Coming soon, the second paper co-authored with Dave Hardwick to appear in Studies in Emergent Order
Abstract: In a recent paper (Hardwick & Marsh, in press) we examine the recent tensions between the two broadly successful spontaneous orders, namely the Market and Science. We argued for an epistemic pluralism, the view that freedom and liberty (indeed the very concept of liberalism and civil society) exists at the nexus of a manifold of spontaneous forces, and that no single epistemic system should dominate. We also briefly introduced the concept of “iterative” knowledge to characterize the essentially dynamic nature of scientific knowledge. Herein lies a tension. The Market (and perhaps the prevailing culture at large) sees scientific knowledge in cumulative terms, that is, progressing to a conclusion in a linear fashion. This relatively static understanding of medical science as it relates to pharmaceutical studies can have a corrosive effect on the practice of medicine and ultimately, we believe, on the proper functioning of the market itself. In this paper we examine this tension in much closer detail by focusing upon the demands of the market, specifically the pharmaceutical industry, and the science upon which it is based. In other words, we expound upon a clash of epistemic value – one (science) that sees knowledge as essentially iterative (dynamic yet tentative) and the other (the Market) that harvests conclusive scientific knowledge (ostensibly as a fixed and firm commodity) functional to its own interests. Clinical Trials that are sharply focused with precisely determined deliverables often manifest this tension in the sharpest of relief. As a means of recovering drug development and testing costs, conclusive assessment is required to avoid creating serious financial problems for the companies themselves not to mention issues in the public interest.
May 24, 2012
Short URL Epistemology, Knowledge, Business, Drug development, Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals, Pharmaceuticals, Medicine, Clinical trial social epistemology, political philosophy, epistemology, liberalism, science, liberty, distributed knowledge, philosophy of social science, philosophy of science, complexity, distributed cognition, individual, libertarianism, incommensurability, individualism, collective knowledge
May 17, 2012
Short URL consciousness, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, knowing how knowing that, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, rationalism, rationality, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence, tacit knowledge
May 8, 2012
Short URL cognition, cognitive closure, cognitive science, constructivism, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, hayek, liberalism, liberty, philosophical psychology, philosophy of social science, qualia, rationalism, social constructivism, social epistemology, social ontology, socialism, sociocognition, spontaneous orders
Readers with some familiarity with the eclectic content found on this website will be aware that the humble ant features strongly. Here is an article that offers a brief and accessible discussion of an excellent symposium to be found in Behavioral Ecology that features Mark Moffett’s work.
May 4, 2012
Short URL Ant, Ant colony, Behavioral Ecology, Laurent Keller, Mark W. Moffett ants, cognitive science, cognitive systems, complex adaptive systems, complexity, computation, computational intelligence, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, spontaneous orders, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
“Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” in Science.
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.
April 18, 2012
Short URL Cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, Extended Mind, Google, Philosophy of mind, Search Engines, Searching, social epistemology, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy, Transactive memory, Web search engine distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, global brain, google, memory
Just under a week until the CI2012 shindig – as it so happens I’m busy co-writing a paper and co-editing a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on a species of CI – surprise, surprise “stigmergy.”
April 14, 2012
Short URL Artificial intelligence, Austrian School, Cognition, Collective intelligence, complexity, Extended Mind, Intelligence, Knowledge, Knowledge Management, Philosophy of mind, social epistemology, Social Sciences, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy, Wikipedia collaboration, collective intentionality, collective knowledge, complex adaptive systems, complexity, computational intelligence, computer simulations, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Don Lavoie, group agency, group cognition, group justification, group minds, hayek, hypothesis of embedded cognition, self organizing systems, situated cognition, social cognition, social connectionism, social epistemology, social networking, social ontology, sociocognition, sociology of science, spontaneous order, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
Check out Joaquín Fuster’s recent paper:
Only now, more than half a century after the publication of his theoretical book (Hayek, 1952), is the reaction to Hayek’s argument beginning to be heard. And it’s a positive reaction, now supported by facts. He used to say that without a theory the facts are silent. Now, belatedly reacting to his book, we can confidently say that modern facts speak eloquently for his theory. In order to understand how modern facts meet Hayek, it is necessary to understand where his thinking came from and where cognitive neuroscience has been going in the past 50 years. Only in this manner can we fully appreciate the happy convergence of two trends of cognitive neuroscience that for most of the 20th century have developed far apart from each other. One is the ‘‘modular’’ trend (one cerebral module for each cognitive function), the other the ‘‘distributed’’ or reticular trend (brain networks of distributed knowledge participating in all the cognitive functions that adapt the individual to his environment). In his The Sensory Order, Hayek was the first to theoretically adopt the latter trend, which has lately developed greatly. Yet, astonishingly, to this day, most of the main actors in the field of cognitive neuroscience don’t even know of Hayek. In my opinion, the chief reason for this lingering neglect of his ideas is the language he used in his book. For example, he used terms that are unusual in physiological psychology, such as ‘‘following’’ and ‘‘map,’’ to characterize what in modern translation corresponds to synaptic association and neural network, respectively. Three powerful intellectual currents shaped Hayek’s psychology: Vienna’s logical positivism, Gestalt psychology, and psychophysics. Curiously, he tried to disown all three, yet ended up modifying them and incorporating them in his thinking.Afourth current, the dynamic systems theory of Von Bertalanffy (1950), came natural to him to theorize about the brain after having accepted the relational code of Gestalt (Koffka, 1935). After all, Hayek had been applying general complex systems theory to economics. With his application of that theory to psychology came the acceptance of a cortical dynamics in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts and irreducible to them: a cortical dynamics in which relationships were established by cell connections. Yet, in his time, little was known about the connectivity or physiology of the brain to support the relational anatomical code or the dynamics of the perceptual system that he devised. Now we know much more about them. Like the positivists of the ‘‘Vienna Circle,’’ Hayek advocated the use of the scientific method devoid of metaphysics as the only valid approach to human knowledge. In dealing with perception, however, he rejected the purely empiricist tenets of the positivists (like his friend Karl Popper, another quasi-renegade among them). According to Hayek, no perception was reducible to raw sensation. The concept of the brain as tabula rasa or passive recipient of sensations was to him unacceptable. The ‘‘elementary sensations’’ (e.g., a pure color) proposed by Ernst Mach (1885), the famous psychophysicist, were literally meaningless as a foundation for perception. Even the simplest of sensations is based on prior experience, either by the self or by the species – thus, in the latter case, inherited.
March 1, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, Ernst Mach, Friedrich Hayek, Hayek, Karl Popper, Philosophy of mind, Psychology, Vienna, Vienna Circle brain, brain scans, brain science, cognition, cognitive science, consciousness, distributed knowledge, Fuster, hayek, joaquin fuster, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, qualia, the "easy" problems, the "hard" problem, the sensory order
This article from The Atlantic.
A FEW YEARS AFTER Philip Rosedale graduated from college with a degree in physics, he joined RealNetworks, then an audio-streaming company. It was a top-down, command-and-control kind of place, where difficult software projects were outlined in advance and executed according to carefully conceived plans.
Rosedale hated it. As a teenager more interested in programming than partying, he had experimented with simulations of flocking birds and other leaderless systems. He marveled at how order could emerge in the absence of hierarchy. “You think that they have a leader and a command architecture, and of course they don’t,” he tells me, going on to describe his “almost spiritual belief” in group self-organization.
February 25, 2012
Short URL Philip Rosedale, RealNetworks, Second Life distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, emergence, extended mind, externalism, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence
Simon died this day in 2001. Check out these two books – Models of a Man (as with most edited books this is uneven, but there is still much to recommend it) and Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America, an excellent intellectual biography. Speaking of Simon, I have a paper coming out entitled “Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension” to be found in a collection edited by Roger Frantz and Robert Leeson Hayek and Behavioural Economics” Vol 4 of Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics with an introduction by non-other than Vernon Smith (whom I met in Tucson last May) and a host of other luminaries such as Herb Gintis, Deirdre McCloskey, Gerry Steele and others. Here is the abstract for my paper:
Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is both unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition.
February 9, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Deirdre McCloskey, Economics, Friedrich Hayek, Hayek, Herbert Simon, Simon, Social Sciences, Vernon Smith bounded rationality, cognitive closure, cognitive science, complex adaptive systems, complexity, computational intelligence, consciousness, Deirdre McCloskey, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Embedded, embodied cognition, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, herb gintis, Herbert Simon, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence
Here is a rather scathing review of David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.
The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used “medium is the message,” McLuhan’s major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems — such as the media — operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan’s primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, “McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions.”
German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan’s inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher — probably the greatest of the 20th century — the most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.
February 3, 2012
Short URL David Weinberger, distributed knowledge, Epistemology, Facts, Knowledge, social epistemology constructing the world, constructivism, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Heidegger, internet, Marshall McLuhan, network theory, networks, social cognition, social connectionism, social constructivism, social epistemology, social facts, social networking, social ontology, social reality
