Topic: Emerging Systems

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Organizations: Cycles and Spirals

Friday, July 25, 2008 - 12:07 PM

Wikipedia : Cycles

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"This image has been (or is hereby) released into the public domain by its author, Cumbrowski at the English Wikipedia project.
This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible:
Cumbrowski grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose,
without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law."

Time ^ Calendar
Planetary cycles
Astronomical cycles
Climate and weather cycles
Geological cycles
Organic
Agricultural cycles
Biological and medical cycles
Brain waves and cycles
Physics
Mathematics of waves and cycles
Electromagnetic spectrum
Sound waves
Manmade
Economic and business cycles
Music and rhythm cycles
Religious, mythological, and spiritual cycles
Social and cultural cycles
Military and war
Literature
& Spirals . . .

10th Anniversary of Media Ecology

People: Incompleteness and Strange Loops

Friday, May 18, 2007 - 05:08 PM

"Kurt Gödel's (1906-1978) monumental theorem of incompleteness demonstrated that in every formal system of arithmetic there are true statements that nevertheless cannot be proved. The result was an upheaval that spread far beyond mathematics, challenging conceptions of the nature of the mind."- Rebecca Goldstein, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Harvard University

"I am a Strange Loop" (2007), seeks to demonstrate
how the properties of self-referential systems,
demonstrated most famously in
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, can be
used to describe the unique properties of minds.
- Douglas_Hofstadter, Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition
Indiana University

"Douglas R. Hofstadter: Analogy as Core, Core as Analogy"
Glen Worthey, Humanities Digital Information Service (HDIS), Stanford University Libraries, 2006

"Is the core of cognition and animacy essentially only self-representation and self-reference (as in Bach, in our DNA and elsewhere)? Is it essential incompleteness (as in Gödel’s Theorem and elsewhere)? Is it strange loops and tangled hierarchies (as in Escher, in Hofstadter’s own book, I Am a Strange Loop, and elsewhere)? Is it in the patterns, puzzles, paradoxes, puns, poetry, and programming that we see throughout Hofstadter’s work? Or is it elsewhere?

Elsewhere.... Perhaps it is precisely in analogy that we find the common thread of all these cognitive and creative phenomena, and thus the common element in the endeavors that make us human, and thus the core of our humanity..."


"The Year of Mathemagical Thinking"
Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine, March 15, 2007

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Review: "A Reflection on The Loopy Self"
Ben C. Burns, Harvard Crimson, April 27, 2007

“I Am a Strange Loop” sets out to probe the essence of the soul—in a philosophical, cognitive sense... Consciousness, soul, and “a light on inside” are all terms referring to the essential “I” which somehow composes an individual human self...

...is very self-referential, and that any explanation of the concept bends back onto the same concept again. The resulting loop, though, isn’t like most loops caused by self-reference, since there’s no feedback as in... an infinite corridor of TV screens on videotape. So consciousness isn’t a regular loop; it’s a strange loop.

..while presenting arguments of logic, clever bits of analogy here and there add up to reveal that the book itself is more than just a friendly essay: everywhere you turn, “Strange Loop” is drawing back on itself, too. For example, the book’s arguments are made almost entirely through symbols, analogies, and tales of personal experience. Appropriately, Hofstadter devotes much discussion to the reasons that symbols, analogies, and empathy (or, as he calls it, “Varying Degrees of Being Another”) actually work. This book is a work of art, unabashedly self-referential on every level..."

"Trying to Muse Rationally about the Singularity Scenario" [Quicktime] [MP3]
Singularity Summit, Stanford University, May 13, 2006

Abstract: "...And yet there are some basic ideas that we should not lose track of, and that should help to keep us from confusing wild speculation with grounded reality. In my talk, I will attempt to chart out a way of looking at the “singularity scenario” with one's feet on the ground, and I will try to give, using my moderate familiarity with a number of different scientific disciplines, a personal appraisal of what I see as the likelihood of our being eclipsed by (or absorbed into) a vast computational network of superminds, in the course of the next few decades."

"The So-called Singularity: An Onrushing Tsunami, or Another Y2K?" [MP3]
Artificial Life X: Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems
Bloomington Campus, Indiana University, June 3-7, 2006

Abstract: "In the past few years, a number of futurologists, extrapolating on the basis of many interrelated exponential curves such as Moore's Law, have come to the conclusion that computer intelligence is rising so swiftly that quite soon, it will inevitably reach and then surpass human intelligence, and that at that monumental juncture in the history of this planet, humanity will be eclipsed and replaced by its own creations. Within a few decades, these cyberprophets proclaim, we humans will be living among superintelligent entities that are just as incomprehensible to us as we are incomprehensible to bacteria, and the upward spiral will continue from there on without limit, resulting in entities "who" are literally billions of times more intelligent than today's humans are, and "who" will soon commandeer stars and then whole galaxies, finally turning the entire universe into one single inconceivably intelligent self-reflective organism akin to the Omega Point of the mystic Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin..."

Organizations: A growing body of empirical evidence...

Thursday, February 01, 2007 - 10:19 AM

ON THE BRAIN by The Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute

"For more than 2,500 years, Buddhist monks have known that practicing meditation leads to increased inner strength, calmness and self-awareness, strengthened contact with subconscious feelings and thoughts, and greater spiritual growth. Now, Harvard Medical School scientists have found that regular meditation can also alter the structure of our brain..."

Volume 12, Number 3 - Fall 2006: Download Paper [med.harvard.edu]

Projects: Animated Parable for the Busy and Preoccupied [#100]

Thursday, August 10, 2006 - 02:52 AM

Freedom River

Narrator: Orson Wells | Parable: Warren H. Schmidt
Writer: Sam Weiss| Screenplay: Joseph Cavella

Complexity Rising:
From Human Beings to Human Civilzation, a Complexity Profile

"A schematic history of human civilization reflects a growing complexity of the
collective behavior of human organizations. The internal structure of organizations
changed from the large branching ratio hierarchies of ancient civilizations,
through decreasing branching ratios of massive hierarchical bureaucracies,
to hybrid systems where lateral connections appear to be more important than the hierarchy.
As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous.
The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increaseing specialization and diversity of professions.
Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant."
- The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) by Yaneer Bar-Yam

News: Complexity, Democracy & Sustainability

Monday, February 27, 2006 - 04:19 PM

July 9-14, 2006 @ Sonoma State University. The 50th anniversary conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences offers an opportunity to celebrate and reinvigorate a half-century of interdisciplinary collaboration and synthesis.



• Complex Systems and the Roots of Systems Thinking
What can the sciences of complexity teach us about social justice and sustainability?

• Self-Organization and Living Systems
What is the nature of the relationship between information and consciousness?

• Ecological Systems and Sustainability
How do we manage information in a way that fosters effective decision-making processes?

• Social Systems Design and Practice
How do we nurture organizational structures that serve human needs while also protecting our resources for future generations?

News: Cellular Sounds from Automata

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 - 12:52 AM

WolframTones is based on a core discovery of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science: that in the computational universe even extremely simple rules or programs can give behavior of great complexity. Each composition is produced by running a program found by searching the computational universe, taking the pattern the program produces, and converting it to a musical score. WolframTones uses a type of program known as a one-dimensional cellular automaton, or Wolfram automaton, studied by Stephen Wolfram since the early 1980s.

People: Inventor of Dreams, SciAm

Thursday, February 24, 2005 - 02:11 PM

Nikola Tesla, the father of today's AC electrical system and other key inventions, often failed to bring his visionary ideas to real-world fruition. By W. Bernard Carlson. When members of the Chicago Commercial Club arrived to hear a lecture by the famed electrical inventor Nikola Tesla on May 13, 1899, they were startled by the sight of an artificial lake sitting in the middle of the auditorium. Everyone knew that Tesla--the man who had devised the alternating-current (AC) system that brought electricity into people's homes and businesses--was a master showman.

People: Free Green Meme - Paul Hawken, Long Now Foundation & "The Blessed Unrest" [UPDATED]

Friday, October 15, 2004 - 12:43 AM

[UPDATED MAY 5, 02007] June 8 - Paul Hawken, "The New Great Transformation"

From Stewart Brand: "The environmental movement has moved on. It has become so deep and wide that it adds up to something new entirely, still unnamed. Whatever it is, it is now the largest movement in the world and the least ideological. Driven by science and patience, it is civilization-scale therapy." Paul Hawken, "ur-environmentalist" [biography] will deliver a 'landmark address' on "The Long Green." "The Long Now Foundation was established...

People: Easing the Mind with Fractals

Friday, May 21, 2004 - 02:20 PM

In 'Fractal Expressionism' associate professor, Richard Taylor (Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon) combines science and art stating that American painter Jackson Pollack's paintings were fractal. But it doesn't stop there... a relationship between the our visual field's complexity and our levels of stress can be reduced, if we take into account our environment and work surroundings... At their basic level, fractals are repeating patterns that reveal greater complexity the more they are enlarged. Some are geometric and easy to spot, like a snowflake or the popular example known as the Sierpinski Triangle, a triangle made of so many smaller triangles that the closer you look the more triangles you find...

People: Stephen Wolfram & A New Kind of Science

Tuesday, February 10, 2004 - 12:16 PM

Physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram has made his seminal work, A New Kind of Science, available for free online. What is the Principle of Computational Equivalence? Almost all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication. More specifically, the principle of computational equivalence says that systems found in the natural world can perform computations up to a maximal ("universal") level of computational power, and that most systems do in fact attain this maximal level of computational power.