Conscious access
This page describes the organizational forces that limit change.  It explains how to overcome them when necessary. 

Power& tradition holding back progress
This page uses an example to illustrate how:
  • A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
  • Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence. 
  • A program approach can ensure strategic alignment. 
Be responsive to market dynamics
This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user. 
The constraints are described. 
The techniques to overcome them are implied. 
Overcome reactionaries
This web frame explores very significant example real world complex adaptive systems (CAS).  It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.  By understanding these summaries you can better frame the interdependencies of important events such as war in Iraq, new iPhone releases or a cancer diagnosis and see how they are impacting you. 

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:
  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
  3. 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 complexity and problems of the US Health 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;
  • 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. 
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
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 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
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
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
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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:
  1. Our capacity to report thoughts using speech. 
  2. 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.   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.   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:
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 therin, 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.   aggregate object 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 therin, 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.   unconscious aggregate object.  Attention depends on the brain being vigilant. 

Dehaene notes that with many unconscious processors and the brain dividing up processing over 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. 
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 from the insula cortex.  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.  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.  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.  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. 
  • 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 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 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 focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information.  Attention uses valuations assigned to each potential object of thought by the basal ganglia. 
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 therin, 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.   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 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). 
.  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.  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 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 brain involved in the temporary storage or coding of long-term episodic memory.  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 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. 
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. 
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.  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, 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 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:
  1. 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 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.  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. 
    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
  2. 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 environment and attention is the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information.  Attention uses valuations assigned to each potential object of thought by the basal ganglia. 
    increases the delay.  To cope we have unconscious mechanisms:
    1. Autopilots respond to low level sensory stimuli. 
    2. Anticipation compensates for the sluggishness of our consciousness.  Almost all sensory and motor areas contain temporal learning mechanisms that anticipate external events.  ,
    3. 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. 
      ;
  3. 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 amplified and persist for perceived signals but collapse for unconscious ones. 
  4. 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 focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information.  Attention uses valuations assigned to each potential object of thought by the basal ganglia. 
.  They are causal:
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 an 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. 
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 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.  . 

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 which is important in learning motor habits.  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. 
, vigilance is the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep or wake up.   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
  • 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.  While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity and supporting the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can drive their 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:


CAS constraints on consciousness
Complex adaptive system
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory is positioned relative to the natural sciences.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. 
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).  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 amydala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. 
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
  • 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.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
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).  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 time associate critical high level object 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 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 (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb noted that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening.  This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP.  The non-realtime 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.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
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. 
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
  • 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.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
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 architecture 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.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
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).  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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This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
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This page uses an example to illustrate how:
  • A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
  • Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence. 
  • A program approach can ensure strategic alignment. 
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