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Entropy | Special Issue : Complexity and Evolution

From Frances Heylighen

Tomas, Olaf and I, supported by Daniela Flores, will be editing a special issue of the open-access journal “Entropy”  (impact factor 2.5) on the subject of “Complexity and Evolution”. We invite everyone to submit a paper. The full Call for Papers with instructions for authors is here:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/complex_evolution
Theme:
The understanding of evolutionary processes is one the most important issues of scientific enquiry of this century. Scientific thinking in twentieth century witnessed the overwhelming power of the evolutionary paradigm. It not only solidified the foundations of diverse areas such as cell biology, ecology, and economics, but also fostered the development of several mathematical and computational tools to model and simulate how evolutionary processes take place.

Besides the application of the evolutionary paradigm and the discovery of the evolutionary features for diverse processes, there is another interesting aspect which touches upon the emergence of novel evolutionary processes. Generally, the emergence of an evolutionary process requires a complex transition between a prior form where no evolutionary process is undergoing and a posterior form where the evolutionary process has been triggered. Most advanced methods to understand the emergence of evolutionary processes require the consideration of systemic features such as self-organization, resilience, and contextuality, among others.

In order to address the multiple facets of evolution, it is necessary to propose and apply methods that on the one hand incorporate recent advances in the modeling of complex systems, and on the other hand leverage both the increasing modeling power as well as growth and integration of databases associated with evolutionary processes. We welcome interdisciplinary articles that aim to advance our understanding of the role played by complexity in the evolution of natural and artificial processes. We welcome articles related to any of these topics:

    Biological evolution;
    Cognitive evolution;
    Social evolution;
    Evolutionary processes of artificial systems;
    The emergence of evolutionary processes;
    Novel methods to study the structural properties of evolutionary processes.
Guest Editors
Prof. Dr. Francis Heylighen
Dr. Tomas Veloz
Dr. Olaf Witkowski
Ms. Daniela Flores

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Entropy | Special Issue : Complexity and Evolution

Something close to my heart since about 2001!

Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pdeutrDkjHNSySndryWMXH1QIN2FmZxzP

Dr Connie Zweig: https://medium.com/@conniezweig/a-call-to-grow-up-clean-up-wake-up-show-up-2bd42ff2c683

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Double Binds: Damned If You Dare and Damned If You Don’t | Psychology Today

Kenneth Silvestri Ed.D.

A Wider Lens

Double Binds: Damned If You Dare and Damned If You Don’t

How to address being caught between two conflicting options.

Posted Feb 09, 2020

“Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine.” —Emily Greene Balch

We all have, in far too many instances, felt the pressure of being in a circumstance described as being damned if you dare and damned if you don’t. Well here is the scoop of how a double bind occurs and a means to resolve this painful situation.

What Is a “Double Bind?”

A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, with one message negating the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other, so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of their response. The nature of a double bind is that the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore can neither comment on the conflict, resolve it, nor opt-out of the situation.

One of the first times I was able to grasp the devastation of being in a double bind was watching a film of a family therapy session at the beginning of my studies at Columbia University. The mother of a ten-year-old asked her son if he loved her. He hesitated and wearily answered,  “Yes.”  His mother then followed with “Why do I have to ask you?” He was damned either way and this affected his consequent behavior.

The session was filmed and when we looked at it frame by frame you saw non-verbal messages of anger from the mother that were not recognized with the naked eye, yet subconsciously internalized by her son. Upon further inquiry into a wider context, it was revealed that the mother had her son out of wedlock and lost a prominent job. Her resentment of what happened was in direct conflict with the sincere love that she had for her son. When she was able to understand the situation from a  wider perspective, it allowed for new ways to better communicate with her son.

A double bind generally includes different levels of abstraction in the order of messages, and these messages can be stated implicitly within the context of the situation or conveyed by tone of voice or body language. Further complications arise when frequent double binds are part of an ongoing relationship to which the person or group is committed. On a positive note, human communication and the mind itself function in an interactive manner like an ecosystem, which helps us understand the interdependence of different parts of a message.

The clue to rising above a double bind is to create perspective by seeing it in its context but also at the same time simultaneously within a larger context. It takes rigor and hard work to break the constraints of a double bind, but if you dare to appreciate it with a widened lens, stepping out of the box, you can construct a whole new world that graciously welcomes the inevitable paradoxes of nature and blends with them to produce new orders of endless possibilities.

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Double Binds: Damned If You Dare and Damned If You Don’t | Psychology Today

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Organizations as Architectures for Complexity — with Joe Norman | by Simone Cicero | Stories of Platform Design

BOUNDARYLESS CONVERSATIONS PODCAST #14

Organizations as Architectures for Complexity — with Joe Norman

Joe Norman talks with us about decentralization and localism as a way to deflate globally rising risk factors and underlines the importance of tackling challenges of organising through a multi-scale variety lens. Our conversation further points in the direction of systemic health-embeddedness of organising through principles of precaution and subsidiarity, providing adequate constraints, rather than directions, for organic systems to evolve.

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Organizations as Architectures for Complexity — with Joe Norman | by Simone Cicero | Stories of Platform Design

Source: European Commission

Complex System Analyser | Knowledge for policy

Complex System Analyser

Workshop-based tool designed to facilitate the systems thinking approach.

This tool was developed to decompose and analyse any complex system so as to identify the key leverage points on which to act if one wants to influence the system.

• It was initially developed by the JRC to analyse the food chain in the context of Delivering on EU food safety and nutrition 2050 – future challenges and policy preparedness (Sustainable food system). 
• The tool provides a 1 to 2 day participatory process working in 5 stages
• The Complex System Analyzer is available to any interested party under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-SA). 
• You are free to use and modify it, but you have to share the results of your adaptations under the same conditions and must attribute the work to its originators.
• We are interested in any feedback on how you plan to use it and returns on experience, please contact us. 

Download the instructions and all the material to organise your own session.

Complex System Analyser – System Mapping instructions

English (1.81 MB – PDF)Download (1.81 MB – PDF)

Complex System Analyser – complete set

English (56.06 MB – ZIP)Download (56.06 MB – ZIP)

source:

Complex System Analyser | Knowledge for policy

I do not know exactly what this is but it is undoubtedly systems-y… h/t Systems Innovation

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The challenges and opportunities that are constantly emerging from our rapidly changing environments, call for new approaches; understanding that everything is connected is fundamental to shift our perspectives and to generate transcendental value.

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By connecting interdisciplinary knowledge, visualising its relationships and understanding the value that every network agent can bring to an ecosystem, we can use our collective wisdom to inspire a new generation of thinkers, creators, inventors and entrepreneurs, to pursue endeavours that generate positive and sustainable impact for a better future for all.

For more information about who we are, visit our company website:
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7Vortex

Explore | 7Vortex

I usually forget there’s a systems thinking subreddit!

https://www.reddit.com/r/systemsthinking/

Systems Thinking r/systemsthinking

Systems Thinking

From Judith Rosen on facebook:

This is fascinating.
I mean, we all sort of “know” that our individual body cells have sensory capacities of their own and even the ability to form “memory” and to “learn”– differently from how our minds do it, but exactly the same in that it’s all about innate model-based guidance and additional model building from experience, right? It’s not something we generally think about (unless you’re as nerdy and deeply curious as I am and, if so, I think I love you!)… But these are indisputable truths about our own bodies– we can prove it is so. What does a vaccine do but build a new memory model in our immune system?
But even so, knowing that, it is freaky to watch cells figuring out a maze… going the wrong way, then turning around and going backward to that last turn… and taking the correct path to get through and exit the maze. The very fact that exiting is a goal is interesting! But the communication happening as successful paths are “marked” just blows my mind. This is Anticipation at work and it’s a really cool bit of scientific work.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/eaay9792#:~:text=Fig.%202%20Real%20cells%20can,them%20to%20the%20attractant%20well.

Paper also available at: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.aay9792

source:

Seeing around corners: Cells solve mazes and respond at a distance using attractant breakdown | Science

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to search

Intertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.

Nelson wrote in Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson 1974, p. DM45): “EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.”^[1]

He added the following comment in the revised edition (Nelson 1987, p. DM31): “Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t.”^[2]

Intertwingularity is related to Nelson’s coining of the term hypertext, partially inspired by “As We May Think” (1945) by Vannevar Bush.^[3]

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Intertwingularity – Wikipedia

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Social System Mapping Deep Dive Session | September 21st, 2020 Registration, Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite

SEP 21

Social System Mapping Deep Dive Session | September 21st, 2020, 4-5pm BST – and monthly

by The MasterMappers and Greater than the Sum Free

Once a month Deep Dive sessions for greater sense making of Social System Mapping

About this Event

Details for this session:

Using Liberating Structures to help with Map Sense-Making – We’ll share some ideas about how Liberating Structures can be used to help inform Social System Map Sense-Making

A monthly session for:

• Meeting other Social System Mappers
• Learning more about a specific Social System Mapping topic
• Sharing your experience and learning with other Social System Mappers

The main session will be an hour – with an OPTIONAL additional 1/2 hour at the end for those who want to participate in small group ‘give and get help’ breakouts.

Who should attend?

These sessions are designed for people who are:

• Already have a basic understanding of what Social System Mapping is.
• Have made some maps, are in some maps or are seriously considering starting a map.
• Somewhere in the process and full of questions (be they visioning, technical or sense-making).
• Wanting to connect with other Social System Mappers.

Find what time this happens in your own timezone here

Date And Time

Mon, September 21, 2020

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM BST

Add to Calendar

Location

Online Event

source:

Social System Mapping Deep Dive Session | September 21st, 2020 Registration, Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite

I know, I know – *nothing* could be more attractive than ‘creating a humanist blockchain future, episode 51: Meta Existential Risk’ but the opening to this is very good (h/t) Mikael Seppala via Systems Innovation

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Exploring systems through the systems leverage canvas | by Ryan Mohr | In Too Deep

Ryan Mohr

Feb 8, 2019 · 3 min read

Systems maps do a great job at capturing relationships. Often, as we’re learning how to translate those relationships into systems maps we’re told to keep related elements near each other and minimize overlapping connections.

But are proximity and orderliness really that useful? What might a systems map look like if we threw those principles out the window?

As Adam Groves and Sam Rye have shown us in their work on systems change, it’s possible to use positioning to pack a lot more information into a systems map A) without making the map overwhelming to your audience, and B) without a whole lot more work on the mapmaker’s side.

Sam calls it the systems leverage canvas. A canvas that allows you to use positioning to capture two additional dimensions to every element on the map.

Rather than arbitrarily placing elements on a map, each element is placed according to two values: leverage and severity.

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Exploring systems through the systems leverage canvas | by Ryan Mohr | In Too Deep

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Innovating in Complexity (Part II): From Single-Point Solutions to Directional Systems Innovation | by Dominic Hofstetter | In Search of Leverage | Medium

Innovating in Complexity (Part II): From Single-Point Solutions to Directional Systems Innovation

Dominic Hofstetter

Jul 26, 2019 · 13 min read

This is the second of a series of three articles exploring innovation in complex adaptive systems. Part I is a critique of roadmaps as a linear, deterministic model for innovation. Part III articulates the contours of a systemic investment logic.

Rethinking Revolution

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Innovating in Complexity (Part II): From Single-Point Solutions to Directional Systems Innovation | by Dominic Hofstetter | In Search of Leverage | Medium

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Experiments – Mind Shift

Experiments

We need to build an alternative future. What are the possibilities? The Experiment board is a place for MIND//SHIFT to share some of the bold and big experiments emerging from across our collaborative community.

To share ideas or thoughts on the experiments, send an email or add a card to the experiment board.

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Experiments – Mind Shift