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

Power& tradition holding back progress
This page uses an example to illustrate how:
  • A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
  • Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence. 
  • A program approach can ensure strategic alignment. 
Be responsive to market dynamics
This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user. 
The constraints are described. 
The techniques to overcome them are implied. 
Overcome reactionaries
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:
  1. The evolving global scientific network. 
  2. The Bell telephone network.  And
  3. The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. 
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. 
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. 
Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. 
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. 

Strategic innovation
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of BREXIT is summarized.  His ideas are then framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory and reviewed. 


BREXIT
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are monopolists that trade workers for technology.  Monopolies that he argues should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle class. 

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).  While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts with relevant CAS history and theory. 

Monopoly job killers
The IPO of Netscape is defined as the key emergent event of the New Economy by Michael Mandel.  Following the summary of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. 
New economy
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy.  It was enabled by the experience of Keynes and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard, the necessity of improving the situation between the wars and the opportunity created by the catastrophe of the Second World War. 

He describes how it was planned and developed.  How it emerged from the summit.  And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy. 

Like all plans there are mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as best it could. 

And then Conway describes the period after Bretton Woods collapsed.  He explains what followed and also compares the relative performance of the various periods before during and after Bretton Woods. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory.  Conway's book illustrates the rule making and infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.  He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and against the development and deployment of the system.  And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. 

Bretton woods
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla.  But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points.  With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.  Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. 
Housing amplifiers
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system.  Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions.  He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst.  Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. 
Derivative systems
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending.  They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. 

The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently:
  • Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR;
  • Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does.  They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem.  And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future.  

They conclude the question is still political.  They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations.  They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. 

Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. 

National debt
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second industrial revolution were the foundation for American economic growth.  Gordon shows how flows of people into difficult rural America built a population base which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets, Clothes in department stores; that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.  The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities; terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow the economy. 

Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
  • Communications and advertising
  • Credit and finance
  • Public health and the health care network 
  • Health insurance
  • Education
  • Social and welfare services

Counter intuitively the constraints introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2 provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970 creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post war America. 

Subsequently the rate of growth was limited until the shift of women into the workplace and the full networking of voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were muted by the narrow reach of the technologies. 

The development of Big Data, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth, but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of the middle class. 

Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 

American growth
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of money based on the attractive features of precious metals.  He compares the potential for government edicts to create money but sees them as lacking. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.  Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
  • Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy transaction intermediates and
  • Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in supporting survival and replication in the currently accessible niches. 

Emergence of money
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth?  To do this he replaces traditional economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an economy is a system in equilibrium, with complexity economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex adaptive system (CAS). 

He introduces Sugerscape to illustrate an economic CAS model in action.  And then he explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics, Agents, Networks, Emergence, and Evolution. 

Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to the economy to build wealth.  He explains how design spaces map strategies to instances of physical and social technologies.  And he identifies the interactors and selection mechanism of economic evolution. 

This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition of wealth. 

In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance, & Politics & Policy. 

Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we leverage. 

Economic complexity
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time.  He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. 

He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points.  This VDS was quickly copied.  The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines.  Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. 

Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.  Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected.  So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. 

Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside.  This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states.  Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. 

Completing the adaptive shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. 

Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory.  The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. 

Globalization from cotton
The 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
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific investigation of meditation's impact on the brain.  They introduce the book by describing their experiences with meditation, science and the research establishment, their friendship, how meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to back them up. 

Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds work.  They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern tradition of exploring and altering the mind. 

Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at Harvard.  Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of consciousness.  It took over twenty years for scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align with this model.  Much of the prior experimental data had to be abandoned. 

They introduce meditation's impact on the amygdala responding to pain and stress. 

They look at the changes in:
  • Stress
  • Compassion
  • Attention
  • Self-awareness; and the potential for use of mediation in psychiatry. 
And they warn of the occurrence of dark nights. 
They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters, starting with Mingyur Rinpoche, and detect meditation altering traits. 
Finally they discuss the potential benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it broadly to a busy America. 

Meditating neurons
Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy.  She responded by developing Radical Acceptance.  Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to:
  • Initially attend to the sensations of our body, 
  • Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love.  
  • Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free.  
  • Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others.  
  • Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves.  Extend observing this goodness in everyone.  This enables the use of loving-kindness.  
  • Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance.  
  • Realize our Buddha nature. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery.  It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence. 

Compassionate CAS
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.  Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. 

The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. 

Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear.  In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type.  But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. 

The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor:
  1. Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds
  2. Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict
  3. Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds
Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. 

The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. 

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life.  Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. 

Enneagram strategies
Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of  nervous systems and feelings.  These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. 

Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. 

Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness.  His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.'  He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism.  And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. 

Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis.  He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives.  But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. 

Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
  • Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. 
  • Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. 

Emergence of feelings
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. 

Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven to create, and successfully invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and especially portraits.  Vincent worked hard to allow artists like him-self to innovate.  But Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis. 

Nemeczek also provides a brief history of Vincent's life. 

Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
 
Vincent creates
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse and eventual recovery. 

Elton stresses the serendipitous nature of his emergence as a musician.  He describes the contributions  of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's sister, and her mother Ivy; who formed his early childhood proximate environment which prepared him for a job in entertainment: he developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs; entering a network based around Dick James Music.  And he almost got married. 

DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the food.  A first album supported touring and the formation of a band.  A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an overnight sensation.  And during this period of time Elton's testosterone level ramped.  Life changed dramatically. 

Stardom provided many rewards but there were still life's problems to deal with.  Elton was befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated. 

His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly in hotels between concerts.  His hair abandoned him.  But he was saved by the challenge of transforming the collapsed Watford football club.  He retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life. 

Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints, Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he hopes will bring him happiness: trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying Renata. 

He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio.  Problems stress him.  He is frightened by a cancer scare, AIDS, inspired by Ryan White, angered by the Sun, and saddened at breaking Renata's heart.  But he was there for Ryan White's final days.  And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton about his string of addictions.  Elton finally agreed he had a problem.  He went to rehab, stopped hating himself, gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other people. 

It seemed the higher force was supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all; they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni was murdered.  Princess Diana died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral.  He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina Turner.  While his new records sold well he found himself in debt and terminated the management relationship with John Reid Enterprises. 

Elton and Bernie improved their situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with his seminal influence: Leon Russell. 

Elton and David became parents of two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate mother and network in California.  They quietly get married when the UK allows.  Elton's mum remains difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many at the funeral recall her fun side with him.  Being parents increases the long-term stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys.  But Elton needs to go out with a bang! And everyone helps. 

Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details of the creative process from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
 
My song
Richard Feynman outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story. 

Richard's personality encouraged him to patiently seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and practice through building and fixing radios.  Leonardo's life inspired him to try innovation, which he concluded was hard.  He played with the emotion in communications, a skill which he used later at Caltech.  And he made a game of avoiding following orders at MIT.  Working during the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and practice. 

Feynman enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton, where the successful approach to science was just like his.  His approach was based on patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for qualitative exploration.  Overtime he added experimental techniques.  He would test the assertions in articles with amusing investigations; with his mind aligned by feelings of joy.  Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized.  He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being taught at Princeton to his current pick.  In his summer recess he explored biology.  Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his creativity.  And his practical orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway, supported his desire for choices and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural pursuits.  Being mostly self-taught, he developed different approaches to problems than the standard strategies provided by mass education. 

Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father.  But are they very different?

While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about the implications of the European war.  After a friend enlisted he decided to dedicate his summer holiday to helping the war effort.  Feynman got involved in the Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the physics of the project, him on Niels Bohr; but was freed from them by Von Neumann.  The records & reports of the project were kept in filing cabinets.  Richard explored the weaknesses of the locks and safes deployed to secure these secrets.  Just after the war he was called up by the draft board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally unfit. 

After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell.  He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on fun.  He enjoyed knowing about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate and approximate a value the fastest. 
Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much fun for Richard.  So he used the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet beautiful women.  Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque frequenting one, and later ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he drank with to sleep with him. 

Richard reflects on various times when he made government officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape;
 
Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech.  Both institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making, but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste of time and he saw risks in a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech and stay there. 

Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in Japan.  Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little Japanese.  Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse effectively, but stops when he finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his individualism. 

Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics.  He felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the latest details, fearful that he could not cope; as the community worked to understand the laws of beta decay.  But Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity premise.  Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of reports.  Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang discussed a failure and a theory to explain it.  Richard felt terrified and could not understand what they said.  His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student having fun, read every line and equation of their paper; he would understand it.  And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what was happening and what still seemed conflicted.  He reported his ideas back to the community.  After Richard returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay.  Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply describing the details of beta decay.  He had identified the workings of a fundamental law.  Years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics.  He was conflicted about the prize and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip, where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese ambassador. 

Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling it on a digital computer.  He explored hallucinations and the reality of experiences. 

Richard lobbies for integrity in science. 

In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science, Richard was quirky.  He would tease those who asked for his help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to their part of the agreement.  And he paid no attention to the logistical details of planning.  He loved percussion, playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success.  He eventually discovered art could be fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying mathematical beauty of the physical world.  He had a great art teacher.  But he discovered although he could eventually draw well he did not understand art. 

Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful, who were interested in integrating art and science, did not understand either subject.  He found the situation was similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects made him angry and disturbed, so he avoided participating in them.  It seemed ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing culture to the physicists!

He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil.  He gets involved in the California public school text book selection process which he concluded was totally broken, but also reveals how his father provided him with a vision of how our world works, inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical theory. 

Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported his creative development from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
 
Richard draws
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. 
Accumulating small changes
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. 
Autonomous emergence
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work.  He shows how these phenomena are sustained.  The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. 
Constraint based phenomena
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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 provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
CAS) 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:
  1. 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. 
  2. 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:
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:
  1. Sufferers can't read a single letter. 
  2. 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.  Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object.  These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.  
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.  Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object.  These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.  
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.  Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object.  These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.  
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.  Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object.  These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.  
recognition system to the language circuit.  They do this in three phases:
  1. 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. 
  2. 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. 
  3. 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:
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:
  1. Cultural acquisition is anchored in tightly defined neuronal circuits. 
  2. 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: Elton John, Elvis Presley; 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 provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.'  It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents.  It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form.  A proposal that does not conform is wrong. 

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
(CAS) theory applies directly to both the architecture and operation of the brain and the 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.  Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment. 
models.  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
This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which supports the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS).  Kauffman describes the mechanism by which the system expands across the space. 
environment 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.  Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment. 
models 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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This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

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

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