Category: Complexity
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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…
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Need for radical reshape
Capitalism ain’t working. Does it need just another (again!) ‘fix’ or a radical reshape? The latter.“This economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It’s time we all listened” Governments must collaborate with private sector Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato
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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…
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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.…
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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.…
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Fractal Organization
A recent BCG article “The Organization of the Future Is Fractal” has a clear description of what John Seely Brown expresses as “we’ve moved from the age of enlightenment to the age of entanglement where sense-making aided by imagination is now more critical than ever.” Over the past 50 years or more, as the global…
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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…
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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…
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The Why, How, and When of Representations for Complex Systems
Complex systems, composed at the most basic level of units and their interactions, describe phenomena in a wide variety of domains, from neuroscience to computer science and economics. The wide variety of applications has resulted in two key challenges: the generation of many domain-specific strategies for complex systems analyses that are seldom revisited, and the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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