Bak’s Sand Pile

Bak's Sand Pile, catastrophes, Per Bak, self-organized criticality, ted lewis

I want to give a plug to Ted Lewis’ new book Bak’s Sand Pile.

Did the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, the massive power blackout of 2003, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Gulf oil spill of 2010 ‘just happen’-or were these shattering events foreseeable? Do such calamities in fact follow a predictable pattern? Can we plan for the unforeseen by thinking about the unthinkable? Ted Lewis explains the pattern of catastrophes and their underlying cause. In a provocative tour of a volatile world, he guides the reader through mega-fires, fragile power grids, mismanaged telecommunication systems, global terrorist movements, migrating viruses, volatile markets and Internet storms. Modern societies want to avert catastrophes, but the drive to make things faster, cheaper, and more efficient leads to self-organized criticality-the condition of systems on the verge of disaster. This is a double-edged sword. Everything from biological evolution to political revolution is driven by some collapse, calamity or crisis. To avoid annihilation but allow for progress, we must change the ways in which we understand the patterns and manage systems. Bak’s Sand Pile explains how.

Ted is the author of the very excellent Network Science: Theory and Applications and is contributing a paper to Marge and my themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on stigmergy which is about to be delivered to the publisher. Ted is Professor of Computer Science and Executive Director of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School. If you want to know more about the late Per Bak, here is his obituary.

Review of Menary’s (ed.) The Extended Mind

active externalism, active perception, Adams & Aizawa, Andy Clark, david chalmers, David Spurrett, extended mind, externalism, Joseph Ulatowski, mark rowlands, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, richard menary, robert rupert, robert wilson, situated cognition, Stephen Cowley, susan hurley

Richard Menary’s long time coming The Extended Mind is reviewed here by  Joseph Ulatowski.

Colin McGinn: All machine and no ghost?

cognition, cognitive closure, cognitive science, Colin McGinn, consciousness, Descartes, dualism, Eliminative Materialism, hayek, idealism, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, Panpsychism, philosophy of mind, the "easy" problems, the "hard" problem, the sensory order

Colin McGinn locates his position within philosophy of mind. Though not a fashionable position, I’m very sympathetic to it – and of course, it is a position that has much in common with Hayek.

The “mysterianism” I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth – an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history – as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.

Hayek, Connectionism, and Scientific Naturalism

connectionism, intentionality, joshua rust, naturalism, science, Searle

Here is an excellent paper by Joshua Rust.

Barry Smith (1997, p. 18) observes that ‘‘Hayek is at one with the connectionist tendency within contemporary cognitive science.’’ And at one level of description, Smith is correct. Friedrich Hayek’s question is, in part, a procedural one: by what mechanism does the mental order come to replicate or represent the most general features of the physical order of which it is a part? In response, Hayek posits an associative scheme that bears some resemblance to contemporary connectionist theories of mind. Nevertheless, I shall contend that Hayek is wrongly shoehorned into the connectionist camp. Hayek’s question cannot be the same as the philosophical connectionist because the former does not share the same ontological presuppositions as the latter.

Extended mind, architecture and design

Andy Clark, architecture, cognitive science, david chalmers, Embedded, embodied cognition, embodiment, extended mind, externalism, philosophy of mind

Chalmers’ and Clark’s extended mind thesis cited in this article from an architecture and design publication.

Turning to philosophy and robotics gives us a new insight into what might be going on. In 1998, A. Clark and D. Chalmers proposed the “extended mind” concept, where the workings of our mind actually extend beyond the brain and into our surroundings. An interplay takes place between our thoughts and internal memories, and knowledge and information stored outside yet within ready reach. Mobile robots do, in fact, use their environment as their memory — they have no stored internal memory, and thus save enormous computational overhead. Rodney Brooks’ Mars Explorer works in precisely this way. Its ability to navigate its environment comes from an “intelligence” that links internal processors with external information.

This implies that the environment is crucial to the development of our brain: our mind is an integral part of our environment, and if we wish it to engage our intelligence, the environment should embody the same degree of organized complexity as our neurological processes themselves. Two possible connective scenarios are thus strikingly contrasted. 1. In an information-sparse, minimalist environment, our mind stops at the skull’s interior. 2. In a coherently complex environment, our mind can extend into and interact with the visual information stored outside. In the latter case, we are situated in a vastly richer information field that drives our brain’s growth in order to process and interpret this information.

Meet the New Boss

distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, emergence, extended mind, externalism, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence

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.

Shapin on Polanyi

constructivism, knowing how knowing that, Mary Jo Nye, polanyi, rationalism, social constructivism, social epistemology, spontaneous orders, steven shapin, tacit knowledge

Shapin’s London Review of Books review of Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science by Mary Jo Nye. (Both Hayek and Oakeshott are mentioned by Shapin).

Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum. We know how to ride a bicycle, but we can’t write down how to do it, at least not in a way that allows non-cyclists to read our instructions, get on their bikes and ride off. We can reliably pick out a familiar face in a crowd, but we can’t say just what it is about the face that we recognise. And, crucially, since Polanyi is now known mainly as a philosopher of science, a scientist can’t adequately describe how to do a bit of science through any version of formalised ‘Scientific Method’. Whether the craft is cooking, carpentry or chemistry, the apprentice learns by watching and doing. Where knowledge and skill are concerned, it’s not all talk.

Conference on Austrian economics and philosophy

austrian economics, bretano, Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo

My chum Gloria is convening the following conference:

Call for Papers for Conference on Austrian economics and philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington, Nov- 1-3. Abstracts due July 2.

We seek innovative contributions that deepen our understanding of Austrian philosophy and Austrian economics. For the purposes of this conference, we are demarcating the Brentanian tradition as that which starts with Brentano and culminates in the work of the students of his students, such as Stein, Reinach, Ingarden. Similarly, we are demarcating the Mengerian tradition as that which starts with Menger and culminates in the contributions of the last generation of economists of this School who are Austrian nationals.

Abstracts may not be longer than 500 words and prepared for blind reviewing by a selection committee. Enclose a separate file indicating name, affiliation, and title of abstract. These files should be Word documents only. Please send submissions to Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo.

Remembering Varela

Autopoiesis, computer science, consciousness, embodied cognition, embodiment, enaction, enactivism, externalism, francesco varela, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of social science

Four articles (and more) of interest to theorists interested in enaction:

1. Tom Froese’s new article in Adaptive Behavior:

Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the paradigm’s “lower-level” insights into embodiment and situatedness appear to be amenable to a functionalist reinterpretation. In this review, I show on the basis of the recently published collection of papers, Enaction, that the paradigm of enaction has (a) a unique foundation in the notion of sense-making that places fundamental limits on the scope of functionalist appropriation; (b) a unique perspective on higher-level cognition that sets important new research directions without the need for the concept of mental representation; (c) a new concept of specifically human cognition in terms of second-order sense-making; and (d) a rich variety of approaches to explain the evolutionary, historical, and developmental origins of this sophisticated human ability. I also indicate how studies of the role of embodiment for abstract human cognition can strengthen their position by reconceiving their notion of embodiment in enactive terms.

2. Autopoiesis, Systems Thinking and Systemic Practice: The Contribution of Francisco Varela by Alberto Paucar-Caceres, Roger Harnden & André Reichel introduction to a special themed issue Systems Research and Behavioral Science:

This special issue of Systems Research and Behavioral Sciences (SRBS) is a memorial issue to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the tragic early death of Francisco Varela (7 September 1946–28 May 2001). A truly remarkable ‘renaissance man’, his wide spectrum of interests encompassed biology, mathematics, neuroscience, epistemology, cognitive science, ethics and philosophy. His early death could not mask an amazingly productive life nor the creative and open way he approached all his activities. Because his ideas have been extremely influential and inspiring, we wanted to remember him with a tribute issue composed of papers reflecting and highlighting his influential work in contemporary science, particularly with regard to systems thinking and system practice.

3. Another Froese article From Second-order Cybernetics to Enactive Cognitive Science: Varela’s Turn From Epistemology to Phenomenology

Varela is well known in the systems sciences for his work on second-order cybernetics, biology of cognition and especially autopoietic theory. His concern during this period was to find an appropriate epistemological foundation for the self-reference inherent in life and mind. In his later years, Varela began to develop the so-called ‘enactive’ approach to cognitive science, which sets itself apart from other sciences by promoting a careful consideration of concrete experiential insights. His final efforts were thus dedicated to finding a pragmatic phenomenological foundation for life and mind. It is argued that Varela’s experiential turn—from epistemology to phenomenology—can be seen as a natural progression that builds on many ideas that were already implicit in second-order cybernetics and biology of cognition. It is also suggested that the rigorous study of conscious experience may enable us to refine our theories and systemic concepts of life, mind and sociality.

4. Pier Luigi Luisi’s recollection of Varela in Systems research and behavioral science:

I review here my personal and scientific interactions with Francisco Varela, starting from our meeting in 1983 in Alpbach, Austria, a momentous meeting, which was also the place where the Mind and Life Institute and independently the Cortona week were conceived. Later on, the scientific cooperation focussed on autopoiesis and permitted to arrive at the experimental autopoiesis on the basis of the self-reproduction of micelles and vesicles. I then briefly describe how Francisco, based on the complementary notion of cognition, was able to draw the bridge between biology and cognitive sciences. The main keywords here are enaction and embodied mind. From here, and towards the end of his life, Francisco focussed mostly on neurobiology, where he introduced the notion of neurophenomenology centred on first-person reports. However, his seminal work on autopoiesis was instrumental to conceive the new field of research on the minimal cells, which is briefly described. I conclude with an overview of the meaning of the work of Francisco for life sciences at large.

Free will

freewill, moral philosophy, mri, neural correlates, neurobiology, neuron, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy, philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, political philosophy

Two articles on that old philosophical chestnut – free will: one from Intelligent Life (neurons v. free will) and one from the sister title, the Economist (Free will and politics).