Category: Biology of Information

• Contextualizing predictive minds

  “Contextualizing predictive minds” discusses how the structure of human memory seems to be optimized for efficient prediction, planning, and behavior. We propose that these capacities rely on a tripartite structure of memory that includes concepts, events, and contexts—three layers that constitute the mental world model. We suggest that the mechanism that critically increases adaptivity and…

  walterstiers

  2024-12-17

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, psychology

• Bayesian Models of Cognition 

  “Bayesian Models of Cognition Reverse Engineering the Mind” is a new MIT-press Open Access book available for online reading. The definitive introduction to Bayesian cognitive science, written by pioneers of the field. How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? How do our minds get so much from so little? Bayesian models of cognition provide…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-19

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, data-science, machine-learning, statistics

• Predecisional information search adaptively reduces uncertainty

  “Predecisional information search adaptively reduces three typesof uncertainty“ How do people search for information when they are given the opportunity to freely explore their options? Information search is an integral part of the decision-making process. Every choice we make is based on information that must first be obtained. In many cases, information search is inherently…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-18

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind

  “The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind“:Karl Friston’s free-energy principle casts agents as self-evidencing through active inference. This implies that decision-making, planning and information-seeking are, in a generic sense, ‘wishful’. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on this perplexing aspect of the free-energy principle and unpack the epistemological implications of wishful thinking under the free-energy principle.…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-05

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, affirmations, manifestation, mindset, philosophy

• Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures

  “Cognitive Biases in Fact-Checking and Their Countermeasures: A Review“ Types of user tasks that may involve cognitive biases: Task Description Causal Attribution Tasks involving an assessment of causality. Decision Tasks involving the selection of one over several alternative options. Estimation Tasks where people are asked to assess the value of a quantity. Hypothesis Assessment Tasks…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-05

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked, bias, cognitive-bias, cognitive-biases, decision-making, psychology

• A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds

  We’re being spoiled by MIT Press Open Access. Not just did we just receive access to the great title “From Sensing to Sentience” , but also “A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness” became available for download. A panoramic view of the evolution of life on our planet, from…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-04

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, brain, consciousness, evolution, philosophy, Science

• From Sensing to Sentience: How Feeling Emerges from the Brain

  Open access book, download available @ MIT Press A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain. Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain. Emergent…

  walterstiers

  2024-11-04

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, consciousness, sentience

• The illusion of information adequacy

  “The illusion of information adequacy““The science behind why people think they’re right when they’re actually wrong“ You don’t know what you don’t know.  –Socrates How individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-17

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, empathy, mental-health, philosophy, psychology, realism

• Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases

  “Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases“ The authors argue that many different biases, such as the bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, and outcome bias, can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, bias, cognitive-bias, cognitive-biases, confirmation-bias, psychology

• Nature heals

  “Nature heals: An informational entropy account of self-organization and change in field psychotherapy“Highlights This paper reviews biophysical models of psychotherapeutic change based on synergetics and the free energy principle. These models suggest that introducing sensory surprise into the patient-therapist system can lead to self-organization and the formation of new attractor states, disrupting entrenched patterns of…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, consciousness, mental-health, philosophy, psychology, spirituality

• Affect-centered account of motivated behavior

  “The affective gradient hypothesis: an affect-centered account of motivated behavior“: everyone agrees that feelings and actions are intertwined, but cannot agree how. According to dominant models, actions are directed by estimates of value and these values shape or are shaped by affect. The article proposes instead that affect is the only form of value that…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-13

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, education, health, mental-health, personal-growth, psychology

• Movement Matters

  An Open Access book from MIT press, Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning (available for download). Experts translate the latest findings on embodied cognition from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science to inform teaching and learning pedagogy. Embodied cognition represents a radical shift in conceptualizing cognitive processes, in which cognition develops through mind-body…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-26

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Walking

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, cognitive-science, education, fitness, mental-health, psychology

• regulation of motivated behavior

  in “A unified theoretical framework underlying the regulation of motivated behavior“, Yu-Been Kim, Young Hee Lee, Shee-June Park and Hyung Jin Choi explain that multiple psychological components have evolved in order to orchestrate behaviors for survival. Despite several theories regarding behavior regulation, these theories do not clearly distinguish distinct components and do not explain the…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-26

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, health, machine-learning, technology

• Risk and Uncertainty

  The core of this post comes from “How do smart people make smart decisions?” by Gerd Gigerenzer, delivered at TEDxNorrköping – available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=-Lg7G8TMe_A and a transcript available . However, there are more sources which lead to this insights, like e.g.: RISK VS UNCERTAINTY RISK: How should we make decisions when all relevant alternatives, consequences,…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-25

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical, Uncategorized

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• How Collaboration Breaks Down

  Simon DeDeo and many other authors describe in this chapter how humans may be “super-cooperators,” but no collaboration lasts forever. This chapter summarizes the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between political, social, economic, and cognitive scientists into the question of collaboration collapse. It locates the breakdown of collaboration downstream from the failure to align on…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-25

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, business, collaboration, innovation, leadership, politics

• Will We Ever Have Conscious Machines?

  The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or conscious has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the distinction of being really self-aware or merely a clever imitation cannot be answered without access to knowledge about the mechanism’s…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-24

  AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Resilience may have downsides…

  Traditionally, resilience has been viewed as a general positive adaptation to stressors. However, the hallmark of resilience – returning to the previous state following a perturbation – may also have severe downsides, which are often overlooked. Specifically, it may be unrealistic to return to the previous state or resilience may cause a person to become…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-23

  Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, mental-health, resilience, wellness

• Complex Systems Research in Psychology

  Han L. J. van der Maas published August 31, 2024 this SFI book “Complex Systems Research in Psychology“, available as PDF for free. Prologue This book is intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes using the tools of complex-systems research. The book has three primary objectives. The first is to provide…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-06

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Do we all see the same colours?

  Patrick Mineault made a little app to test if we all see the same colours. https://ismy.blue He did the test, and in the end, yes, his wife has consistently different blue/green boundaries. It takes access to an adaptive optics ophthalmoscope to figure out if it’s a cone density difference or more of a Sapir-Whorf situation.…

  walterstiers

  2024-08-13

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas

  #TheInformationLens

• It’s the Biology, Stupid!

  “It’s the biology, stupid! Proxy failures in economic decision making” is a commentary by Pier Luigi Sacco (available here), on a work by Yohan J. John et.al.: “Dead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: Proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems” (also available on ResearchGate) Where the “Dead rats, … peacock tails”…

  walterstiers

  2024-08-07

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens

• Insight –> selection of ideas

  “Insight and the selection of ideas” describes the mechanisms underlying Eureka heuristic, explained within an active inference framework.  Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-30

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked, bayesian-inference, decision-making, heuristics, philosophy, psychology

• music and aging | Bayesian inference

  “Understanding music and aging through the lens of Bayesian inference“ Bayesian inference has recently gained momentum in explaining music perception and aging. A fundamental mechanism underlying Bayesian inference is the notion of prediction. This framework could explain how predictions pertaining to musical (melodic, rhythmic, harmonic) structures engender action, emotion, and learning, expanding related concepts of music…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-29

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

•  The Edge of Sentience

  “The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.” by Jonathan Birch Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences?…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-29

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, AI, artificial-intelligence, consciousness, sentience

• exploring One Health

  The eco-epidemiology of zoonoses is often oversimplified to host-pathogen interactions while findings derived from global datasets are rarely directly transferable to smaller-scale contexts. Through a systematic literature search, we compiled a dataset of naturally occurring zoonotic interactions in Austria, spanning 1975–2022. We introduce the concept of zoonotic web to describe the complex relationships between zoonotic…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-29

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, biodiversity, climate-change, health