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We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our
understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the
African savanna.
As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact
the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend
them. So this web frame
explores significant real world complex
adaptive systems (CAS):
- Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the
wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of
stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and
retirement savings of the working class. The
assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
- The US nation was built
from two divergent political
views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also
reflects the development
of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and
Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall
Street into a position of power, while the middle and
working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing
financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions
helped hide the shift.
- Most US health care is still
operating the way cars built in the 1940s did.
Geisinger is an example of better solution. But
transforming the whole network is a challenge. And
public health investment has proved far more
beneficial.
- Helping our children learn to be
effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have
created a robust but deeply flawed education system.
Better alternatives have emerged.
- Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our
good ideas to
become a second genetic material.
- The emergence
of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent
development;
It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all
have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and
explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It
outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.
Example systems frame |
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and
manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these
systems can have disastrous consequences for their human
managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties
psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental
strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage
CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
- Effective iterative planning and
- Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he
reviews.
Complexity catastrophes |
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to
date and explains how the two systems can coexist most
effectively.
Adaptive ecology |
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President
Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and
energy goals.
US vds alignment |
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite
and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly
executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their
successful strategy used the credibility of conservative
religious leaders to:
- Demonstrate religious issues
with the New Deal.
- Integrate the corporate
elite and evangelicals.
- Use the power of corporate
advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American
people to view the US as historically religious and
the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious
socialism.
- Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham.
- Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower.
- Add religious elements to
mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
- Push for prayer in
public school
- Push Congress to promote prayer
- Make elections more
about religious positions.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends
on persistence.
Inventing Christian America |
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
Financial WMD |
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic
alignment of the American justice system. The result
he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into
resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as
it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a
potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to
extract profits and leave the victim deflated.
Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the:
activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes,
prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are:
Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare
recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the
justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and
responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to
win.
Aligned justice |
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of
staff.
Mechanics of power |
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and
libertarianism.
Libertarianism |
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their
organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs.
He promotes strategies
that help OKR success: Focus,
Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance
reviews, and provides illustrative success
stories.
Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's
view that employees are adaptive and will
respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them
framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture
is tailored for the startups KPCB
invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all
CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the
association to planning.
Startup PDCA |
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take
hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces
including famine and
oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured
that thoughtful leaders
were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the
crisis.
Voltaire's disruptive network |
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges
during the enlightenment.
It was a poem
encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a
humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and
reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the
foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms
are discussed.
Constraining happiness |
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of
web services to explore Ada
Lovelace's ideas about thinking
machines and poetic
science. He highlights the value of computer
augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to
fulfill the process.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and
collaboration are discussed.
Arts technology & intelligence |
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of
consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on
the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he
describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the
potential and challenges of associative neural
networks.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the
additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling
evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that
Haikonen's neural
architecture, Smiley's Copycat
architecture and molecular biology's intracellular
architecture leverage the same associative properties.
Associatively integrated robots |
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Developing ideas |
A government sanctioned monopoly
supported the construction of a superorganism
American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Within this
Bell Labs was at the center of three networks:
- The evolving global scientific
network.
- The Bell telephone network. And
- The military
industrial network deploying 'fire and missile
control' systems.
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation
engine.
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing
ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent
opposition and enable the creation and growth of new
ideas.
Once the monopoly was
dismantled, AT&T disrupted.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are
discussed.
Strategic innovation |
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of
BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory and
reviewed.
BREXIT |
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google
are monopolists that
trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues
should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle
class.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments
assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).
While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts
with relevant CAS history and theory.
Monopoly job killers |
The IPO of Netscape is
defined as the key emergent event of
the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary
of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.
New economy |
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of
rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was
enabled by the experience of Keynes
and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard,
the necessity of improving
the situation between the wars and the opportunity created
by the catastrophe of the Second
World War.
He describes how it was planned
and developed. How it
emerged from the summit.
And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy.
Like all plans there are
mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as
best it could.
And then Conway describes the period after
Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed
and also compares the relative performance of the various
periods before during and after Bretton Woods.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS)
theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and
infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.
He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and
against the development
and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a
key piece of the history of our global economic CAS.
Bretton woods |
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008
housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential
mortgage value delivery system (VDS)
by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS
was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one
incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.
Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Housing amplifiers |
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Derivative systems |
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt
provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as
creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate
different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the
eighteenth century administrations of England and France.
The US embodies two different political and economic systems which
approach the national debt differently:
- Taxes to support a sinking
fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in:
Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social
programs; Starting with Hamilton,
Lincoln & Chase,
Wilson, FDR;
- Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by
individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison,
Reagan,
George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US
government does. They argue that the conflicting
sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in
the middle' with a future problem.
And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help
assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the
future.
They conclude the question is still political. They hope
it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed
explanations. They ask who is willing to
push all the coming risk onto individuals.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery
system, key CAS features are highlighted.
National debt |
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
American growth |
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of
money based on the attractive features of precious metals.
He compares the potential for government edicts to create money
but sees them as lacking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that
precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.
Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
- Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy
transaction intermediates and
- Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in
supporting survival and replication in the currently
accessible niches.
Emergence of money |
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith
developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do
this he replaces traditional
economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an
economy is a system in
equilibrium, with complexity
economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex
adaptive system (CAS).
He introduces Sugerscape
to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he
explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics,
Agents, Networks, Emergence, and
Evolution.
Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to
the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces
map strategies to instances of physical and
social
technologies. And he identifies the interactors and
selection mechanism of economic
evolution.
This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition
of wealth.
In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of
adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance,
& Politics
& Policy.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions
and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we
leverage.
Economic complexity |
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the
growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and
their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global
commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for
the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land
and labor to work it including slaves.
He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for
industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of
the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly
copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized
cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to
operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages
and the ways found to
mobilize industrial labor.
Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton
CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.
Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all
prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when
the US civil war
blocked access to the major production nodes in the
American Deep South the CAS began adapting.
Beckert describes the global
reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways
of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion
further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation
states. Beckert explains how other countries responded
by copying the colonial strategies and creating the
opportunities for future armed conflict among the original
colonialists and the new upstarts.
Completing the adaptive shifts Beckert describes the advocates
for industrialization
in the colonized global south and how over time they
joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western
manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS
dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart
pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers,
spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each
other on cost.
Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands
into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS
required the development over time: of military force, global
transportation and communication networks, perception and
representation control networks, capital stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The emergent system demonstrates the
powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic
alignment.
Globalization from cotton |
The structure and problems of the US
health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory.
The network:
- Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the
conflict between two
opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net
or low tax without. The emergence
of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further
constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of the network.
- The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous
levels of: salt,
sugar, cigarettes,
guns, light, cell phones, opioids,
costly education, global travel,
antibacterials, formula, foods including
endocrine disrupters;
- Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's
offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress,
amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of
walking, microbiome
collapse;
- Is incented to focus on localized competition generating
massive & costly duplication of services within
physician based health care operations instead of proven
public health strategies. This process drives
increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope
for each new technological breakthrough.
- Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation
and indirection of service development,
provision, reimbursement and payment.
- Is impacted by the different political strategies for
managing the increasing
cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.
- Is presented with acute
and chronic
problems to respond to. As currently setup the network
is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions
with patients tend to be transactional.
- Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure
which is:
- Costly and inefficient
- Structured around yearly
contracts which undermine long-term health goals and
strategies.
- Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT
which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has
entrenched commercial EHR
products deep within the hospital systems.
- Is maintained, and kept in
alignment, by massive network
effects across the:
- Hospital platform
based
sub-networks connecting to
- Physician networks
- Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA
narrow network legislation
- Hospital clinical supply and food
production networks
- Medical school and academic research network and NIH
- Global
transportation network
- Public health networks
- Health care IT supply
network
Health care |
Deaton describes the wellbeing
of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public
health strategies and the effect of growth in
material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of
aid.
Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. The situation he describes is complex including
powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap
broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The
biosphere, Politics, Economics,
Philosophy and Health care.
Improving wellbeing |
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations
of the major problems afflicting US
health care as of 2006.
Problems of US health care |
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the
modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse
following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the
business, they describe how a calamity
unfolding around them supported building a vision of a
better US health care network. And they explain:
- How they planned
out the transformation,
- Leveraging an effective
governance structure,
- Using a strategy
to gain buy in,
- Enabling
reengineering at the clinician patient
interface.
- Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic
& hot
spot care; to help the patients and help the
physicians.
- Geisinger's leverage of biologics.
- Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.
- Where Geisinger is headed next.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory.
E2E insured quality care |
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader
and son who know that the current health care network interacts
with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that
caused his father's death. But he is confident that these
problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he
asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated,
collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their
patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be
made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical
errors and make care more cost effective.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
including synergistic examples of these systems in
operation. The health care network is built out of
emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals
they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker
explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and
hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh
Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson
highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives.
Bad medical models |
US healthcare is ripe for
disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that
technologies are emerging which will support low cost business
models that will undermine the current network. Applying
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist
these progressive forces.
Disrupting health care |
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent
improvement in quality in medicine by organizing
to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic
plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists.
With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates
the effects of
complexity and how to organize to cope with it.
Following the short review RSS
additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of
complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within
the network of US health care,
contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping
his various examples and reviewing facets of complex
failures.
Complexity checklists |
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on
1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman
starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects'
lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking
broadly across each subject's: Personality,
Education, Parental impacts,
Energy
levels, Partnering,
Careers, Religion,
Social networks,
Gender, Impact from war and
trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways,
which each individual could be seen to select and travel
along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long
life. Others were problematic. The models imply that
the US approach to health and
wellness should focus
more on supporting
the development and selection of beneficial pathways.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most
applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support
necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving
to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may
be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network,
starved of resources.
Promoting longevity |
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots
of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping
with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on
aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to
show how technology has amplified
this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the
independent self, living fully while aging with the
support of the extended family. Central
planning responded to the technological and societal changes
with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But
Gawande then contrasts the power of
bottom up innovations created by experts responding to
their own family situations and belief
systems.
Gawande then explores in depth the challenges
that unfold currently as we age and become infirm.
He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will
have to understand the dilemma of
integrating medical treatment and hospice
strategies. He notes that all parties
involved need courage to cope.
He proposes medicine must aim to assure
well being. At that point all doctors will practice
palliative care.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death,
evolution, cooperation and adaptations
to new technologies are discussed.
Agent death |
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles
mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are
infected each year with malaria and one million die.
Malaria |
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution
of medical science.
Medical science events |
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex
systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of
design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies
that generate complexity
within systems. They do this through a focus on
modularity.
Modular designed systems |
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the
strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer
company IBM.
Compartmented systems |
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer
software design.
Object based systems |
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for
creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data
types and inheritence make object orientation a superior
methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy
to the use of objects.
Software construction |
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved
dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
Tools |
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the
World. He highlights:
- A list of
preconditions resulting in
- Additional niche
capture & more free time
- Building a network
to interconnect memes processes & tools which
- Enabling inter-generational
transfers
- Innovations
that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil
fuels
Memetic trading networks |
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported
the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man
building cultures and
later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson
identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these
are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a
change of approach.
He:
- Explores creativity:
how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter gatherer,
enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the
evening around the campfire. He notes the power of
fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing
signature of aesthetic
surprise.
- Looks at the current limitations of the
humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.
- Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and
culture:
- Ultimate causes viewed
through art, & music
- The bedrock of:
- Ape senses and emotions,
- Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied
by humanities,
&
- Exponential change in science and
technology.
- How the breakthrough from
our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat,
supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory &
language.
- Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.
- The impact on human nature.
- Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are
destroying.
- Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes,
exploration, irony, and
considers the potential for a third enlightenment,
supported by cooperative
action of humanities and science
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
- The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework
for representing the cultural CAS while
- Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science
gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of
layered CAS.
Evening campfire rituals |
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the
economy. They argue it has generated exponential
growth. This has been due to innovation.
It has created a huge bounty of
additional wealth.
But the wealth is spread unevenly across
society. They look at the short and long term implications of
the innovation bounty and spread
and the possible future of
technology.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory.
Brilliant technologies |
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
Education versus guilds |
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The
Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed
by CAS theory and reviewed.
What drives success |
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires
developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining
the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin
shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth
rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the
summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
is used to augment Turchins findings.
Warrior groups |
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael
Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory highlights the value of evolutionary
testing of the food chain.
Natural systems |
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can
take hold. Various social insects have developed
strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable
available niches. Like humans they invest in
specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped
competitors.
Insect superorganisms |
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter gatherers - making sense
of the objects they
perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
Computationally adapted mind |
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the
impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span:
conception, infantile
puberty, girlhood,
juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are
described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in
how emotions are processed
by women compared to men.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with
the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and
behavioral CAS.
Evolved female brain |
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky
developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time
spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology,
psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of
adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight
challenges for scientific research on behavior.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's
details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured
to successfully enter niches we now occupy.
CAS behavior |
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
Emergence of time |
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.
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 and
operation introduce constraints which are discussed.
Conscious access |
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 |
Antonio Damasio argues
that ancient
& fundamental homeostatic processes,
built into
behaviors and updated by evolution
have resulted in the emergence
of nervous systems and feelings. These
feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general
systems supporting enteric
operation, are later ubiquitously
integrated into the 'images'
built by the minds of higher animals
including humans.
Damasio highlights the separate
development of the body frame in the building of
minds.
Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds
supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of
emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the
end-to-end
integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers
hard problem of consciousness.
Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures
and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the
cultural creative process, linking culture to
homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the
development of tools
to improve our lives. But the results of the
creative process have added
stresses to our lives.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Each of the [super]organisms
discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
- Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns
well with CAS theory.
- Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS
examples.
Emergence of feelings |
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent
van Gogh in Arles.
Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven
to create, and successfully
invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and
especially portraits. Vincent
worked hard to allow artists like him-self
to innovate. But
Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis.
Nemeczek also provides a brief history of
Vincent's life.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Vincent creates |
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 |
|
|
Evolved reading
Summary
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 is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
.
Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural
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) 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.
Reading in the Brain
In Stanislas Dehaene's book
'Reading in the Brain' he describes the unconscious mechanisms
the brain uses to read and write and how these
developed.
How do we read?
Dehaene first introduces behavioral characteristics of
reading. Later in the brain's
letterbox neuronal mechanisms will be associated with the
behaviors.
Dehaene notes that the eye are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala. They also signal [social] emotional state to other people. And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably. Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea. The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE. Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome. Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology. High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma. Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma. Age is associated with AMD.
is a rather poor scanner. Our gaze centers the retina
slightly left of center of words. Our eyes can only
accurately resolve in a small window. Big letters force
the word outside the window. He explains the fovea is the central part of the retina. It is the only region that is dense in high-resolution photo receptor cells. It is the only part of the retina that is useful for reading. Our eyes are in constant saccades as we read to present text to the fovea. is the only region of
the eye that can resolve fine print. So we focus the fovea
at the target, explode the resulting signals into detected
fragments which are mapped back by the visual processing chain
to extract: graphemes is a series of one or more letters that maps onto a phoneme in the target language. The grapheme 'tt' in 'button' maps to the phoneme 't'. Dehaene notes that English has an extensive set of: - Simple frequently used graphemes including 't', 'k' and 'a'.
- Simple but less frequent graphemes including 'b', 'm', 'f'.
- Irregular ones including 'i', 'o'.
- Complex graphemes including 'un', 'ch', 'ough', 'oi' and 'au.' The human visual system treats learned graphemes as units.
,
syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots. The
processing chain has two mutually reinforcing parallel routes:
- Phonological
route during reading associates letters with particular strings of phonemes that are perceived during conscious access.
turns letters into speech sounds. It is
useful for learning new word strings, reading chemical
formulas etc.
- Lexical route during reading associates word meanings with the representation given conscious access.
accesses a mental dictionary of known word
meanings.
The reading process copes well with correcting for the vast
variety of surface forms of written text. It solves the invariance problem in reading is the need to identify words regardless of their specific form. Our visual system recognizes the aspects of words that do not vary -- the sequence of letters -- whatever the shape of the actual letters presented. Invariance is an essential characteristic of the inferior temporal lobe. . Word
recognition is invariant for character shape. Various
forms of a letter are arbitrary and have to be learned by an
abstract letter detector. Word shape is thus
irrelevant.
Having been trained for years 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. is
sensitive to miniscule differences amplifying them and
signalling different regions of sensory space. Every word
is processed to build a tree containing:
- Single letters - stripped of variants.
- Bigrams,
- Graphemes is a series of one or more letters that maps onto a phoneme in the target language. The grapheme 'tt' in 'button' maps to the phoneme 't'. Dehaene notes that English has an extensive set of:
- Simple frequently used graphemes including 't', 'k' and 'a'.
- Simple but less frequent graphemes including 'b', 'm', 'f'.
- Irregular ones including 'i', 'o'.
- Complex graphemes including 'un', 'ch', 'ough', 'oi' and 'au.' The human visual system treats learned graphemes as units.
,
- Syllable,
- Morpheme are the smallest sub-units of written words that have associated meaning. Decomposition of a word into its morphemes is an essential step between vision and meaning. Our visual system unconsciously extracts morphemes of words. Dehaene explains that after being presented with the word 'departure' the morpheme 'depart' is primed. He notes a word primes the recognition of other words that share a morpheme but look quite different such as 'can' and 'could'. Conversely words like aspire and aspirin which look similar but do not share a morpheme do not prime. Deriving morphemes is of such importance to our reading system that it makes guesses about the decomposition of words. The resulting parsing errors have to be caught at later stages in the word dissection process. ,
- Word.
The mappings from letters to sounds must be learned based on the
structures of our brains and our languages. The goal of
writing is to abstractly signal meaning efficiently.
Languages differ in how irregular the sounds of written words
are. English is very irregular. It takes years to
learn to read. Italian has only one letter per phoneme are the smallest speech units explicitly representing discrete speech sounds. The phoneme 't' is a part of Tuna, stop and foot. . Reading is
learned in months.
This odd situation reflects the fact that English speech uses
short words and has many sounds and similar sounds can mean
different things. By varying the spelling of words and
providing lots of vowels and diphthongs written English helps
signal the particular meaning efficiently with a small alphabet
using letter combinations. Alternately Italian, by
increasing the syllables and or word length maintains a highly
regular mapping of letters to sounds and meanings.
Mandarin Chinese uses only one or two syllables for its words
but each can refer to dozens of meanings. Mandarin
characters transcribe morphemes are the smallest sub-units of written words that have associated meaning. Decomposition of a word into its morphemes is an essential step between vision and meaning. Our visual system unconsciously extracts morphemes of words. Dehaene explains that after being presented with the word 'departure' the morpheme 'depart' is primed. He notes a word primes the recognition of other words that share a morpheme but look quite different such as 'can' and 'could'. Conversely words like aspire and aspirin which look similar but do not share a morpheme do not prime. Deriving morphemes is of such importance to our reading system that it makes guesses about the decomposition of words. The resulting parsing errors have to be caught at later stages in the word dissection process.
and add phonetic markers to further clarify how the root is
pronounced and what word is intended.
Various mental dictionaries develop to be huge in size. An
average vocabulary has 100,000 words. Learning to read
develops a large semantic lexicon, phonological lexicon
etc.
Dehaene notes that for experienced readers reading time is not
proportional to the number of letters in a word. Each
letter is processed unconsciously in parallel. And letters
are actively decoded. Errors in the text are corrected by
the processing chain improving robustness. Parallel
processing provides context to suggest correct perceptions and
top down feedback from grapheme and word detectors favor
interpretations compatible with their own. Ambiguities and
conflicts in interpretation slow down the processing.
Words that are part of a dense neighborhood can be judged
rapidly part of the language. But to understand or name a
word unequivocally can be slowed by the existence of lots of
close neighbors.
The brain's letterbox
Dehaene introduces Joseph-Jules Dejerine who studied patients
with Pure Alexia is the selective loss of the visual recognition of letter strings. Writing is unaffected. Spoken language is not affected. The sufferer can still identify letters if their shape is traced out by touch. Objects, faces and drawings are still recognized. Numbers are still recognized. It is caused by lesions in the visual word form area which must provide pathways for specifically reading letters. There are two types: - Sufferers can't read a single letter.
- Sufferers can recognize individual letters.
.
These stroke is when brain cells are deprived of oxygen and begin to die. 750,000 patients a year suffer strokes in the US. 85% of those strokes are caused by clots. There are two structural types: Ischemic and hemorrhagic. Thrombectomy has been found to be a highly effective treatment for some stroke situations (Jan 2018). victims could
not recognize individual letters or words when attempting to
read. Numbers were still recognized and the sufferers
could still write but then could not read what they had
written! Dejerine noted where the strokes had left lesions
in the sufferer's brains.
Modern analysis of these types of lesion with 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. , once aggregated,
indicated visual recognition of letters depends on the letterbox is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. region.
Dejerine assumed the reading system operated as a serial chain:
Reading flowing to the occipital pole, then the angular gyrus, Wernicke's area is the posterior part of the left superior temporal cortex. It is involved in the comprehension of spoken or written language. Sensations from the ears generate signals to the auditory cortex which then flow on to Wernicke's area. Wernicke showed the arcuate fasciculus pathway connects this area with Broca's area. , Broca's area is the left inferior frontal cortex. It is involved with spoken language. Lesions have resulted in an inability to speak or write even though language is understood. and
finally the motor cortex is the posterior precentral gyrus region of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex involved with planning, control and execution of voluntary movements.
to support writing. Further study reveals that the
operation is complex with massive parallel activity: visual
analysis, association of roots of words, association of meaning,
association of sound patterns, association of motor
articulation; with signalling feedback. And the process
operates for Chinese and Japanese readers too.
The functional operation of reading in the brain was
demonstrated by Peterson,
Posner & Rachle were the first researchers to visualize which brain areas consume energy when we read. They used PET to show the functional organization of the language areas of the brain. . Viewing words generated
activity in the visual areas at the back of the head and the
letterbox region. Listening to spoken words activated
hearing (superior temporal
cortex of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe. ) and speech perception (middle temporal cortex of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe. ).
Talking activated Broca's area. Semantic activity
activated the left interior prefrontal cortex (PFC) is - The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It evolved most recently. During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum. The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior. It regulates feelings. Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice. The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions. It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory. It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels. It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat. Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it. Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.
.
Only the left
occipito-temporal region is anatomically a few centimeters to the front of the occipital pole in the left occipito-temporal area within a groove in the cortical mantle. This is where the visual recognition of letters occurs so it is also called the brain's letterbox. was specific to reading.
Faster modern techniques such as fMRI have corroborated this
functional picture. And Dehaene confirms the letterbox is
universal to all human reading. And nearby functional
areas support perception of: houses and landscapes, faces, objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. and tools;
Dehaene explains that the letterbox region (occipito-temporal
fisure is anatomically a few centimeters to the front of the occipital pole in the left occipito-temporal area within a groove in the cortical mantle. This is where the visual recognition of letters occurs so it is also called the brain's letterbox. on the brain's midline) is part of a broad
patchwork of visual analyzers. Every brain uses separate
but nearby patches of cortex to process faces are neurons which respond when the features of a face are presented to the retina. Faces are recognized by dedicated neural networks consisting of face cells grouped into 6 patches of 10,000 cells on each side of the brain in the cortex just behind the ear. The face cells respond abstractly to the dimensions and features of faces. Each face cell responds to a combination of facial dimensions, creating a holistic representation. A single face cell represents a vector of about 6 dimensions. Two hundred cells can together represent the 50 dimensions which are required to identify a face in a face space where an infinite number of faces can be represented. Cal tech's Chang & Tsao argue there is an average face at the origin of the face space and each actual face is represented as differences from it in the face space (Jun 2017). (inferior cortical
site in the fusiform
gyrus 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.
), and on the edge of the brain, objects and
tools.
The reading processing chain happens very rapidly. The
main bottleneck is in saccading are the small jerky steps by which we reorient our eyes gaze.
the eye are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala. They also signal [social] emotional state to other people. And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably. Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea. The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE. Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome. Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology. High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma. Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma. Age is associated with AMD. . When a
computer is used to present a stream of words to the eye at a
fixed position, reading speed increases dramatically.
Perception is best for words to the right of our gaze.
This is because words to the left must be signalled via the corpus callosum is a large tract of nerve cells that connect the cerebral cortex on one side of the head to that on the other side.
which takes Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time. Within the
letterbox region the integration of left and right perceptive
fields allow position invariance. But this is not the case
if the corpus callosum fails. In such cases of hemi-alexia is a reading impairment in just the left half of the visual field. It is due to failure to transmit word perception signals across the corpus callosum to the letterbox area. diffusion MRI magnetizes the brain twice in opposite directions. For motionless molecules, the magnetization cancels out but for molecules in motion a measurable signal is created. This effect can be used to monitor flows in the brain's white matter where flows are constrained to move in the direction of the fiber's major axis. Computers can thus assemble a plot of the connectivity of the brain. shows
the failure of the fiber bundle.
Dehaene argues reading is a sophisticated construction
game. A complex unconscious cortical assembly line is
needed to progressively put together a unique neural code for
each written word.
The letterbox includes special case invariance functions
identified by Rock and Farah using fMRI. This capability
depends on learning the associations of specific capital and
lower case letter forms. 'HOTEL' and 'hotel' are mapped
into the same processing chain within the letterbox region
unlike 'hotel' and 'radio'. The lowest coding level deals with
single letters and is concerned with repetition of individual
letters at the same location - when identified the fMRI signal
drops. In the next processing area word coding becomes
invariant. This region still codes for units below the
whole-word level. The cortex becomes sensitive to the
similarity of 'ANGER' and 'range' even if not aligned.
This may be where morphological
relations are the smallest sub-units of written words that have associated meaning. Decomposition of a word into its morphemes is an essential step between vision and meaning. Our visual system unconsciously extracts morphemes of words. Dehaene explains that after being presented with the word 'departure' the morpheme 'depart' is primed. He notes a word primes the recognition of other words that share a morpheme but look quite different such as 'can' and 'could'. Conversely words like aspire and aspirin which look similar but do not share a morpheme do not prime. Deriving morphemes is of such importance to our reading system that it makes guesses about the decomposition of words. The resulting parsing errors have to be caught at later stages in the word dissection process. are detected. These roots have not been
associated with meaning so the identified associations may fail
further up the hierarchy (i.e. depart and department).
Anterior to this area whole words are processed. 'ANGER'
followed by 'anger' reduces the fMRI signal. 'ANGER'
followed by 'range' does not reduce the fMRI signal.
Dehaene notes that research indicates many areas are provided
with signals from the brain's visual areas. The
interactions are likely to be far more complex than this
discussion presents. Diffusion MRI magnetizes the brain twice in opposite directions. For motionless molecules, the magnetization cancels out but for molecules in motion a measurable signal is created. This effect can be used to monitor flows in the brain's white matter where flows are constrained to move in the direction of the fiber's major axis. Computers can thus assemble a plot of the connectivity of the brain.
indicates that major cortical areas are linked by pathways such
as the inferior
longitudinal bundle is a large nerve fiber bundle that traverses the temporal lobe from its rearmost part to its anterior pole. It appears to support signal transmission from all the brain areas devoted to vision, including the letterbox area, to the anterior temporal lobe. .
The reading ape
Reading rests on the evolved neuronal mechanisms of primate
vision. Neuronal
recycling is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability. Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading. leverages neurons that signal types of line
junctions that resemble letter shapes: T, Y and L. These
shapes are position
and scale invariant in reading is the need to identify words regardless of their specific form. Our visual system recognizes the aspects of words that do not vary -- the sequence of letters -- whatever the shape of the actual letters presented. Invariance is an essential characteristic of the inferior temporal lobe. .
Macaque monkeys with lesions of the ventral temporal
lobes signals written word awareness to a large variety of distant brain regions but in particular language areas and particularly Broca's area and Wernicke's area. display psychic blindness is a set of unusual and massive macaque behavioral changes in response to bilateral lesion of the temporal lobes. Dehaene explains the impaired animals behaved as if they no longer recognized their fellow apes, objects, or food items. They explored the world around them haphazardly using their mouths and attempted to copulate with or ingest very inappropriate objects--a form of sightlessness that Kluver and Bucy, called "psychic blindness". The animals no longer recognized shapes by seeing them. .
A related problem is seen in human left temporal of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe. stroke is when brain cells are deprived of oxygen and begin to die. 750,000 patients a year suffer strokes in the US. 85% of those strokes are caused by clots. There are two structural types: Ischemic and hemorrhagic. Thrombectomy has been found to be a highly effective treatment for some stroke situations (Jan 2018). victims. The letterbox is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. region appears
to have evolved from the Macaque object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. recognition
area.
Brains have evolved to identify invariant perceptions.
Researchers progressing Hubel
and Wiesel's research recorded neuronal activity in the primary visual area of the cat in the 1960s. They noted that these neurons signalled in response to simple bars of light. This ground breaking insight induced researchers to explore the temporal cortex and eventually led to Tanaka's identification of neuronal alphabets. on line detectors over 50 subsequent
years have found the inferior temporal of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe. neurons to
signal highly specific complex objects. Separate
overlapping patches signal sparse coded sets of higher level
neurons providing them with a highly invariant perception.
Except rotation invariance is limited to less than 40 degrees
with different neurons dedicated to different views of a rotated
object.
The macaque inferior temporal cortex is organized as a parallel
operating cellular pyramid: LGN is lateral geniculate nucleus. It is a contradiction: - It looks like a relay and nothing more. Both anatomically and physiologically it seems to be a relay. The principal cells receive inputs from the retina and send outputs, seen radiating out to the visual cortex, to the first visual area (V1) of the neocortex (in primates - in cats they go to a number of visual areas). These axons have very few collateral branches to other principal cells or to other parts of the LGN. There is a direct map from retinal area to primary visual cortex area. But Francis Crick argued in contradiction to this
- It is probably doing something a lot more complicated which we do not yet fully understand! The macaque LGN has six layers. The inputs from two eyes and M & P cells within them are all kept separate within the LGN.
- Two of these layers have large cells (magnocellular). One of them gets its inputs from the right eye, the other from the left eye. There is little interaction between the layers. Their input is mainly from the M cells of the retina. These two layers specialize in detecting movement and flicker.
- Four of the layers are smaller (parvocellular). They receive input from the P cells of the retina. They seem to carry signals relating to color, texture, shape & steropsis.
- The LGN neurons also get input coming back from the first visual area of the cortex. There are many more axons coming back than go to the neocortex from the LGN. However, they tend to synapse onto those parts of the dendrites rather distant from the cell bodies so their effects are probably subdued.
- There are also inputs from the brain stem that modulate the behavior of the thalamus and especially its reticular nucleus. This means that the LGN freely transmits visual information in the awake higher animal but blocks this transmission somewhat when the animal is in slow wave sleep.
- Dehaene identifies the LGN as at the base of a hierarchy of reading neurons signalling local contrasts and oriented bars. The signals reach
- V1 which associates them with oriented bars,
- V2 - letter fragments,
- V4 Letter shapes,
- V8 abstract letters,
- Left occipital temporal sulcus - bigrams,
- Left occipital temporal sulcus - small words, frequent substrings and morphemes.
signals V1 is primary visual area (V1). It mainly responds to LGN's signals for thin lines and object contours. It is located in the occipital lobe. <-> V2 is visual area (V2). It responds to combinations of lines with curves and inclines from V1's signals. <-> V4 is visual area (V4). It responds to signals from V2 for case specific letter shapes. Its signals are associated with abstract letters in V8. <-> TEO is part of the posterior inferior temporal cortex. It responds to simple combinations of curves. <-> TE (temporal
pole) with increased complexity of the signalled image.
The architecture reassembles the low level signals generated by
the individual detectors in the retina.
Keiji Tanaka discovered that monkey brains contain a neuronal alphabet. He iteratively reduced the complexity of a scene that initially caused a neuron to signal. The simplifications that still induced the firing described a neural alphabet of invariant components.
identified a neuronal
alphabet is a patchwork of neurons dedicated to fragments of shape. Keiji Tanaka experimentally identified these invariants within the temporal cortex. Various of these combinatorial codes exist at points in the visual system: V1, V2, TEO; in monkeys which by combination can describe any
complex form. The alphabet is highly stylized and
simplified generating the scale and position invariance.
Two overlapping discs are found to signal a cat. A cube
neuron responded to a y junction. He showed the preference
of the high level neurons varied smoothly across the
cortex. Neighboring neurons tend to signal similar shapes:
y or t, star forms, simplified
faces are neurons which respond when the features of a face are presented to the retina. Faces are recognized by dedicated neural networks consisting of face cells grouped into 6 patches of 10,000 cells on each side of the brain in the cortex just behind the ear. The face cells respond abstractly to the dimensions and features of faces. Each face cell responds to a combination of facial dimensions, creating a holistic representation. A single face cell represents a vector of about 6 dimensions. Two hundred cells can together represent the 50 dimensions which are required to identify a face in a face space where an infinite number of faces can be represented. Cal tech's Chang & Tsao argue there is an average face at the origin of the face space and each actual face is represented as differences from it in the face space (Jun 2017). .
Tanaka's student Manabu
Tanifuji was a former student of Keiji Tanaka. Tanifuji showed that the neuronal alphabet operates by each simplified item acting as an invariant description that other identified details could be associated with to identify and describe in detail a specific visually presented object. Tanifuji used a video camera able to detect small changes only tenths of a millimeter apart via the reflection of light on a cortical surface. This resolved Tanaka's shape coding columns which were tenths of a millimeter in width. went on to show that during selection of a neuron
from this foundational catalogue, details of a specific scene
are added associatively refining the choice of alphabet item and
associative weights.
Dehaene notes that macaque neuron's signal to an approximation
of our alphabet letters. Dehaene suggests this congruence
is due to their selection in the course of evolution or
throughout the course of a lifetime of visual learning of
non-accidental properties required to process the visual
scene. These collectively form an optimal code good for
both detection and representation. For example the shape T
is extremely frequent in natural scenes when one object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. masks another.
Similarly Y and F are found where several sharp edges of an
object meet. J and 8 result from objects with curves and
holes. Memories are encoded based on a sketch of the
non-accidental properties.
Humans did not invent most of our letter shapes: They were
just rediscovered when we invented
writing and the alphabet.
The ability for humans to learn is an evolved process and it is
carefully limited. Binocular
vision leverages a short period of plasticity present to
align the two eyes are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala. They also signal [social] emotional state to other people. And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably. Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea. The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE. Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome. Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology. High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma. Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma. Age is associated with AMD.
associated visual maps. At the end of that period the
circuit freezes. Plasticity in the letterbox is
similar. Seeing objects stabilizes the neuron set via synaptic, a neuron structure which provides a junction with other neurons. It generates signal molecules, either excitatory or inhibitory, which are kept in vesicles until the synapse is stimulated when the signal molecules are released across the synaptic cleft from the neuron. The provisioning of synapses is under genetic control and is part of long term memory formation as identified by Eric Kandel. Modulation signals (from slow receptors) initiate the synaptic strengthening which occurs in memory. growth. Each
layer of the pyramid depends on learning of correlations in
lower layers.
Learning of temporal progressions may depend on neurons
sensitive to correlations across Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time.
The cortex allocates the temporally correlated pair to the same
neuron.
Dehaene comments that our 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.
inherited just enough plasticity to become a reader's
brain. Preschoolers are naturally acclimatized to letter
and word recognition using the precursor alphabet. It is
this pre-adaptation, initially termed pre-adaptation refers to the coopting of some function for a new use.
that enables reading. The small amount of plasticity
allows for the learning of new objects. During schooling a
part of the system rewires itself for reading. The tool
kit we have is exapted, initially termed pre-adaptation refers to the coopting of some function for a new use. .
Scribes tailored the visual inputs to leverage these
characteristics and a new schema emerged -- cultural is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
learning.
Birth of a Culture
Dehaene asserts that neuronal recycling is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability. Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.
is essential in stabilizing culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
.
He sees the scribes' iterative
adjustments as enabling an
epidemic. Periods of proliferation were punctuated
by long periods of stasis. Emergence points included the:
Fertile Crescent, China and South America. He stresses
that 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 must work this way to
conform to evolutionary constraints. He contrasts Susan
Blackmore's 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.
imitative copying
mechanism as essentially Lamarckian.
Neurons for Reading
From our understanding of primate brain operation Dehaene
proposes an operational model for the human visual word
recognition neuron hierarchy. Local contrasts (LGN is lateral geniculate nucleus. It is a contradiction: - It looks like a relay and nothing more. Both anatomically and physiologically it seems to be a relay. The principal cells receive inputs from the retina and send outputs, seen radiating out to the visual cortex, to the first visual area (V1) of the neocortex (in primates - in cats they go to a number of visual areas). These axons have very few collateral branches to other principal cells or to other parts of the LGN. There is a direct map from retinal area to primary visual cortex area. But Francis Crick argued in contradiction to this
- It is probably doing something a lot more complicated which we do not yet fully understand! The macaque LGN has six layers. The inputs from two eyes and M & P cells within them are all kept separate within the LGN.
- Two of these layers have large cells (magnocellular). One of them gets its inputs from the right eye, the other from the left eye. There is little interaction between the layers. Their input is mainly from the M cells of the retina. These two layers specialize in detecting movement and flicker.
- Four of the layers are smaller (parvocellular). They receive input from the P cells of the retina. They seem to carry signals relating to color, texture, shape & steropsis.
- The LGN neurons also get input coming back from the first visual area of the cortex. There are many more axons coming back than go to the neocortex from the LGN. However, they tend to synapse onto those parts of the dendrites rather distant from the cell bodies so their effects are probably subdued.
- There are also inputs from the brain stem that modulate the behavior of the thalamus and especially its reticular nucleus. This means that the LGN freely transmits visual information in the awake higher animal but blocks this transmission somewhat when the animal is in slow wave sleep.
- Dehaene identifies the LGN as at the base of a hierarchy of reading neurons signalling local contrasts and oriented bars. The signals reach
- V1 which associates them with oriented bars,
- V2 - letter fragments,
- V4 Letter shapes,
- V8 abstract letters,
- Left occipital temporal sulcus - bigrams,
- Left occipital temporal sulcus - small words, frequent substrings and morphemes.
) <-> Oriented bars (V1 is primary visual area (V1). It mainly responds to LGN's signals for thin lines and object contours. It is located in the occipital lobe. ) <-> Local contours (V2 is visual area (V2). It responds to combinations of lines with curves and inclines from V1's signals. ) <-> Case specific
letter shapes (V4 is visual area (V4). It responds to signals from V2 for case specific letter shapes. Its signals are associated with abstract letters in V8. ) <->
Abstract letter detector banks (V8 is visual area (V8). It responds to V4 letter shapes signalling abstract letters. The signals are associated in the letterbox with bigrams, morphemes, frequently seen substrings and small words. )
<-> Written words are likely coded by a series of Bigram
detectors. Bigram
neurons is an ordered pair of letters. The human visual system potentially includes bigram neurons which respond to specific letter conjunctions. Dehaene illustrates with the example of a neuron that signals the presence of a letter 'n' one or two letters to the left of a letter 'a'. That allows us to discriminate between 'AND' and 'DNA'. Bigram neurons have not been isolated experimentally. Dehaene explains how they might work: - A bigram neuron would collect signals from several partially overlapping detectors with the prior letter fields appearing mostly on the left.
- The bigram detector would end up with greater location invariance than any of the underlying detectors.
- The architecture would be tolerant to the presence of one or more intermediate letters.
- The underlying letter detectors receptive fields would be spread over part of the retina.
have never been observed but their operation can
be explained and their predicted features align with
observation.
If bigram neurons do exist they would signal the next layer of
the hierarchy. Dehaene suggests in consequence this would
respond to complex combinations of up to five letters.
Given reading's two parallel pathways these neurons should
signal for aspects that are meaningful to the spelling (graphemes is a series of one or more letters that maps onto a phoneme in the target language. The grapheme 'tt' in 'button' maps to the phoneme 't'. Dehaene notes that English has an extensive set of: - Simple frequently used graphemes including 't', 'k' and 'a'.
- Simple but less frequent graphemes including 'b', 'm', 'f'.
- Irregular ones including 'i', 'o'.
- Complex graphemes including 'un', 'ch', 'ough', 'oi' and 'au.' The human visual system treats learned graphemes as units.
) or semantic
meaning path (morphemes are the smallest sub-units of written words that have associated meaning. Decomposition of a word into its morphemes is an essential step between vision and meaning. Our visual system unconsciously extracts morphemes of words. Dehaene explains that after being presented with the word 'departure' the morpheme 'depart' is primed. He notes a word primes the recognition of other words that share a morpheme but look quite different such as 'can' and 'could'. Conversely words like aspire and aspirin which look similar but do not share a morpheme do not prime. Deriving morphemes is of such importance to our reading system that it makes guesses about the decomposition of words. The resulting parsing errors have to be caught at later stages in the word dissection process. )
as appropriate.
Dehaene notes that the brain can use learning to focus on
building only appropriate detectors for the proximate
language. That limits the combinatorial explosion of
neurons otherwise required to generically process all
possibilities.
To back up his proposals Dehaene wishes to simulate the neuronal
architecture for reading. But he admits this is currently
an inaccessible dream.
The letterbox region is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. is
particularly biased towards fine grained foveal is the central part of the retina. It is the only region that is dense in high-resolution photo receptor cells. It is the only part of the retina that is useful for reading. Our eyes are in constant saccades as we read to present text to the fovea. images. At the
same time as one moves up its neuronal hierarchy the receptive
fields broaden and using both hemispheres would result in
redundancy. Instead the brain can dedicate just the left
side to reading. If the left side is not available for the
function the right hemisphere takes over the processing.
Inventing Reading
The neuronal architecture constrains all writing systems so they
all display common features reflecting the underlying neuronal
encoding. Universally writing systems demonstrate:
Certain neurons discharge when presented with the natural
junction of two surfaces or a single line. Scribes used
this property to encourage neuronal self-stimulation.
Dehaene argues that initially representations supported
counting, book keeping and depictions of hand signals used in
hunting. But as the representations became more abstract
and were focused away from faces and places -- which the brain
processes away from the letterbox
area is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. -- pictograms began supporting early writing and
reading of language.
Pictography has limits
Dehaene describes how pictographic systems were soon found
problematic. They struggled to represent abstract
concepts. It was done by use of arbitrary conventions that
had to be learned. And the writing system needed to be
easy to use and quick. Simplified symbolic representations
were adopted. These were representations that were aligned
with the constraints of the local materials. The scribes
initially leveraged the rebus principle uses the similarity between certain sounds to help draw a pictogram that represents a visual pun. The process converts pictograms into phonograms. but
that rapidly evolved into writing sounds. Mixed writing
systems combining meaning and sound fit the set of constraints
including memory limitations, letterbox is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. network
structures and spoken language organization.
Once writing became symbolized the structures had to be
standardized and learned. And the mix of pictograms and
descriptions of sounds encouraged incremental expansion.
The
Alphabet: A Great Leap Forward
Dehaene explains how the early writing systems grew more and
more complex with Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time constraining
their use to a small group of specialists. The virus like
infection of writing needed to become simplified to allow it to
infect a broader population base. As the scribes of other
tribes on the edges of mainstream society, such as the speakers
of Semitic
languages include Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew. They have an unusual morphology that emphasizes consonants. The designers of Proto-Sinaitic writing exploited this building a representation of an abstract consonant grid that only required about two dozen shapes in the consonant lexicon. They also used the acrophonic priciple to leverage mnemonics. , looked to adopt writing they were able to
borrow useful signs from the earlier architectures but by
adopting alphabetic is a writing process where representational signals (letters and graphemes) refer to speech sounds (phonemes) rather than meanings. Dehaene asserts the principle probably emerged in small groups of people on the fringes of mainstream society. The first example is Proto-Sinaitic. Alphabets allow for a drastic reduction in the number of signs required to be learnt.
representations vastly reduced the learning required.
Writing with an alphabet quickly spread worldwide.
Phoenicians added explicit notations for vowels initially
introduced to correct for pronunciation drift. The Greeks
completed the process creating the modern alphabet. Due to
Greek miss-mappings aleph (A), iota (i), omicron (o) and upsilon
(u) became vowels. Other representations were added
including graphemes is a series of one or more letters that maps onto a phoneme in the target language. The grapheme 'tt' in 'button' maps to the phoneme 't'. Dehaene notes that English has an extensive set of: - Simple frequently used graphemes including 't', 'k' and 'a'.
- Simple but less frequent graphemes including 'b', 'm', 'f'.
- Irregular ones including 'i', 'o'.
- Complex graphemes including 'un', 'ch', 'ough', 'oi' and 'au.' The human visual system treats learned graphemes as units.
such
as 'o' conjugated with 'u' to denote the sound u with upsilon
left representing the sharper pronunciation.
Dehaene notes that in consequence and for the first time the
Greeks had a complete graphic inventory of their language sounds
and writing had been stripped of its pictographic and syllabic
origins. This minimal set of symbols was easily learned by
the letterbox area is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. and
established a direct link to speech sounds coded in the superior
temporal of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe.
cortex.
Learning to Read
Dehaene argues children must connect the object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. recognition system to
the language circuit. They do this in three phases:
- Pictorial - where 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.
represents a few dozen notable words as objects, recognized
by superficial details.
- Phonological - where they learn to decode graphemes is a series of one or more letters that maps onto a phoneme in the target language. The grapheme 'tt' in 'button' maps to the phoneme 't'. Dehaene notes that English has an extensive set of:
- Simple frequently used graphemes including 't', 'k' and 'a'.
- Simple but less frequent graphemes including 'b', 'm', 'f'.
- Irregular ones including 'i', 'o'.
- Complex graphemes including 'un', 'ch', 'ough', 'oi' and 'au.' The human visual system treats learned graphemes as units.
into phonemes are the smallest speech units explicitly representing discrete speech sounds. The phoneme 't' is a part of Tuna, stop and foot. . This
requires learning to decode words into letters and linking
of the letters/graphemes to speech sounds. Initially
build explicit representation of speech sounds.
Subsequently discover through instruction, phonemic
awareness is the discovery that speech is made up of phonemes. Jose Morais showed it requires teaching of an alphabetic code to occur. Illiterate adults fail to detect phonemes in words. . The anterior insula (near Broca is the left inferior frontal cortex. It is involved with spoken language. Lesions have resulted in an inability to speak or write even though language is understood. 's area)
supports phoneme processing.
- Orthographic - when word recognition becomes fast and
automatic due to the development of a vast lexicon of visual
units. Word length ceases to play a role in ease of
reading.
Letterbox is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. circuits are
changed during each of these phases. The children use
trial and error to support the specialization.
Neuronal recycling suggests that during the first year of life
linguistic (Speech comprehension) and visual 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. (invariant
visual recognition) prepare for reading:
The relationship between grapheme and phoneme 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. is likely
reciprocal. Reading acquisition progresses from simple to
complex rules. Errors are induced by irregular words and
increased syllable complexity.
Many children see colors associated with letters for a short
period of 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. .
A few continue to see this association. Dehaene notes that
this effect is in line with neurons associated with color being
some of those recycled is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability. Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.
for reading.
Dehaene stresses that the alternative whole language teaching
strategy ignores the need to learn grapheme - phoneme mappings
and should be avoided. He does have proposals for
educators:
The Dyslexic Brain
Reading scores fit a normal distribution. The complexity
of the reading chain and the dependencies on internal and
external factors such as teaching for its correct 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. leave many
points for failure. Never the less a causal chain from
gene to dyslexic is expressed as severe reading problems. However, these problems fall on a normal distribution of reading skills. The majority of the problems affect the letterbox region. But many issues are indirect. In particular disorganization of the left lateral temporal region disrupts phonological generation of the alphabet mapping required for neuronal recycling in the letterbox. Because of the long chain of dependencies in neuronal recycling required for the letterbox to support reading there are many potential developmental aspects that can fail. A variety of gene mutations have been found to induce dyslexia.
behavior is being uncovered. Dyslexia can be
inherited. The temporal lobes anatomy is disorganized in
dyslexia. When reading some of the areas, including the left
lateral temporal cortex processes phonological information in speech. It supports the generation of the alphabet mappings required for the neuronal recycling of the letterbox. Its disorganization will result in reduced development of the letterbox and display as dyslexia. and the letterbox is part of the human visual system. It is located in the same brain area in all readers. It responds automatically to written words. Unconsciously it extracts the identity of a letter string regardless of superficial changes in component letter shape, size or position. It signals the identities to two major sets of brain areas that encode sound patterns (temporal) and meaning (frontal) lobes. , do not
activate as much as in proficient readers. Dehaene notes
that remedial interventions are providing cures.
Dyslexia is often the result of a failure to represent speech
sounds correctly. Less frequently it is due to spatial attention
deficits.
The disorganization of the temporal lobe is due to incorrect
deployment of neurons along the 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. 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. . This
process is specified by genes which have been found mutated in
dyslexia. Another gene that contributes to dyslexia
specifies the deployment of the corpus callosum is a large tract of nerve cells that connect the cerebral cortex on one side of the head to that on the other side. .
Failure to represent speech sounds can be treated with intensive
remedial training in mapping pitch, duration and intensity with
rewards provided for success, which has resulted in word
recognition scores improving spectacularly.
Reading & Symmetry
Dehaene explains that the brain has evolved to assume left right
symmetry. Key aspects of reading require awareness of left
right asymmetries and neuronal recycling is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability. Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.
enables this.
Early in life virtually all children make mirror errors in
reading and writing. This typically resolves between age 8
and 9. Dehaene explains that our brains were not evolved
for reading and have converted through any available
means. The essence of conversion depends on:
- Visual maps in the occipital regions are mirror
images.
- Incoming image signals are not duplicated in the two
hemispheres. The left half of the visual field
projects on the right hemisphere and visa versa.
- Corballis & Beale concluded a memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected. trace of visual
input is mirrored across the corpus callosum is a large tract of nerve cells that connect the cerebral cortex on one side of the head to that on the other side.
.
As we memorize a letter the information is generalized to
both hemispheres.
- Neurophysiology findings agree with the theory. The
inferior temporal
cortex of the cerebral cortex is involved in associating sensory input with comprehending language (TEO), storing new memories in the medial area (hippocampus), visual memory, emotion and deriving meaning. The temporal lobe is located bellow the parietal lobe, and between the frontal lobe and occipital lobe.
extracts mirror symmetry. One-to-one
projections link symmetrical sectors of the visual areas
directly. A neuron located on the left visual cortex
sends an axon that first goes in a direction perpendicular
to the cortical surface, then joins the bundle of callosal
fibers and reaches the other hemisphere where it then heads
toward a location in the cortex exactly symmetric to its
starting point. Dehaene stresses that the majority of
the callosal bundle is not symmetric - it stitches together
the two cortical representations into one. Olavarria
shows symmetrical connections are abundant at birth but are
pruned back in the first days of life. Stitching
connections are maintained by spontaneous waves of neural
activity travelling across the retina.
- Higher level processes in the visual hierarchy build
abstractions with no symmetry.
- Visual cortex is divided into ventral focuses on invariant object recognition. It identifies what is being looked at - leveraging geon based representations of objects. It is highly sensative to image identity, shape, and color, but ignores size and spatial orientation.
and dorsal via the parietal cortex is primarily concerned with space and action. It attends to distance, position, speed, and orientation in space. It is not mirror symmetric.
(parietal) routes. The dorsal system allows us to
handle left right asymmetry for hand gestures, eye are major sensors in primates, based on opsins deployed in the retina & especially fovea, signalling the visual system: Superior colliculi, Thalamus (LGN), Primary visual cortex; and indirectly the amygdala. They also signal [social] emotional state to other people. And they have implicit censorious power with pictures of eyes encouraging people within their view to act more honorably. Eyes are poor scanners and use a saccade to present detail slowly to the fovea. The eye's optical structures and retina are supported by RPE. Eyes do not connect to the brain through the brain stem and so still operate in locked-in syndrome. Evo-devo shows eyes have deep homology. High pressure within the eye can result in glaucoma. Genetic inheritance can result in retinoblastoma. Age is associated with AMD. movements, and various
spatial receptors.
- Lesions of the right parietal cortex of the cerebral cortex is at the back of the brain divided into two. It associates sensory signals of various modalities with:
- Details about the location of the body: supramarginal gyrus; and
- Models interpreting touch, visual signals, language and mathematics.
can induce mirror
blindness reflects bilateral lesions of the dorsal parietal cortex which cause the sufferer to see no difference between a geon described object and its mirror image. The lesion deprives them of any information about right and left, and their intact ventral visual pathway is blind to orientation. Except in the case of reading letters! Expert readers of asymmetric writing systems like English still detect mirror transforms of letters and words. The ventral visual pathway of readers builds in asymmetric letter detectors during neuronal recycling for asymmetric writing systems. . While sufferers lack most
information about orientation they can still detect mirror
letters as long as the writing system is strongly
asymmetric. The reading visual chain has special
mechanisms to overcome the brain's general left right
symmetry.
- Lesions further indicate that the symmetry mechanisms
are still present but are hidden for reading.
Dehaene suggests that when processing reading the parietal
and frontal 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.
lobe sends prioritization signals to focus attention on
the left hemisphere processing.
A
surprising case of mirror dyslexia
Mirror dyslexia is expressed as severe reading problems. However, these problems fall on a normal distribution of reading skills. The majority of the problems affect the letterbox region. But many issues are indirect. In particular disorganization of the left lateral temporal region disrupts phonological generation of the alphabet mapping required for neuronal recycling in the letterbox. Because of the long chain of dependencies in neuronal recycling required for the letterbox to support reading there are many potential developmental aspects that can fail. A variety of gene mutations have been found to induce dyslexia. is
potentially due to a failure of the reading chain to unlearn
symmetry. Micheal McCluskey had a brilliant student who
reported this rare form of dyslexia. On investigation he
found:
- Reading isolated letters resulted in errors of spatial
reversals (p - q, m - w)
- Reading words resulted in reversal of individual letters
and positions mixed up.
- Reading sentences resulted in inverted word order.
- Spatial relations were never stable and were resolved via
context.
- Sufferer struggled to copy drawings with 50% chance of a
mirror reversal.
- Sufferer had mirror errors with grasping.
- Flickering lighting or movement removed the problem.
The patient started reading under a strobe light.
Toward a culture
of neurons
Dehaene asks 'why are humans the only species to have created a
culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
and to reuse
neurons.' He suggests it is the vast conscious neuronal
workspace that allows for flexible rearrangement of the
mental models.
Resolving the
reading paradox
He concludes that there is no reading paradox because the human
brain never evolved for reading. 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.
Biological
evolution is blind. The evolution was cultural is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
. Reading
progressively evolved towards a form adapted to our brain
circuits. After centuries of trial and error, writing
systems converged onto similar solutions.
Dehaene is keen to stress two key facets of this brain function:
- Cultural acquisition is anchored in tightly defined
neuronal circuits.
- Culture is highly constrained by brain structure but the
simple rules that apply allow many combinations.
For reading all the writing systems are based on the morpho-phonological
principle is that all writing systems simultaneously represent word roots and phonological structures. . As Changizi asserts that in all the world's writing systems the arrangements or configurations of individual strokes tend to be the same. Their frequency follows a universal distribution that closely parallels the features of natural scenes. showed all
rely on a small inventory of visual shapes.
Dehaene argues that reading is only one of many cultural
inventions. He assumes each is constrained by our neuronal
architecture. So bridging laws must integrate the laws of
human psychology with the historical, political and economic is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. forces that
shape society. Donald Brown documents 400 features shared
by all cultures including: Use of color, number terms,
territoriality, facial expressions, music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure. It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans. Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens. And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session. He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions. The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one. As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm. The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized. , games and legal
systems. Sperber and Fodor argue describes the aggregate ideas of: Alan Turing, Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, Hilary Putnam & Jerry Fodor; that beliefs and desires are information, bound through sense organ triggered associations with neuronal or other symbolic representations that once triggered give rise to other symbols and muscular actions generating behaviors. For Steven Pinker the theory allows behavior to be explained by beliefs and desires and makes the beliefs and desires part of the physical universe.
the brain has a
collection of specialized modules each providing some
domain of competence. Sperber argues that the modules
evolved for some use (proper domain) but have been extended to
support culture (actual domain). Dehaene sees learned
associations as equivalent to the 'actual domain'. Dehaene
dislikes the idea of 'modules' since he judges the cortex is
vastly more variable, redundant and plastic. But he sees neuronal recycling is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability. Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.
as enriching Sperber's modules.
Dehaene notes that reading, mathematics and music are recent
inventions and limited in their presence in cultures. He
thinks this is because they must be learned.
Dehaene is keen to identify a set of cultural invariants.
He notes potential items from the arts - infants appreciate music, mathematics
- simple objects
are anchored in the brain, and the natural sciences -
naturally build taxonomies, Religion.
Why are
we the only cultural species?
Dehaene asks 'why are we the only cultural is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
species.' He
reflects that it is not known. But he suggests humans are
uniquely able to invent and transmit cultural objects. A
primitive representation of intention, belief and goals is
present in all apes. But it is amplified in humans.
Michael Tomasello argues the human brain is pre-adapted for
cortical transmission, with a well-developed theory of mind of mind is the capability of adults, and even young children, to see that others think and perceive the world differently to them. It typically develops around age three to four. It supports the child's development of empathy. It is associated with the DMPFC, precuneus, superior temporal sulcus & temporoparietal junction. Subsequently more capabilities appear including: Understanding a second person's theory of mind about a third person, Perspectives and Irony.
module. With this:
- Adults can represent the extent and limits of their
children's knowledge.
- Helps children understand the communicative and
pedagogical intensions of adults.
- Helps each human to represent themselves, know their
mental states and change them.
Dehaene notes that children learn language by listening while
they track the gaze of the person talking and decide what they
are referring to.
A global neuronal
workspace
Dehaene adds another essential aspect necessary to create culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal. CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism. Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering. Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling. Damasio notes prokaryotes and social insects have developed cultural social behaviors. Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset. He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised. Culture: - Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation. Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain. Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes. Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach. And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations! PMS symptoms vary by culture.
- Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play. So parents try to control their children's peer group.
- Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc.
- Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate.
- Can transform dominance into honor. There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures. Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian.
- Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.
- Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire.
- Can provide varying levels of support for innovation. Damasio suggests culture is influenced by feelings:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting
detection and diagnosis of homeostatic
deficiencies, identifying
desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural
instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments
required by the cultural process over time
- Produces consciousness according to Dennet.
: unparalleled
imagination -- a capacity for new combinations of ideas.
He suggests the huge human frontal lobe adds this capability by
providing a global
neuronal workspace. In children the ability to
integrate is limited until they complete 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. of the
brain. He argues that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is - The front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. It evolved most recently. During adolescence when the PFC is still deploying, older brain agents provide equivalent strategies: ventral striatum. The PFC has been implicated in planning, working memory: dorsolateral; decision making: Orbitofrontal cortex; and social behavior. It regulates feelings. Different PFC circuits track internal reward driven strategies and externally signalled advice. The PFC chooses between conflicting options, letting go or restraint, especially between cognition and emotions. It imposes an overarching strategy for managing working memory. It is essential for thinking about multiple items with different labels. It includes neurons that are interested in particular sub-categories: Dog, Cat. Once it has made a decision it signals the rest of the frontal lobe just behind it. Glucocorticoids decrease excitability of the PFC.
provides each of us with 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. .
CAS implications
of reading
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 cultural emergence
of writing Dehaene describes.
Visual processing neurons, the global
neuronal workspace and humans all act as 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.
CAS agents responding to visual 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.
signals including writing and
supporting Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support
the emergence of the systems.
Examples of constraints are discussed.
flows via cooperation
with a network of other agents. Neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a: - Receptive element - dendrites
- Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
- Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.
operate via a DNA (DNA), a polymer composed of a chain of deoxy ribose sugars with purine or pyrimidine side chains. DNA naturally forms into helical pairs with the side chains stacked in the center of the helix. It is a natural form of schematic string. The purines and pyrimidines couple so that AT and GC pairs make up the stackable items. A code of triplets of base pairs (enabling 64 separate items to be named) has evolved which now redundantly represents each of the 20 amino-acids that are deployed into proteins, along with triplets representing the termination sequence. Chemical modifications and histone binding (chromatin) allow cells to represent state directly on the DNA schema. To cope with inconsistencies in the cell wide state second messenger and evolved amplification strategies are used. based 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 maintaining
nuclear and synaptic This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which
supports the emergence of complex
adaptive systems (CAS). Kauffman describes the mechanism
by which the system expands across the space.
state and
sending and responding to signals. The signals in the
retina are generated by light sensitive receptors.
Otherwise the signals are generated by other neuronal
agents. The basic architecture allows for flows to be
processed by additional agents when these emerge. For
example neuronal flows can be translated into speech signals
that are processed by other receptive human agents responding to
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.
memetic and genetic schemata
their brains have already encoded. Most of the signalled
information is encoded in the recipient's The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Samuel
modeling is described as an approach.
models. But associative agent's
signals can act as Rather than oppose the direct thrust of some environmental flow agents
can improve their effectiveness with indirect responses.
This page explains how agents are architected to do this and
discusses some examples of how it can be done.
indirect This page discusses the tagging of signals
in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
Tagged signals can be used to control filtering of an event
stream. Examples of CAS filters are reviewed.
tags for higher level agents to filter
on. 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.
Emotional structures
provide modulation of the visual processing chain.
Dehaene's operational model of
the human visual system represents the developmental
deployment of This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolutionarily
specified 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.
The visual chain is valuable enough to be genetically specified
This page reviews the strategy of architecting an end-to-end
solution in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its costs and benefits are discussed.
end-to-end. In this case it is
necessary to allow learning about the proximate environment to
tailor the deployed neuronal networks via Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random
events is explained.
Shewhart cycles so that non matching The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Samuel
modeling is described as an approach.
models and managers can be pruned
back. As Dehaene cleverly realized this required
plasticity allows for neuronal recycling is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability. Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment. A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment. During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation. Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.
used to build the reading This page discusses the strategy of modularity in a complex
adaptive system (CAS). The
benefits, mechanism and its emergence
are discussed.
modules.
Writing and Reading introduces 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.
memetic schemata that can be used to
develop This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its
core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take
advantage of an alteration in, the genome
or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples
from biology, high tech and politics.
evolved amplifiers.
With a This page discusses the physical foundations of complex adaptive
systems (CAS). A small set of
rules is obeyed. New [epi]phenomena then emerge. Examples are
discussed.
written rule enforced by
agents law makers can encourage those subject to the rule to
behave in ways that is slightly beneficial to the subjects but
highly beneficial to the rule makers. While evolution must
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.
blindly wait for the emergence of such
amplifiers, law makers can aim to strategically modify the
rule sets.
Neighborhoods seem typical of CAS This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive
system (CAS).
geographic
clusters.
The emergence of
the alphabet illustrates the need for Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows. They can enforce
separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build
diversity. Examples of different types of barriers: physical
barriers, chemical
molecules can form membranes, probability based,
cell membranes can include controllable
channels, eukaryotes
leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and
their effects are described.
barriers to overcome the Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support
the emergence of the systems.
Examples of constraints are discussed.
constraints of This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
extended
phenotypic alignment.
Dehaene proposes the This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergence of a
global neuronal workspace,
and he wonders
why we are the only cultural species. Matt Ridley
speculates in the 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
Rational Optimist
that the hunter gatherer unit leveraged fire to capture more
resources faster from eating, and cooperated to benefit from the
asymmetry of men hunting and women gathering. This
encouraged signalling in support of cooperating (talking) and
hunting (silent signs) and allowed for resources to be used to
support growth of a bigger brain. Both of these aspects
had the Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time for evolution to have
encoded the specifications of these activities and allow for 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.
cloning of the cortex and mutation
into the prefrontal network that effectively supports talking
and reading.
'Reading in the Brain' reveals key aspects of how our
unconscious reads and writes. It is packed with insightful
details to justify Dehaene's conclusions. A vision 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.
memetic 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
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emerge from the pages!
.
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