Category: Biology of Information

• Facts Don’t – Stories Do

  I want to share the great article on LSE by Anna Toomey on “Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do”, based upon the author’s article Why facts don’t change minds: Insights from cognitive science for the improved communication of conservation research, published in Biological Conservation. It is counterintuitive (and not a…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-08

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Information Technology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, education, philosophy, Science, Sustainability

• Shifting attention

  The Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis (I referred to earlier) asserts, contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, that attention is inherently biased toward internal information. A related work on attention switching has been published: “Shifting attention between perception and working memory“ Most everyday tasks require shifting the…

  walterstiers

  2024-05-24

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load – do not stress

  Chronic psychosocial stress increases disease risk and mortality, but the underlying mechanisms remain largely unclear. This article in Psychoneuroendocrinology outlines an energy-based model for the transduction of chronic stress into disease over time. The energetic model of allostatic load (EMAL) emphasizes the energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load, where the “load” is the additional…

  walterstiers

  2024-05-07

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, healing, health, wellness

• Fast walkers have higher IQ and larger brains than slow walkers.

  These findings are from a 5-decade cohort study of 904 participants in New Zealand published in @JAMANetworkOpen which tested the hypothesis that slow gait speed reflects accelerated biological aging at midlife. Slow gait was associated with multiple indices of compromised structural brain integrity, including smaller total brain volume, global cortical thinning, and reduced total surface…

  walterstiers

  2024-05-01

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Science, Uncategorized

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, brain, fitness, gait, health

• Andy Clark “How the brain shapes reality”

  Philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark challenges our conventional understanding of the mind’s interaction with the world. A great and entertaining lecture. I like the reflection with the reference to the weather forecast and how the forecast impacts “reality” perception. At the very least, understanding all those prediction-driven, precision-inflected, looping influences should bring us a…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-29

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Collective behavior from surprise minimization

  This paper introduces a model of collective behavior, proposing that individual members within a group, such as a school of fish or a flock of birds, act to minimize surprise. This active inference approach naturally generates well-known collective phenomena such as cohesion and directed movement without explicit behavioral rules. This model reveals intricate relationships between…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-23

  #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Laughter – a signal

  Laughter may be the tool that nature gave to mankind to help it survive while traveling along the evolutionary path, claims Carlo V. Bellieni in “Laughter: A signal of ceased alarm toward a perceived incongruity between life and stiffness“ This feature of human behavior that precedes language development (infants as young as three months old are…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-23

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, health, humor, laughter

• Why the simplest explanation isn’t always the best

  Eva L. Dyer and Konrad Kording discuss in a commentary article “Why the simplest explanation isn’t always the best” an essential learning related to the article Phantom oscillations in principal component analysis (also available on BioRXiv) Dimensionality reduction simplifies high-dimensional data into a small number of representative patterns. One dimensionality reduction method, principal component analysis (PCA), often selects oscillatory…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-18

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, data-science, machine-learning, unsupervised-learning

• Intelligence: Evolution, Brains and AI – but #6?

  I just finished the marvellous book from Max Bennett: “A Brief History of Intelligence“. As mentioned by the praise: “If you are interested in understanding brains or in building human-like general AI, you should read this book.” Dileep George, DeepMind, Co-Founder of Vicarious AI In the book, a wonderful story is given from the evolution…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-11

  #sense-making, #stakeholder economy, #Wicked, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical, Sustainability, Uncategorized

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Novel beings, novel goals

  Every now and then there is the opportunity to get the a clear overview on the actual state of research on biology, intelligence, the artificial and it’s overlap towards future capabilities. “Novel beings, novel goals: evolution & engineering of the agential material of life | Dr. Mike Levin‘ is available on youtube. Dr. Michael Levin…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-19

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• Every category is a simplification

  I like to refer to a great book and MIT Press Reader article from Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories, an in-depth analysis of how humanity’s compulsion to categorize affects every aspect of our lived experience. “Every category is a simplification to some degree; it throws away information about the thing.” The minute we…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-11

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, categories

• Bad Therapy

  I just copied the review of this book – Bad Therapy by @AbigailShrier This is one of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read. It’s a must read for any parent, any teacher, and should be required reading for any school administrator as well.The book dives into trying to figure out why kids are having…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-11

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Design Thinking, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, anxiety, children, depression, mental-health, parenting

• Humanity needs a fundamental shift—“a very different civilisation”

  I choose to quote some sentences of the BMJ opinion article Osler’s valediction: how might physicians contribute to the effort to postpone human extinction?This article is written to physicians, but extrapolation to other professions is left to the reader. Historically, physicians have focused on individual patients. The time has come to expand the scope of…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-10

  #sense-making, #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability, Uncategorized

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, empathy, environment, health, healthcare, humanity

• Bayesian model: prior–cost

  Sohna and Jazayeri discuss in “Validating model-based Bayesian integration using prior–cost metamers” the two competing views on how humans make decisions under uncertainty. Bayesian decision theory (BDT) posits that humans optimize their behavior by establishing and integrating internal models of past sensory experiences (priors) and decision outcomes (cost functions). An alternative hypothesis posits that decisions…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Representation of priors and decisions

  The PLOS article by Marshall, Ruesseler, Hunt, O’Reilly “representation of priors and decisions in the human parietal cortex” discusses how both humans and animals actively sample the environment using their sensory organs, far from being passive recipients of sensory information. In rodents, active sampling processes include whisking and sniffing; in primates, the most important and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

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

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, articles, memory, philosophy, Science

• Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making

  Natural decisions involve two seemingly separable processes: inferring the relevant task (task-belief) and performing the believed-relevant task. The assumed separability has led to the traditional practice of studying task-switching and perceptual decision-making individually. In this study, “Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making”, Xue, Kramer and Cohen used a novel paradigm to manipulate and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, aging, health, psychology, self-awareness

• Penguin Update 12/2023

  The Leif Penguinson article I wrote a while ago refers to an article in Nature, which got updated. Of course, you always can have your regular “Can you spot the penguin?” when you follow the Nature Briefings

  walterstiers

  2023-12-30

  Biology of Information

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds

  For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation.The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals. Social interaction underpins who we are, how we think, and how we…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-21

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• The Quark & the Jaguar

  In 1994, SFI co-founder Murray Gell-Mann published his only book, The Quark & the Jaguar.  Now available in electronic formats through the SFI Press, the book examines the laws of physics and the complexity of the natural world through Gell-Mann’s uniquely personal and unifying vision.  “The world of the quark has everything to do / with…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-21

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Science

  #TheInformationLens

• An New Law Needed?

  On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems - by Michael L. Wong, et al. (2023) Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure. The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-18

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• Reactive declined, Proactive selective. How human aggression evolved.

  The feature review in TICS “Evolutionary and neuroendocrine foundations of human aggression” by Amar Sarkar, and Richard Wrangham describes a human behavioural paradox: they are peaceful in many circumstances, but they are also violent and kill conspecifics at high rates. The review describes a social evolutionary theory to resolve this paradox. The theory interprets human…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-12

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #Wicked

• There is hope (emoji) &(biodiversity)

  The open access article ” Biodiversity communication in the digital era through the Emoji tree of life” might be a candidate for the (Ig)Noble. At least, it expresses the hope for better communication, and highlights: Emojis enable direct expressions of ideas and emotions in digital communication, also contributing to discussions on biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, the…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-11

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #TheInformationLens

• Generating meaning – AI²: predicting wor(l)ds

  I would like to quote some of the great insights and statements from the opinion by G. Pezzulo, T. Parr, P. Cisek, A Clark, and K. Friston published in TICS: “Generating meaning: active inference and the scope and limits of passive AI“. Does ChatGPT ‘understand‘ what it talks about in the way we do, or…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-27

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Interoception and Active Inference for mental health

  Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a momentary mapping of the body’s internal landscape and its relationship to the outside world. Active inference is based on the premise that afferent sensory input to the brain is constantly shaped and modified by…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-17

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked