Category: Life Ideas

• From reductionism to realism

  “From reductionism to realism: holistic mathematical modelling for complex biological systems” At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has often fallen short in addressing fundamental questions in the biological sciences.…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-24

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• From Noise to Music:: Context

  “From Noise to Music: Reframing the Role of Context in Clinical Reasoning” Traditional perspectives on clinical reasoning (CR) have framed it as a content-specific process in which differences in the information stored in a clinician’s mind account for differences in CR performance. The finding that individual clinicians perform differently on cases with the same clinical content…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-21

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, health, technology

• Affective State as a central component to environmental changes

  “Considering affective state as a central component of the response of animals to environmental changes” Current environmental changes are often considered as negatively impacting the affective state of animals. Yet, the interplay betweenenvironmental conditions and affective state should rather be viewed as a reciprocal and dynamic relationship, as variation in affective state likely determines how…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-17

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, health, Science

• Cultural evolutionary behavioural science inpublic policy

  “Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy” Interventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-17

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, Science

• Music as a scientific metaphor for mind and brain

  “Music as a scientific metaphor for mind and brain” Metaphors have long played multiple roles in conceptualizing the mind and brain, guiding the development and refinement of theoretical models and empirical questions. Early analogies (comparing the brain to hydraulic systems, telephone exchanges, factories, or libraries) offered shortcuts to understanding aspects of cognition, memory, and brain…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-17

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• A generic self-learning emotional framework for machines

  “A generic self-learning emotional framework for machines” In nature, intelligent living beings have developed emotions to modulate their behavior as a fundamental evolutionary advantage. However, researchers seeking to endow machines with this advantage lack a clear theory from cognitive neuroscience describing emotional elicitation from first principles, namely, from raw observations to specific affects. As a…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-13

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, consciousness, health, mental-health

• Your brain on nature

  “Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of nature exposure” The relationship between natural environments and human cognition has gathered increasing attention across disciplines, including neuroscience, environmental psychology, and public health. An expanding body of empirical evidence supports the notion that exposure to nature consistently promotes psychological and physiological well-being. However, our…

  walterstiers

  2026-03-10

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

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

• what felt like a communication problem is a thinking problem

  “Betting blind on AI and the scientific mind” Our brains when we stop writing Writing is, for many, a way of thinking. Using chatbots to bypass the struggle to articulate thoughts might erode a scientist’s capacity for creativity and critical thinking, writes science-communication educator and neuroscientist Tim Requarth. The evidence either way is, so far,…

  walterstiers

  2026-02-28

  #Sensemaking, AI, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Inferring to cooperate: Bayesian inferential strategies

  “Inferring to cooperate: Evolutionary games with Bayesian inferential strategies” Strategies for sustaining cooperation and preventing exploitation by selfish agents in repeated games have mostly been restricted to Markovian strategies where the response of an agent depends on the actions in the previous round. Such strategies are characterized by lack of learning.However, learning from accumulated evidence…

  walterstiers

  2026-02-16

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Boredom and curiosity – information

  “Boredom and curiosity: the hunger and the appetite for information“ Boredom and curiosity are common everyday states that drive individuals to seek information. Due to their functional relatedness, it is not trivial to distinguish whether an action, for instance in the context of a behavioral experiment, is driven by boredom or curiosity. Are the two…

  walterstiers

  2026-01-27

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Delusion as embodied emotion

  “Delusion as embodied emotion: a qualitatively driven, multimethod study of first-episode psychosis in the UK” Delusions in psychosis involve complex and dynamic experiential, affective, cognitive, behavioural, and interpersonal alterations. Their pattern of emergence during the early stages of illness remains poorly understood and the origin of their thematic content unclear. Phenomenological accounts have emphasised alterations…

  walterstiers

  2026-01-14

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

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

• Collective intelligence as collective information processing

  “Collective intelligence as collective information processing” Collective intelligence research spans multiple disciplines and focuses on a broad range of collective behaviors, including group problem-solving, flocking in social animals, and the formation of social knowledge. It is not apparent what these different forms of collective intelligence have in common, apart from being instances of collective behavior.…

  walterstiers

  2026-01-09

  #Sensemaking, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens

• Paradox of Predictability

  “The paradox of predictability provides a bridge between micro- and macroevolution” The relationship between the evolutionary dynamics observed in contemporary populations (microevolution) and evolution on timescales of millions of years (macroevolution) has been a topic of considerable debate. Historically, this debate centers on inconsistencies between microevolutionary processes and macroevolutionary patterns. Here, we characterize a striking…

  walterstiers

  2026-01-06

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• A (Re)Solution

  I’d like to share the New Year Resolution of Tom Gauld It is a Re(al)Solution 😉

  walterstiers

  2026-01-01

  #Sensemaking, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• The coevolution of cognition and sociality

  “The coevolution of cognition and sociality“ Cognition serves to resolve uncertainty. Living in social groups is widely seen as a source of uncertainty driving cognitive evolution, but sociality can also mitigate sources of uncertainty, reducing the need for cognition.Moreover, social systems are not simply external selection pressures but rather arise from the decisions individuals make…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-26

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, AI, philosophy, psychology

• Homo sapiens, industrialisation and the environmental mismatch hypothesis

  “Homo sapiens, industrialisation and the environmental mismatch hypothesis”. For the vast majority of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, a range of natural environments defined the parameters within which selection shaped human biology. Although human-induced alterations to the terrestrial biosphere have been evident for over 10,000 years, the pace and scale of change has accelerated dramatically since…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-26

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, biology, evolution, health, philosophy, Science

• Decoding the architecture of living systems

  “Decoding the architecture of living systems“, by Manlio De Domenico The possibility that evolutionary forces — together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes — might constrain the logic of living systems is tantalizing. However, it is often overlooked that any practical implementation of…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-22

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Entanglement, #TheInformationLens

• Complex Systems Frameworks Collection

  Complex Systems Frameworks Collection The Complex Systems Frameworks Collection is a gerat resource for navigating an increasingly complex world. Over time, people have developed many excellent frameworks, analogies and models for understanding complexity. This collection brings them together in an illustrated collection to help you: Because complex isn’t the same as complicated. Each framework has its…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-19

  #Cynefin, #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical, Uncategorized

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Mapping interactions between adversity and neuroplasticity across development

  “Mapping interactions between adversity and neuroplasticity across development” Highlights: The human brain undergoes a protracted course of development that provides prolonged opportunities to be sculpted by experience. Yet, persistent definitional and measurement challenges have complicated efforts to understand how experience interacts with neuroplasticity during human development. Here, we synthesize previously siloed perspectives to propose an…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-09

  Active Inference, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, brain, health, mental-health, wellness

• Collective predictive coding

  “Collective predictive coding as model of science: formalizing scientific activities towards generative science” This article proposes a new conceptual framework called collective predictive coding as a model of science (CPC‑MS) to formalize and understand scientific activities. Building on the idea of CPC originally developed to explain symbol emergence, CPC‑MS models science as a decentralized Bayesian…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-08

  #sense-making, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Science, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, artificial-intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, Science

• The ‘made-up mind’.

  “The ‘made-up mind’. Deriving new hypotheses on delusions from general psychological models of belief maintenance” Highlights Contemporary definitions of delusions highlight their resistance to conflicting evidence as the core feature, but there has been little progress in understanding why even explicit confrontation with contradicting evidence seldom leads to belief revision. This review aims to generate…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-08

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty, AI, artificial-intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, Science

• Social networks affect redistribution decisions and polarization

  “Social networks affect redistribution decisions and polarization” “Whom you observe in your daily life alters your willingness to tax the rich” Recent research suggests that the visibility of extreme wealth within a person’s social circle drives their support for economic redistribution but simultaneously fosters political polarization and personal dissatisfaction. A study published in PNAS Nexus combines computational…

  walterstiers

  2025-12-06

  #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, economics, economy, history, news, politics

• Nature on the balance sheet …

  “Putting nature on the balance sheet: how to account for the ecological costs of our actions” Economists should consider forests and wetlands as well as factories and farms. A book review of “On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us“, Partha Dasgupta (2025) On Natural Capital recaps the roaring economic advances of the past 75…

  walterstiers

  2025-11-24

  #stakeholder economy, #Wicked, Complexity, Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, environment, nature, Sustainability

• Becoming Nature Positive

  “Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Future “, an open access book from the Nature Positive Initiative Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Futureis a collaborative effort from a wide range of authors, covering many sectors of society. ‘Nature Positive’ is a recently agreed upon global goal to “halt and…

  walterstiers

  2025-11-24

  #stakeholder economy, Life Ideas, Policy

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, biodiversity, environment, nature, Sustainability