecture and some alternative architectures are reviewed by Melanie Mitchell. computer
architecture he uses as the processing analog where routing is
necessary to move data between storage and the processing units
is not appropriate. Dehaene's addition of plasticity in computer programs is the ability to learn as they operate according to Dehaene. and autonomy is decision making based on careful weighting of the pros and cons before committing to a course of action according to Dehaene. highlights the
issue. Emergent systems have to solve these problems close
to the point of emergence. Hence the architecture must
have a fundamental ability to The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
model and
learn (based on the Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
schematic plan)
and to action the plan and its changes (the Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agent architecture). This presentation applies complex adaptive system (CAS) agents to computer
programming.
Smiley, and we assume the brain's
associative networks must be based on:
In such architectures a key difficulty for the cooperating
agents is in representing state and sharing it coherently.
Information
must This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emerge associatively from the
modelling agents' outputs driven by the current distributed
'state' of the neural network of agents and the diverse
multi-modal sensory signals. Speed will force competing
systems to introduce Representing state in emergent entities is essential but
difficult. Various structures are used to enhance the rate
and scope of state transitions. Examples are
discussed.
structurally
enhanced state. It is possible that a Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
schematic structure will be identified
that allows representation of Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
memes
and enables [epi] Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic
operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.
The nature of the operations is described.
genetic operations
to be performed. Otherwise evolution must work through the
cell's genetic structures alone.
'Consciousness and the Brain' reveals key aspects of what we
are. It is packed with insightful details to justify
Dehaene's conclusions. Descartes would be impressed!
.
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