The new science of Complexity explains that limited knowledge prevents societies from predicting and controlling their developments. But Complexity further suggests that nature uses the limits of knowledge to evolve, which turns an apparent obstacle into an opportunity to reevaluate governmental institutions. As in nature, the limits of knowledge lead social systems to evolve by individuating, liberating, and empowering their members. Societies individuate and liberate their members to probe environments and exploit opportunities. Societies empower individuals to globalize their findings which (...) requires constitutionally constraining governmental powers. Societies that respect human rights thus gain selective advantage. Showing that what nature is models what societies ought to be, Complexity may finesse the "naturalistic fallacy" of Hume and Moore. (shrink)

(1992). Chaos and constitutionalism: Toward a post‐modern theory of social evolution. World Futures: Vol. 34, Evolutionary Models in the Social Sciences, pp. 131-156.

The common cause principle states that common causes produce correlations amongst their effects, but that common effects do not produce correlations amongst their causes. I claim that this principle, as explicated in terms of probabilistic relations, is false in classical statistical mechanics. Indeterminism in the form of stationary Markov processes rather than quantum mechanics is found to be a possible saviour of the principle. In addition I argue that if causation is to be explicated in terms of probabilities, then it (...) should be done in terms of probabilistic relations which are invariant under changes of initial distributions. Such relations can also give rise to an asymmetric cause-effect relationship which always runs forwards in time. (shrink)

The logic of a physical system consists of the elementary observables of the system. We show that for chaotic systems the logic is not any more the classical Boolean lattice but a kind of fuzzy logic which we characterize for a class of chaotic maps. Among other interesting properties the fuzzy logic of chaos does not allow for infinite combinations of propositions. This fact reflects the instability of dynamics and it is shared also by quantum systems with diagonal singularity. We (...) also generalize the fuzzy implication to a probabilistic implication following the hint of von Neumann. In this way we can evaluate the probability of the validity of the logical inference. (shrink)

Constantin Caratheodory offered the first systematic and contradiction free formulation of thermodynamics on the basis of his mathematical work on Pfaff forms. Moreover, his work on measure theory provided the basis for later improved formulations of thermodynamics and physics of continua where extensive variables are measures and intensive variables are densities. Caratheodory was the first to see that measure theory and not topology is the natural tool to understand the difficulties (ergodicity, approach to equilibrium, irreversibility) in the Foundations of Statistical (...) Physics. He gave a measure-theoretic proof of Poincaré's recurrence theorem in 1919. This work paved the way for Birkhoff to identify later ergodicity as metric transitivity and for Koopman and von Neumann to introduce spectral analysis of dynamical systems in Hilbert spaces. Mixing provided an explanation of the approach to equilibrium but not of irreversibility. The recent extension of spectral theory of dynamical systems to locally convex spaces, achieved by the Brussels–Austin groups, gives new nontrivial time asymmetric spectral decompositions for unstable and/or non-integrable systems. In this way irreversibility is resolved in a natural way. (shrink)

Long-term vegetation dynamics based on paleo-pollen data display transient behaviour, often alternating in phase between predominant determinism and predominant 'turbulence', when viewed as a trajectory in a multivariate phase space. Given this, the metaphor of vegetation dynamics as a 'flowing stream', first introduced by Cooper in his classic 1926 paper entitled "The fundamentals of vegetation change", is re-examined and revealed to be not only useful, but strikingly realistic. Vegetation dynamic theory is reviewed and classic theories are found to reflect reality (...) poorly. It is suggested that vegetation dynamics is a far from equilibrium system, and that the application of nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory is appropriate. (shrink)

The paper explores the basis for decision?making and policy with regard to the Environment. Clearly these should be based on knowledge of possible consequences and accompanying risk assessments involving the linked behaviour of the many interacting human actors within a socio?economic system and the ecological, and physical systems in which they are embedded. The paper describes the Complex Systems approach to these problems, showing the kind of models that are required in order to obtain whatever limited knowledge is possible about (...) the co?evolution of the human and environmental systems involved. Several practical examples are described and the models briefly presented. These are shown as examples of what should be required for the creation of the necessary basis for making policy and decision explorations with an integrated view of the system as a whole, instead of separate parts studied in detail by experts of specific disciplines. This provides a framework for making real use of the ?knowledge? of disciplinary experts, and linking their narrow views to the overall, practical consequences in the real world of possible policy options. (shrink)

Complexity theory attempts to explain, at the most general possible level, the interesting behaviors of complex systems. Two such behaviors are the emergence of simple or stable high-level behavior from relatively complex low-level behavior, and the emergence of sophisticated high-level behavior from relatively simple low-level behavior; they are often found nested in the same system. Concerning the emergence of simplicity, this essay examines Herbert Simon's explanation from near-decomposability and a stochastic explanation that generalizes the approach of statistical physics. A more (...) general notion of an abstract difference-making structure is introduced with examples, and a discussion of evolvability follows. Concerning the emergence of sophistication, this essay focuses on, first, the energetics approach associated with dissipative structures and the fourth law of thermodynamics, and second, the notion of a complex adaptive system. (shrink)

Since the end of the 1980s – the Decade of Style – the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times see a focus on style as a sign of design’s immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed as a way of taking design away from its early stage as ‘mere’ styling, towards the more thoughtful, serious (...) matters of business. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is of a different mind however. ‘Style,’ he writes, ‘amounts to innovation.’ For us this engages not only a rethinking of design practice in particular, but also a reconsideration of the guiding principles of scenario planning. Deleuze’s thought entails the opportunity for styling to be an act that participates in driving all creativity towards making a successful future impact. A philosophical disruption of current design and scenarios orthodoxies offers a way of considering that style has a key role in the production of the future. Here, then, we will investigate the creative, even innovative, opportunities that emerge from a reworking of the value of style that comes from a critique of Design Thinking, a perspective on future-thinking, but also some work from organisation and management studies ), and an encounter with philosophy. We will highlight the affective capacities of style – in design and scenarios, both as creative constructing of futures – by way of creatively accessing uncertainty, complexity and indeterminacy in the production of strategic maps for living. (shrink)

If only everything were formed of neat laminar flows, with easy to understand conditions, and determinable outcomes: there would be no risk to manage out, messy inconsistencies and uncertainties to disrupt well-laid out plans. Things are not so clear-cut however. Indeed, as scientists, poets and philosophers of science have pointed out it is under conditions of nondeterminism and complexity that everything comes into being. There is an issue, then, when creative disciplines in particular find such complexity problematic enough to design (...) systems and models in which uncertainty, disruption and aleatory collisions are if not destroyed, then dampened. We wonder: what might become of a creative practice that championed its encounter with The Swerve, Lucretius's clinamen? This article examines the role, value and applicability of the concept of collision to design. It takes a philosophical approach to examining this concept and mapping the possibilities of its use in design. We will argue using concepts mainly from Lucretius and Serres – but also Deleuze and others – that collision is an important aspect of all creativity, and that there would be nothing were it not for collisions, disruptive deviation and swerves from equilibrium. The aim will be to articulate the conditions for the possibility of designing that is a 'fan of collisions'. (shrink)

Many sophisticated essays and books have been written about the topic of consciousness. My own contributions date back some twenty-five years in an essay entitled 'Problems concerning the structure of consciousness' (Pribram 1976), and five years before that in delineating the difference between brain processes that are coordinate with awareness and those that are coordinate with habitual behavior (Pribram 1971a). I have been intrigued by what has been written since and take this occasion to reassess a few of the major (...) issues that have arisen. (shrink)

Context: The advent of a general artificial intelligence mechanism that learns like humans do would represent the realization of an old and major dream of science. It could be achieved by an artifact able to develop its own cognitive structures following constructivist principles. However, there is a large distance between the descriptions of the intelligence made by constructivist theories and the mechanisms that currently exist. Problem: The constructivist conception of intelligence is very powerful for explaining how cognitive development takes place. (...) However, until now, no computational model has successfully demonstrated the underlying mechanisms necessary to realize it. In other words, the artificial intelligence (AI) community has not been able to give rise to a system that convincingly implements the principles of intelligence as postulated by constructivism, and that is also capable of dealing with complex environments. Results: This paper presents the constructivist anticipatory learning mechanism (CALM), an agent learning mechanism based on the constructivist approach of AI. It is designed to deal dynamically and interactively with environments that are at the same time partially deterministic and partially observable. CALM can model the regularities experienced in the interaction with the environment, on the sensorimotor level as well, as by constructing abstract or high-level representational concepts. The created model provides the knowledge necessary to generate the agent behavior. The paper also presents the coupled agent environment system (CAES) meta-architecture, which defines a conception of an autonomous agent, situated in the environment, embodied and intrinsically motivated. Implications: The paper can be seen as a step towards a computational implementation of constructivist principles, on the one hand suggesting a further perspective of this refreshing movement on the AI field (which is still too steeped in a behaviorist influence and dominated by probabilistic models and narrow applied approaches), and on the other hand bringing some abstract descriptions of the cognitive process into a more concrete dimension, in the form of algorithms. Constructivist content: The connection of this paper with constructivism is the proposal of a computational and formally described mechanism that implements important aspects of the subjective process of knowledge construction based on key ideas proposed by constructivist theories. (shrink)

Problem: Is constructivism contradicted by the reductionist determinism inherent in digital computation? Method: Review of examples from dynamical systems sciences, agent-based modeling and artificial intelligence. Results: Recent scientific insights seem to give reason to consider constructivism in line with what computation is adding to our knowledge of interacting dynamics and the functioning of our brains. Implications: Constructivism is not necessarily contradictory to digital computation, in particular to computer-based modeling and simulation. Constructivist content: When viewed through the lens of computation, in (...) many of its aspects constructivism seems in line with what currently is held to be valid in science. (shrink)

Because an unmeasured quantum system consists of information — neither tangible existence nor its complete absence — no property can be assigned a definite value, only a range of likely values should it be measured. The instantaneous transition from information to matter upon measurement establishes a gradient between being and not-being. A quantum system enters a determinate state in a particular moment until this moment is past, at which point the system resumes its default state as an evolving superposition of (...) potential values of properties, neither strictly being nor not-being. Like a “self-organized” chemical system that derives energy from breaking down environmental gradients, a quantum system derives information from breaking down the ontological gradient. An organism is a body in the context of energy and a mind in the context of information. (shrink)

This is the third and final paper of a series bringing a philosophical investigation to matters of design and innovation. With the others examining: first, the urges to reconsider innovation from a creative, specifically design, direction ; and second, the type of dynamic innovation that may be thus reconsidered ; this paper will investigate a way of constructing this type of design-driven innovation. It will begin by looking at the networks that can be created to deliver a dynamic, continually innovative (...) innovation and will start by considering two concepts of network: the open and the closed. While there seems to be an easy distinction to be made between open and closed, and its mapping onto similarly convenient ideas of good and bad, I hope to show that this is not the case. The complexity of networked forms of organisation demand that we bring to them a complexity of thought that comes from philosophy. Nevertheless, such an account will also need to engage with discourses from other disciplinary areas: notably organisational theory, innovation management and design. The outcome is of importance to thinking the organisational structures in which innovation is managed. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to show that phenomenal consciousness is realized by a particular level of brain operational organization and that understanding human consciousness requires a description of the laws of the immediately underlying neural collective phenomena, the nested hierarchy of electromagnetic fields of brain activity – operational architectonics. We argue that the subjective mental reality and the objective neurobiological reality, although seemingly worlds apart, are intimately connected along a unified metastable continuum and are both guided by the universal (...) laws of the physical world such as criticality, self-organization and emergence. (shrink)

Recent developments in the natural sciences make a renewed dialogue with the humanities possible. Previously, humanists resisted transferring scientific paradigms into fields like history, fearing materialism and determinism would deprive experience of its meaning and people of their freedom. At the same time, scientists were realizing that deterministic materialism made understanding phenomena like life virtually impossible. Scientists escaped the irony of describing a nature to which they did not belong by also discovering that their knowledge can never be complete and (...) that descriptions of nature at the subatomic level were essentially random. These developments, as Monod said, weakened the “Modern” paradigm sufficiently to make life scientifically possible. To understand how life might actually exist, however, scientists had to move beyond laments about observations losing information and concentrate on how nature creates information. Nature creates information in the process of reducing thermodynamic gradients and stores created information in self-organized systems. Nature thus becomes historical, for it is defined by qualitative changes accumulating over time because of unpredictable contingencies. This paper will explore the possibility that the patterned processes by which nature changes apply in the human realm, where interactions can change people and created information can be stored in self-organized societies. Values, Ethics and Morals are the qualitatively new information stored in social systems. VEMs script the actions structuring societies, demonstrating there is meaning in history and solving the problem of how sequences of events –“chronicles”–become narratives. Moreover, when societies compete, their system-structuring information is tested in the same way natural selection tests DNA. Thus, the succession of social systems suggests there is a meaning of history. The meaning of history need be no more transcendental or intended than Darwinian evolution. But if organs and traits can have biological value without implying design, socially constructed attributes like morality, consciousness, and freedom can be valued without supposing history has an ultimate or eternal purpose. Aspiring to show how the cacophony of historical events becomes a cosmos, a “well-ordered” context in which changes become meaningful, this sketch suggests a new understanding of nature may provide a basis for ethics. (shrink)

Time as the key to a theory of everything became recently a renewed topic in scientific literature. Social constructivism applied to physics abandons the inevitable essentials of nature. It adopts uncertainty in the scope of the existential activity of scientific research. We have enlightened the deep role of social constructivism of the predetermined Newtonian time and space notions in natural sciences. Despite its incompatibility with determinism governing the Newtonian mechanics, randomness and entropy are inevitable when negative localized energy is transformed (...) into spatially dissipative heat. In sharp contrast to the Newtonian notion, social constructivism makes room for the temporal twin of cyclic conservation and pseudo-linearly structural evolution both reconciling mechanical order and thermodynamic chaos in Leibnizian space-time. In the broad scope of natural sciences this triad nature of time produces a multiple reality and gives appropriate answers on virtual physical paradoxes. (shrink)