Month: September 2022

DE-COUPLING. “Interestingly, analysis of fMRI data showed that loss of consciousness due to brain injury corresponds to a reduction of integrated information and causal emergence in the brain.” (fMRI = functional MRI). https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT CONSCIOUSNESS. “In this way, the more nuanced view on neural information dynamics offered by ΦID offers the promise of further insights for our understanding of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Developing procedures to either identify emergent features, or to efficiently calculate emergent capacity in large systems are important avenues for future work.” (ΦID = Integrated Information Decomposition). https://lnkd.in/eFDvNHBt View in LinkedIn

ANT HIVE. “An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words, there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence View in LinkedIn

INTERCONNECTIVITY. “Emergent behaviours can occur because of intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system's evolution.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence View in LinkedIn

COMMON EXAMPLES. “The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or school of fish are good examples of emergent properties.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence View in LinkedIn

COMPLEX SYSTEMS. “One reason emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between a system's components increases exponentially with the number of components, thus allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge. Emergence is often a product of particular patterns of interaction. Negative feedback introduces constraints that serve to fix structures or behaviours. In contrast, positive feedback promotes change, allowing local variations to grow into global patterns.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence View in LinkedIn

SPIRITUAL VIEWS. “In religion, emergence grounds expressions of religious naturalism and syntheism in which a sense of the sacred is perceived in the workings of entirely naturalistic processes by which more complex forms arise or evolve from simpler forms.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence View in LinkedIn

ABOMINABLE MYSTERY. “Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing.” (Mark A. Bedau). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second weekend on the phenomenon of emergence. “The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations, but rather to catalogue and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself. We call this physics of the next [21st] century the study of complex adaptive matter.” (David Pines, Santa Fe Institute). https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st-century-science-4324ac0f951e#:~:text=Examples%20of%20emergent%20behavior%20are,and%20planets%2C%20the%20evolution%20of View in LinkedIn

MATERIAL DRIVEN. “As in Nature, when creation begins with matter, morphogenesis, or the generation of form, is a process engendered by the physical forces of Nature. Similarly, in the framework of this essay, Material is not considered a subordinate attribute of form, but rather its progenitor.” (The remarkable Professor Neri Oxman, MIT Media Lab). https://lnkd.in/ezq26y33 View in LinkedIn