Category: Life Ideas

• 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

• Limitarism – A bliss

  Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, a powerful case for limitarianism–the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate. A must-read! (so says Thomas Piketty). Ingrid Robeyns’ Limitarianism is a recent addition in a long line of critiques – such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Branko Milanovic’s Visions of Inequality – of the…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-15

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Life Ideas

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens

• Equality is essential for sustainability.

  In following, I resume 3 recent articles on this most valuable topic, related to the survival of our environment, societies and species. Why the world cannot afford the rich Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-15

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Decision Intelligence, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Policy, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, bill-gates, climate-change, economics, economy

• 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

• 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

• 7 principles of acts of knowing, and how we build resilient knowledge ecosystems.

  Dave Snowden‘s 7 principles of acts of knowing (or knowledge management) are as evergreen and impactful as when they were first shared in one of the early Cynefin articles – Complex Acts of Knowing.

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #Cynefin, #sense-making, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Bayesianism and Wishful Thinking are Compatible

  On the face of it, wishful thinking seems incompatible with the Bayesian brain hypothesis. This is why defenses of Bayesianism have taken an eliminative stance toward wishful thinking, showing that many apparent instances of wishful thinking are not wishful after all. This strategy has succeeded in defeating many challenges to the Bayesian brain hypothesis, with…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

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

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, bayes-theorem, bayesian-inference, machine-learning, philosophy, statistics

• We weten hoe het moet – duurzaamheid …

  Annette Kehnel, professor Middeleeuwse geschiedenis verbonden aan de Universiteit Mannheim, schreef enkele jaren geleden het inspirerende boek “We weten hoe het moet een kleine geschiedenis van de duurzaamheid van de middeleeuwen tot nu“. (of origineel: “Wir konnten auch anders: Eine kurze Geschichte der Nachhaltigkeit” (rezensiert von Dietrich Lohrmann, Aachen)Een fragment uit het boek is ter…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-19

  #stakeholder economy, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens, blog, blogs, identiteit, nederlands, recensie

• Simplifying social learning

  Social learning is complex, but people often seem to navigate social environments with ease. This ability creates a puzzle for traditional accounts of reinforcement learning (RL) that assume people negotiate a tradeoff between easy-but-simple behavior (model-free learning) and complex-but-difficult behavior (e.g., model-based learning). This publication offers a theoretical framework for resolving this puzzle: although social…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-08

  #Sensemaking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, education, learning, mental-health, philosophy, psychology

• 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

• It Takes Two To Think

  The title refers to the recent article by Yanai & Lercher. (Itai Yanai is a Professor at the NYU School of Medicine. Martin Lercher is Professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf at both the Institute for Computer Science and the Department of Biology. ) At the heart of science is a creative ‘night science‘ process,…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-09

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Governing the economics of the common good

  To meet today’s grand challenges, economics requires an understanding of how common objectives may be collaboratively set and met. Tied to the assumption that the state can, at best, fix market failures and is always at risk of “capture”, economic theory has been unable to offer such a framework. To move beyond such limiting assumptions,…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-08

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Life Ideas, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #ProblemSolvingMind, #StakeholderEconomy, #TheInformationLens

• Models .. Right or Wrong:

  Often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but the rooted elsewhere: “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.” Carveth Read, “Logic: Deductive and Inductive” 4th edition -1920, p.351 You all have probably heard the story about Malcolm Forbes, who once got lost floating for miles in one of his famous balloons and finally…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-07

  #Sensemaking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• 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

• Yes, it is an ART; but it leads tot non-decisions

  Anthony Judge 2021 blog on “The art of non-decision-making” identifies 14 aspects of the art of non-decision-making based on experiences serving in, and observing, a range of international organisations. 1. Definitional games: This is the process of defining categories in one way in one document or organizational unit, and then defining them in another way…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-23

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

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• “don’t hate the players, change the game” – The dark side of competition in AI

  Competition. It’s a fundamental part of human nature. […] When it’s done right, it can drive us to incredible feats in sports and innovation, […] healthy competition, because even though individual companies might come and go, in the long run, the game between them creates win-win outcomes where everyone benefits in the end. But sometimes…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-21

  #Sensemaking, AI, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #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

• Human society is currently undergoing a socio-cultural ETI

  An evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) occurs when a previously independent organism becomes a lower level unit within a higher hierarchical level (for example, cells in an organism, ants in a colony). Based on archaeological and historical accounts from the last 12000 years, this article “Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?”…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-16

  #Sensemaking, #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #StakeholderEconomy

• Adult play – favoring collective decision making

  Adult play and the evolution of tolerant and cooperative societies Play is generally considered an immature affair. However, adult play is present in several mammal species living in complex social systems. This article considers the hypothesis that adult social play is favored by natural selection in those species characterized by high level of social tolerance…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-07

  #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy