Category: Biology of Information

• Nice TED speech on capital psycho pathology

  I’ve been pointed to the great lecture Jon Ronson delivered at TED2012: “Strange answers to the psychopath test” It becomes very interesting and maybe even somewhat scary from minute 9. Some parts o the transcripts to get the idea: capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior — the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative.  So, here’s…

  walterstiers

  2022-08-25

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Supporting sensemaking and decisions with scientific evidence

  If you have the opportunity to work on a complex problem, including change at the technical, organizational and governance/policy level of a rather complicated environment, you can considered to be lucky to start with the insights from the Cynefin farmework, developed by Dave Snowden. Recent evolution of this framework include “Entanglement“, liminality and the great…

  walterstiers

  2022-08-03

  #Cynefin, #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Policy, Science, Social-Technical, Uncategorized

  #ActiveInference, #Cynefin, #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #Sensemaking, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked

• David – Big Ideas

  “Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking…

  walterstiers

  2022-07-27

  Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Life Ideas

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Exploite to explore mentation while growing old

  Changes in cognition, affect, and brain function combine to promote a shift in the nature of mentation in older adulthood, favoring exploitation of prior knowledge over exploratory search as the starting point for thought and action. In humans, the exploration versus exploitation trade-off has been extensively studied in young adults. Yet there is growing evidence that the determinants and…

  walterstiers

  2022-07-03

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Ecosystem, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Offline memory consolidation during waking rest

  People spend approximately half of their waking hours in a so- called offline state — daydreaming, mind wandering or otherwise inattentive to their surroundings. These activities are often viewed as a waste of time, perhaps as moments of lost productivity. However, periods of offline waking rest can facilitate the consolidation of newly formed memories. Even…

  walterstiers

  2022-06-25

  Biology of Information, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

• Are Dogs outsmarting human primates?

  I just love the intelligence of nature, behaving as a complex adaptive system, working with minimal effort to a beneficial solutions. As such, nature often behaves smarter than self-conscious human primates, without going into difficult reasoning and decision making processes. A great text putting this fact into evidence is the 2012 lecture “The dog and…

  walterstiers

  2022-06-24

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Where the senses fail us, reason must step in

  It is true that the unique human ability to reason is what allows for science, technology, and advanced problem-solving. But there are limitations to reason. Highly deliberative people tend to be less empathetic, are often perceived as less trustworthy and authentic, and can undermine their own influence. Ultimately, the supposed battle between head and heart is overblown.…

  walterstiers

  2022-06-02

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked

• task-related information and form functional networks encode both sensory input and behavioral choice.

  Cortical processing of task-relevant information enables recognition of behaviorally meaningful sensory events. How task-related information is represented within cortical networks by the activity of individual neurons and their functional interactions was investigates. A subset of neurons transiently encode sensory information used to inform behavioral choice. These neurons form functional networks in which information transmits sequentially.…

  walterstiers

  2022-06-02

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

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Information perspective helps overcome the challenge of biology to physics

  Keith D. Farnsworth uses the concept of “formal, efficient and material causes“, to become the foundation for considering living systems as causal systems Living systems have long been a puzzle to physics, leading some to claim that new laws of physics are needed to explain them. Separating physical reality into the general (laws) and the particular…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-31

  Biology of Information, Complexity

  #downcausation, #Ecosystem, #emergence

• Plan with “value-guided construal”

  When people plan, they do so by constructing a simplified mental representation of a problem that is sufficient to solve it—a process that we refer to as value-guided construal. An ideal, cognitively limited decision-maker should construe a task so as to balance complexity and utility. Preregistered predictions of this model explain people’s awareness, ability to…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-20

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

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Will it ever happen?

  Evolution of Brains and Computers: The Roads Not Taken – Can machines ever achieve true intelligence? , is a perspective article in entropy by Ricard Solé and Luís F. Seoane, has a great discussion on intelligence. When computers started to become a dominant part of technology around the 1950s, fundamental questions about reliable designs and…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-17

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked

• Metacognition accompanying decision-making

  Decision-making is usually accompanied by metacognition, through which a decision maker monitors uncertainty regarding a decision and may then consequently revise the decision. These metacognitive processes can occur prior to or in the absence of feedback. The neural mechanisms of metacognition remain controversial. A novel “decision–redecision” paradigm to investigate the neural metacognitive processes involved in…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-17

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Modeling the Predictive Social Mind

  The social mind is tailored to the problem of predicting the mental states and actions of other people. However, social cognition researchers have only scratched the surface of the predictive social mind. We discuss here a new framework for explaining how people organize social knowledge and use it for social prediction. Specifically, we propose a…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-17

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

  #TheInformationLens

• Enriched Environment helps decision

  Inter-Individual Differences in Cognitive Tasks: Focusing on the Shaping of Decision-Making Strategies is a recent publication about the Mouse Gambling Task. It revealed about 30% of healthy mice displaying risk-averse choices while about 20-25% of mice make risk-prone choices. These strategies are accompanied by different brain network mobilization and individual levels of regional -prefrontal and…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-17

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence

• Enlightement or Entanglement?

  Two great articles build on this idea of the need to get more attention to the connections and relations in between, compared to the specialised detailed view, or to have the multidisciplenary view of entanglement, compared to tradition we learned rom the enlightement. In the 2020 article “Wisdom of stakeholder crowds in complex social–ecological systems“,…

  walterstiers

  2022-05-04

  #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• A radical realignment between grown and built environments

  Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli architect and designer known for pioneering the field of Material Ecology. Formerly a tenured professor at MIT, founder and director of The Mediated Matter Group; she now runs her own lab, called Oxman, in Manhattan. She discussed her manifesto and accompanying film Nature x Humanity in a live interview. “How might we leverage design…

  walterstiers

  2022-04-28

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #Analogy, #Creativity, #DecisionIntelligence, #Entanglement, #TheInformationLens

• Your spatial navigation ability links with the entropy of your city street networks

  I already mentioned the importance of space-time decisions, Individual differences in information seeking, the importance of anology (for AI), The importance of spatial thinking and the Active Inference principle (the brain is an “inference engine” that seeks to minimize “prediction error.”) It all comes togethers in a great article in Nature: “Entropy of city street…

  walterstiers

  2022-03-31

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Information Technology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Active Inference – The book

  Available, – Open Access – free to download – great reading … Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior  By Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo, Karl J. Friston The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding…

  walterstiers

  2022-03-30

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

  This post is a pointer to a great article from Michael Levin, just published in Frontiers in Systems Neurosciences All known cognitive agents are collective intelligences, because we are all made of parts; biological agents in particular are not just structurally modular, but made of parts that are themselves agents in important ways. There is…

  walterstiers

  2022-03-30

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• French Horn taught me everything I needed to Know – Arthur Brooks

  ‘From Strength to Strength:’ Follow this link, fill out the CAPTCHA and … Arthur Brooks discusses his new book. He discusses about a nice set of ideas on building a happy and interesting life. His book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life  is a practical…

  walterstiers

  2022-03-24

  #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Wicked

• Machine Learning Article deserves to have the best ‘Plain Language Summary’

  I share the opinion that “all plain language summaries should aspire to the glorious heights of this piece of literary art.”I also like the conclusion presented 🙂

  walterstiers

  2022-02-09

  Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence

  #TheInformationLens

• Why Can the Brain (And Not a Computer) Make Sense of the Liar Paradox?

  Ordinary computing machines prohibit self-reference because it leads to logical inconsistencies and undecidability. In contrast, the human mind can understand self-referential statements without necessitating physically impossible brain states. Why can the brain make sense of self-reference? This paper addresses this question by defining the Strange Loop Model, which features causal feedback between two brain modules,…

  walterstiers

  2022-02-09

  AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Education shapes the structure of semantic memory and impacts creative thinking

  Quotes from some a recent article, presenting intersting insights on semantic memory and creative thinking. “Education is central to the acquisition of knowledge, such as when children learn new concepts. It is unknown, however, whether educational differences impact not only what concepts children learn, but how those concepts come to be represented in semantic memory—a…

  walterstiers

  2022-02-06

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind

• Complex Data and Models lead to Ascendency Analysis

  When making decisions, data might not be overlooked, nor the methodology to collect and interprete them. Especially in complex matteras as sustainability and circular economy, data, the collection and interpretation is key in helping our understanding and guiding our decisions. The EU JRC just published a great overview report on “Domestic Footprint of the EU…

  walterstiers

  2022-01-24

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Science, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, #Wicked