Category: Life Ideas

• 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

• Communicate Unflattening

  I already mentioned in a previous blog entry the “Krebs Cycle of Creativity“, a map that describes the perpetuation of creative energy, analogous to the Krebs Cycle proper. In this analogy of the Krebs Cycle, the four modalities of human creativity— Science, Engineering, Design and Art— replace the Krebs Cycle’s carbon compounds. Each of the modalities…

  walterstiers

  2024-10-21

  #Sensemaking, Creative Thinking, Design Thinking, Life Ideas

  #TheInformationLens

• 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

• Learning by thinking

  Learning by thinking in natural and artificial minds:Canonical cases of learning involve novel observations external to the mind, but learning can also occur through mental processes such as explaining to oneself, mental simulation, analogical comparison, and reasoning. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) reveal that such learning is not restricted to human minds: artificial minds…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-27

  Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, education, learning, teaching

• 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

• Better stories <equals> better solutions

  Become a Better Problem Solver by Telling Better Stories is a great article from Arnaud Chevallier, Albrecht Enders, and Jean-Louis Barsoux on MIT SMR. One of the biggest obstacles to effective decision-making is failure to define the problem well. Invoking the power of narrative and a simple story structure can help ensure that teams are…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-26

  #sense-making, #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Design Thinking, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, business, gaming, writing

• 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

• 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

• practical wisdom in complex system management

  Leonie Hallo et al. published the research “Investigating practical wisdom in complex system management: What is it and how do we get more?“ Systems are now extremely complex with the continuous involvement of multiple stakeholders and rapidly advancing technology, and a new way of viewing high-performance system management and decision-making is needed.This paper considers the…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-11

  #Sensemaking, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, leadership, personal-development

• 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

• I Might As Well Be Happy

  The Korean best-seller If I’m Going to Live to One Hundred, I Might As Well Be Happy, is a “comforting, insightful, and surprisingly hilarious collection of life lessons” from retired psychiatrist and essayist Rhee Kun Hoo (이근후 1935-). He offers the wisdom he’s learned along the way on everything from forgiveness and regret to perseverance, letting…

  walterstiers

  2024-09-04

  #Sensemaking, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Three Orders and levels of Theorizing: unite in complexity …

  “A Pragmatist Approach to Complexity Theorizing in Project Studies: Orders and Levels”  offers pragmatist recommendations to develop strong theorizing strategies organized in a triad: 1. orders of theorizing (degree of recursiveness of the theorizing process), 2. levels of theorizing (interactions between micro, meso, and macro loci of analysis), and 3. the integration between orders and…

  walterstiers

  2024-08-20

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• wisdom perception across 12 countries

  Wisdom is the hallmark of social judgment, but how people across cultures recognize wisdom remains unclear—distinct philosophical traditions suggest different views of wisdom’s cardinal features. This article in Nature Communications explores perception of wise minds across 16 socio-economically and culturally diverse convenience samples from 12 countries. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplars, and themselves on 19…

  walterstiers

  2024-08-18

  #Sensemaking, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #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

• Slow productivity — here’s why you should adopt it…

  The full title is “Slow productivity worked for Marie Curie — here’s why you should adopt it, too“, and yes, it is referring to the book from Cal Newport, I already mentioned a while ago. “… figure out how you can leverage the autonomy you have and how you organize your labour to get away…

  walterstiers

  2024-08-06

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #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

• the lost art of accomplishment without burnout

  The book “Slow Productivity The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” by Cal Newport. An excerpt is available on the author’s website: “When I first encountered the story of John McPhee’s long days looking up at the leaves in his backyard — a scene from a time long past, when those who made a living…

  walterstiers

  2024-07-30

  Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, cal-newport, productivity, slow-productivity

• 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