We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers united by a shared interest in recent approaches to cognitive science, often known as “4E cognition” to refer to their emphasis on embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition.
Our research group is officially hosted by the Research Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems (IIMAS) in the main campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the southern parts of Mexico City.
We also have ties with the Centre for Complexity Sciences (C3), also at UNAM.
COORDINATOR
Tom Froese – http://froese.wordpress.com/
UPCOMING EVENTS
Enactivism
March 15, 2018 – March 17, 2018, Memphis
http://www.ummoss.org/enactivism18.html
4EC & Mental Disorder
April 5, 2018 – April 6, 2018, Exeter
https://www.joelkrueger.com/4e-conference
Reconceiving Cog.
June 27, 2018 – June 29 Antwerp, Belgium
ALIFE 2018
July 23, 2018 – July 27, 2018, Tokyo, Japan
Movement: Brain, Body, Cognition
July 27, 2018 – July 29, 2018, Harvard Medical School
https://movementis.com
What do cities, robots, corporations, political organizations, human bodies, and ecosystems have in common? For the scientists involved in the development of cybernetics from the 1940s to the 1960s, this was all but an awkward question.
In their intellectual and hands-on experimentations, cyberneticians called forth a world in which machines, bodies and nature are entangled as complex and dynamic systems. They theorized that information would and should flow ever more effortlessly within and between these systems.
The purpose of the seminar is to revisit the legacy of cybernetics to shed light on contemporary digital politics. Many of the fundamental questions asked by cyberneticians regain salience today. What remains of liberal individualism when the boundaries between humans, machines and nature are blurred? What are the systemic properties and operating routines of democracy in a world in which machines and humans are increasingly entangled?
Programme
Scholars from fields as diverse as Philosophy, Anthropology, and Artificial Intelligence will give presentations. The speakers include Simon Marvin, Noortje Marres, Andrew Pickering, Willem Schinkel and Tsjalling Swierstra.
Registration
There is limited seating. Are you interested in taking part? Please inquire with Anne Hovingh: anne.hovingh@student.uva.nl. After you register you will receive a more detailed program with abstracts, locations and times.
Public event
The seminar will be concluded by a public event ,The Politics of a Cybernetic World, on Friday March 23 at 4PM at Crea with lectures by Luc Steels and Katherine Hayles, a theatrical performance prepared by Ricarda Franzen and concluding reflections by Andrew Pickering.
Funded by
The event is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the research project Safeguarding long-term equal stakeholdership in the Smart City & the Center for Urban Studies of the University of Amsterdam as part of a collaboration with the Sheffield Urban Automation Institute.
A creative and engaging event exploring the politics of cybernetics with professor Katherine Hayles, professor Luc Steels, professor Andrew Pickering, and dramaturg Ricarda Franzen
Event
What forms of political subjectivity and social organization emerge when people and things are increasingly connected through digital infrastructures? What can robots teach us about inequality or democracy?
During this event, speakers and performers revisit the legacy of cybernetics to shed light on contemporary digital politics.
This even is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the research project Safeguarding long-term equal stakeholdership in the Smart City and the Center for Urban Studies of the University of Amsterdam as part of a collaboration with the Sheffield Urban Automation Institute
The programme
Theatrical performance directed by Ricarda Franzen
Lectures by Katherine Hayles and Luc Steels
Discussions with speakers, audience and Andrew Pickering
Venue
CREA ‘Muziekzaal’, Nieuwe Achtergracht 170, Amsterdam
Registration
Attendance is free of charge but seats are limited, so please register with Anne Hovingh: anne.hovingh@student.uva.nl
The speakers
Katherine Hayles is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University, and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Amongst her distinguished works are How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis; How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, and Writing Machines.
Luc Steels is professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB), co-founder and chairman (from 1990 until 1995) of the VUB Computer Science Department (Faculty of Sciences) and founder and first-director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His main research field is Artificial Intelligence covering a wide range of intelligent abilities, including vision, robotic behavior, conceptual representations and language.
Andrew Pickering is an emeritus professor at the University of Exeter. He is internationally known as a leader in the field of science and technology studies. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science and Kybernetik und Neue Ontologien. In his book The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, he analyses cybernetics as a distinctive form of life spanning brain science, psychiatry, robotics, the theory of complex systems, management, politics, the arts, education, spirituality and the 1960s counterculture, and argues that cybernetics offers a promising alternative to currently hegemonic cultural formations.
Ricarda Franzen works as a dramaturg, sound artist and researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Coinciding with her interests in art practice, she is interested in aspects of sound in relation to its environment but also as being used in theatre and radio dramas. For the Rotterdam-based laboratory for Unstable Media she co-produced a performance based on the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. For the theatrical performance she developed for ‘the State of cybernetics,’ she similarly draws inspiration from a group of historical cutting-edge thinkers and tinkerers.
The organizers
Justus Uitermark is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is affiliated with the Center for Urban Studies and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Uitermark’s research uses relational theorizing and network analysis to examine self-organization, political conflict, and the social organization of the city. With colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, he is currently researching the online/offline interface, utilizing data sourced from Twitter and Instagram to analyze subcultures and social movements. Recent publications include “Longing for Wikitopia. The study and politics of self-organization” (in Urban Studies) and Cities and Social Movements (co-authored with Walter J. Nicholls, Wiley).
Dorien Zandbergen is an anthropologist of digital culture and politics, currently working as a postdoc researcher at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam. Her current work critically explores the politics of urban digitization. In the documentary In search of the Smart Citizen, which she co-produced with Sara Blom (Creative Commons 2015), she interrogates the vision of the “smart city.” She founded Stichting Gr1p to support artistic and literary interventions that help make complex technological themes, visible, debatable and tangible for a broad audience. Her recent academic publications include “From data fetishism to quantifying selves” (with Tamar Sharon, New Media & Society, 2016) and “We Are Sensemakers.” The (Anti-)politics of Smart City Co-creation” (Public Culture, 2017).
I think this is really a big deal – as Patrick Hoverstadt says:
“Michael Pfiffner did a study across 137 organisations and found a -0.78 correlation between organisations ‘conforming’ to VSM as a normative model and organisational crisis – in other words the more VSMy the organisation, the less likely to end up in crisis and the less VSMy the more likely to end up in crisis with a predictability of almost 80% accuracy. I think that is significantly better than anything else I’ve seen as a general predictive model.”
System viability of organizations and the aetiology of organizational crisis : A Quantitative Assessment of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model
Pfiffner, M.D.
(2017) Utrecht University Repository
(Dissertation)
Supervisor(s): Schruijer, Sandra; Boselie, Paul
Abstract
Subject of this dissertation is the aetiology of crisis processes which place organizations under existential threats and which often cause organizational demise and bankruptcy. To date, research on organizational crises (OC) has not succeeded in identifying the generic grounds for these detrimental processes in organizations. A minimal consensus can be … read more
Complexity suggests a different approach to engaging with the world – a middle ground between control and laissez-faire.
We’ve chosen the wrong science to understand the social world.
On the one hand, there is an increasing focus for public sector organizations on defining detailed rules, standardizing methods, evidencing and measuring outcomes. The intention is to make the hospital or school work as an efficient, optimized, well-oiled machine. The belief is that if we tell people exactly what to do and check they do it exactly, then standards and efficiency will improve.
On the other hand, when it comes to commerce and the private sector, there is almost the opposite – increasing deregulation and laissez-faire driven by a strong belief in the invisible hand of the market and in the power of competition to lead to optimal outcomes. The economic world is still largely modelled as if it worked predictably and controllably, moving inexorably towards equilibrium.
What is remarkable is that these beliefs seem to harden and become ever-more entrenched despite the repeating crises facing our economies, ecologies, and societies. They persist in spite of the stark and often completely unexpected social eruptions and political crises that dominate the news. They persist even in the light of increasing evidence that policies are failing. For example, the UK – despite continuing focus on ‘machine thinking’ (defining detailed teaching methods and lesson plans, detailed measuring of performance of schools, teachers and pupils) – is near the bottom of 24 countries in relation to literacy and numeracy. And, despite neo-liberal free market policies and the promise of ‘trickle down’, inequality continues to rise; the UK is 28th out of 34 OECD countries in relation to income inequality andbottom of 37 countries in relation to difference in healthy eating between rich and poor children. If ever there was a need for fresh thinking, we are seeing it now. Yet most of the solutions that are attempted consist in propping up the status quo, doing more of the same, rather than thinking afresh and questioning underlying assumptions.
Dave Snowden at TedX: A succinct overview of his groundbreaking work
I first met Dave in 2002 when we were both employed by IBM. I remember experiencing an immediate resonance with his work, especially the inherent integrity of honoring context and not mindlessly applying best-practice recipes as the big consultancies tend to do.
It is now 16 years later, and it has been a privilege to be part of his journey, and to see the thinking and methods become more and more coherent over time. This talk is an excellent resource for anyone who wants an introduction to the thinking, or who wants to introduce others to it.
In less than 18 minutes, Dave manages to introduce complex systems theory; tell the children’s party story (3 mins 30 secs) and introduce a new theory of change based on the power of micro-narrative and vector measures enabled by Sensemaker (7 mins).
Watch it … It’s 18 minutes well spent.
Some stand-out nuggets:
On our over-focus on order and measurement (40 secs)
Order is hugely valuable to human beings, on a negative side a fear of chaos has been used to impose order unnecessarily and destroy creativity and freedom.
Over the last 40 or 50 years we’ve taken an engineering focus on society and an engineering metaphor. We’ve actually compounded order with excessive outcome based measurement. If you actually look at the history of last 40 or 50 years, everything has to have a target; everything has to have a defined outcome and it has to be a number. Whether it’s KPI’s, number of published papers or whatever else. The reality is all of the scientific evidence says that when human beings are pursuing explicit targets it destroys intrinsic motivation, there is no evidence to contradict that.
Where do we most need intrinsic motivation? In health and education. And where do we impose the worst targets? In health and education so we need to start thinking differently about this and move away from a primitive dichotomy.
On managing Complex Adaptive Systems (2 mins):
Complex adaptive system: it’s a system defined not by its structure by it by its connectivity. In a complex system everything is connected with everything else but many of the connections cannot be known. …
… Understanding how we manage them is critical and it’s not about control it’s about understanding the connections and changes in the linkages.
3 mins 30 secs: Children’s Party Story
6 mins 30 secs:
… what we manage is the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors within boundaries and we manage the only three things that you can manage in a complex adaptive system: the boundary conditions; the probes and the amplification strategy.
Management and governance is much simpler when you understand the nature of the system and you stop trying to treat an ecosystem as if it was an engineering problem when it’s an ecological problem.
On micro-narrative and a new theory of change (7 mins 10 secs)
We need to understand what’s going on, and you can only understand a complex system by understanding the small particular parts of day-to-day interaction. For humans those are the anecdotal data of the school gate, the street stories, the beer after work; not the grand narratives of workshops but the day-to-day anecdotes of people’s existence.
And we need to understand them through the voice of the people who tell them not through an AI machine interpreting the text or an expert making them fit their cultural expectations.
The people’s own voice has to be subject to their own interpretation.
And then we need to allow those in power at any level of society to have direct access to the raw stories of the people they govern, without multiple levels of interpretation which allow them to hide from reality behind the guise of policy reports.
On change (nudging towards adjacent possibles) (15 min 40 sec)
… they can all nudge their systems in a direction appropriate to their context rather being subject to the tyranny of the average approach: the global campaign.
We need to start doing small things in the present rather than promising massive things in the future because that just leads to perpetual disappointment.
We are Dave’s exclusive South Africa partners, so if you want to explore how to implement these ideas in your own context, please contact us to find out more.
CCS2018 is the flagship conference on Complex Systems promoted by the CSS. It brings under one umbrella a wide variety of leading researchers, practitioners and stakeholders with a direct interest in Complex Systems, from Physics to Computer Science, Biology, Social Sciences, Economics, and Technological and Communication Networks, among others.
We are looking forward to seeing the best of your new insights in Complex Systems at the Conference on Complex Systems 2018, in Thessaloniki, Greece, to be held from 23 to 28 September 2018.
Topics covered by the Conference include, but are not limited to:
Main Tracks
1. Foundations of Complex Systems (complex networks, self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, mathematical modeling and simulation)
2. Information and Communication Technologies (Internet, WWW, search, semantic web, Blockchain, Bitcoins)
3. Cognition and Linguistics (evolution of language, social consensus, artificial intelligence, cognitive processes)
4. Economics and Finance (social networks, game theory, stock market and crises)
5. Infrastructure, Planning and Environment (critical infrastructures, urban planning, mobility, transport and energy, Smart Cities)
6. Biological and (Bio)Medical Complexity (biological networks, systems biology, evolution, natural science, medicine and physiology)
7. Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) (global environmental change, green growth, sustainability and resilience)
8. Complexity in Physics and Chemistry
9. Other applications of Complex Systems
We invite you to submit a one-page abstract until the 30th of April 2018, via our EasyChair submission link: EasyChair
Abstract Submission Guidelines
Easychair will be used for all procedures
Log in to easychair.org using an existing account.
If you do not have an account, you can easily sign up.
Click on the submission link (see below).
Log in to the conference as an author, and proceed with uploading your paper at the top left corner by clicking “New Submission”
Follow the instructions easy chair provides you and fill in all the necessary details.
We accept contributed talks (regular and lightning talks) and posters. Please indicate your preference for one of the following categories to present your research:
Regular talk
Poster submission
Lightning talk
Oral Presentations
The allocated time for each oral presentations is 15 minutes, which total time for presentation +questions (12 min + 3 min). There is a tight schedule and it is important that each presenter stay within this time limit. Presenters will have access to a laptop with LCD projector and a laser pointer. Please, bring your presentation to the meeting on a USB flash drive to load on the in-room laptops. You should load your presentation on one of the conference laptops before the first session, during the coffee breaks, or during lunch preceding your presentation. A support staff member will be in each room to assist with the loading.
Poster Presentations
For each poster, display boards will be allocated. The poster area will open 30 minutes before each poster sessions begins each day. It is advisable to hang the posters sometime before 9:00 a.m. the day of the respective session. Posters will need to be taken down by the end of the day of each session. Presenters will be required to be next to their posters during specific time slots. Poster dimensions: 90 x 120 cm.
Lightning (Ignite) presentations
A few oral talks will be presented in the “ignite” mode. Such talks should present a single, new, key idea of the problem at hand, rather than give complete and detailed results of a research project. Thus, the allocated time will be 3 minutes. No questions/answers will be allowed. Each ignite talk should have no more than 3 slides. All presentations should be loaded to the room laptop before the beginning of the session. Please see the support staff member of the room to assist you with the loading.
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 Apr 2018
Notification to authors: 1 June 2018.
Dates of the Conference: 23-28 September 2018.
Dates of satellite meetings: 26-27 September 2018.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: ccs2018@auth.gr
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the historical development of this new world view, focusing on its philosophical foundations. Determinism was challenged by quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Systems theory replaced reductionism by a scientifically based holism. Cybernetics and postmodern social science showed that knowledge is intrinsically subjective. These developments are being integrated under the header of “complexity science”. Its central paradigm is the multi-agent system. Agents are intrinsically subjective and uncertain about their environment and future, but out of their local interactions, a global organization emerges. Although different philosophers, and in particular the postmodernists, have voiced similar ideas, the paradigm of complexity still needs to be fully assimilated by philosophy. This will throw a new light on old philosophical issues such as relativism, ethics and the role of the subject.
Contextuality: A Philosophical Paradigm, with Applications to Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Gershenson, C (2002) Contextuality: A Philosophical Paradigm, with Applications to Philosophy of Cognitive Science.[Departmental Technical Report] (Unpublished)
We develop on the idea that everything is related, inside, and therefore determined by a context. This stance, which at first might seem obvious, has several important consequences. This paper first presents ideas on Contextuality, for then applying them to problems in philosophy of cognitive science. Because of space limitations, for the second part we will assume that the reader is familiar with the literature of philosophy of cognitive science, but if this is not the case, it would not be a limitation for understanding the main ideas of this paper. We do not argue that Contextuality is a panaceic answer for explaining everything, but we do argue that everything is inside a context. And because this is always, we sometimes ignore it, but we believe that many problems are dissolved with a contextual approach, noticing things we ignore because of their obviousity. We first give a notion of context. We present the idea that errors are just incongruencies inside a context. We also present previous ideas of absolute being, relative being, and lessincompleteness. We state that all logics, and also truth judgements, are contextdependent, and we develop a “Context-dependant Logic”. We apply ideas of Contextuality to problems in semantics, the problem of “where is the mind”, and the study of consciousness.
Carlos Gershenson, Francis Heylighen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
(Submitted on 16 Feb 2004 (v1), last revised 1 Jun 2004 (this version, v2))
This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical thinking and its intrinsic drawbacks when dealing with complexity. We then show how complexity forces us to build models with indeterminacy and unpredictability. However, we can still deal with the problems created in this way by being adaptive, and profiting from a complex system’s capability for selforganization, and the distributed intelligence this may produce.
The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy
Carlos Gershenson
Computer Sciences Department,
Instituto de Investigaciones en Matem´aticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas
Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico
May 17, 2011 Abstract
Reductionism has dominated science and philosophy for centuries. Complexity has recently shown that interactions—which reductionism neglects—are relevant for understanding
phenomena. When interactions are considered, reductionism becomes limited in several aspects. In this paper, I argue that interactions imply non-reductionism, non-materialism, non-predictability, non-Platonism, and non-nihilism. As alternatives
to each of these, holism, informism, adaptation, contextuality, and meaningfulness are put forward, respectively. A worldview that includes interactions not only describes better our world, but can help to solve many open scientific, philosophical, and social problems caused by implications of reductionism.
Since it’s a good source – especially recently – I took a look at the person behind Complexity Digest (https://comdig.unam.mx/ – and often drawn from the open-contribution, curated scoop.it at http://www.scoop.it/u/complexity-digest). Though there’s a storied history, going back to Dr Gottfried Mayer (see https://comdig.unam.mx/about/), Carlos Gershenon, the current editor, is an interesting chap doing some interesting work (headline link and below):
I can’t find a free source for this article, so have linked to the Complexity Digest piece – this and the recentre three articles are from that excellent resource.
Evolving Ecosystems: Inheritance and Selection in the Light of the Microbiome
The importance of microorganisms in human biology is undeniable. The amount of research that supports that microbes have a fundamental role in animal and plant physiology is substantial and increasing every year. Even though we are only beginning to comprehend the broadness and complexity of microbial communities, evolutionary theories need to be recast in the light of such discoveries to fully understand and incorporate the role of microbes in our evolution. Fundamental evolutionary concepts such as diversity, heredity, selection, speciation, etc., which constitute the modern synthesis, are now being challenged, or at least expanded, by the emerging notion of the holobiont, which defines the genetic and metabolic networks of the host and its microbes as a single evolutionary unit. Several concepts originally developed to study ecosystems, can be used to understand the physiology and evolution of such complex systems that constitute “individuals.” In this review, we discuss these ecological concepts and also provide examples that range from squids, insects and koalas to other mammals and humans, suggesting that microorganisms have a fundamental role not only in physiology but also in evolution. Current evolutionary theories need to take into account the dynamics and interconnectedness of the host-microbiome network, as animals and plants not only owe their symbiogenetic origin to microbes, but also share a long evolutionary history together.
Evolving Ecosystems: Inheritance and Selection in the Light of the Microbiome
Santiago Sandoval-Motta, Maximino Aldana, Alejandro Frank
If you’ve been frustrated by seeing situations at work or elsewhere in the world going wrong in the same way over and over again then, without knowing it, you’ve probably experienced a systems law in operation. If you’re interested in learning more about the insight made possible through understanding how systems work, why not join us for an evening Systems Café event to learn about systems thinking and try applying it to some of the news topics of the day or your own management issues?
This Systems Café is organised by SCiO. SCiO is a community of systems practitioners who believe that traditional approaches to running organisations are responsible for many of the problems we see today. We believe that systems approaches to designing and running organisations offer radically new and better alternatives. We have run quarterly Open Meetings (mini-conferences) and Development Days for some years. Systems Cafés are a new initiative to help support Systems Practitioners and others interested in learning about Systems approaches and practice.
£2 fee towards refreshments
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“In systems thinking… understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.” – Russell Ackoff
What the body feels is every bit as significant as what the mind thinks, a neuroscientist argues. Turn to emotions to explain human consciousness and cultures
Skin trade: Homeostasis, 2005-2006, by Liza Lou. Homeostasis is the key word throughout the book. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Nietzsche would have given four cheers for this intricately argued book, which is at once scientifically rigorous and humanely accommodating, and, so far as this reviewer can judge, revolutionary. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, sets out to investigate “why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves … and how brains interact with the body to support such functions”. We are not floating seraphim, he reminds us, but bodies that think – and all the better for it.
From Plato onwards, western philosophy has favoured mind over “mere” body, so that by the time we get to Descartes, the human has become hardly more than a brain stuck atop a stick, like a child’s hobbyhorse. This is the conception of humanness that Damasio wishes to dismantle. For him, as for Nietzsche, what the body feels is every bit as significant as what the mind thinks, and further, both functions are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, from the very start, among the earliest primitive life forms, affect – “the world of emotions and feelings” – was the force that drove unstoppably towards the flowering of human consciousness and the creation of cultures, Damasio insists.
The idea on which he bases his book is, he tells us, simple: “Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavours.” In claiming simplicity, it is possible the author is being a mite disingenuous. The tone in which he sets out his argument is so carefully judged, so stylistically calm and scientifically collected, that most readers will be lulled into nodding agreement. Yet a moment’s thought will tell us that we conduct our lives largely in contradiction of his premise, and for the most part deal with each other, and even with ourselves, as if we were pure spirit accidentally and inconveniently shackled to half a hundredweight or so of forked flesh.
“Feelings, and more generally affect of any sort and strength,” Damasio writes, “are the unrecognised presences at the cultural conference table.” According to him, the conference began among the bacteria, which – who? – even in their “unminded existence … assume what can only be called a sort of ‘moral attitude’”. In support of his claim, he adduces the various ways in which bacteria behave that bear a striking resemblance to human social organisation. The implication is, then, that “the human unconscious literally goes back to early life-forms, deeper and further than Freud or Jung ever dreamed of”. Damasio’s argument is that we are directly descended not only from the apes, but from the earliest wrigglers at the bottom of the primordial rock pool.
Antonio Damasio … wholly his own man. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The keyword throughout the book is homeostasis, of which he offers a number of definitions, the clearest of which is the earliest, and which he favours enough to set it in italics: homeostasis is the force – the word seems justified – that ensures that “life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species”.
Damasio, whose books include The Feeling of What Happens and Self Comes to Mind, is a scientist but also a convinced, one might say a crusading, humanist. He wants us to recognise the richness of life in all its aspects, good or bad; but he is no sentimentalist. The human condition is one of struggle and assertion and the will to prevail: “Life comes equipped with a precise mandate: resist and project life into the future, no matter what.” Here again the shadow, or the radiance, of Nietzsche’s thinking falls across the page.
Also called to the table is Spinoza – on whom Damasio has written at length – and his emphasis on conatus, the essential force by which all things strive to persevere, and which had for Spinoza the same significance that homeostasis has for Damasio.
There are echoes here too of William James, that most endearing of philosophers, as when Damasio pauses for a brief, Jamesian consideration of the anomalous fact that for all the hi-tech sophistication of modern life, we still cling to the primitive pleasure and reassurance of the domestic fireplace. And James would have been delighted by Damasio’s “everydayness”, his readiness to acknowledge the fundamental underpinnings of even our highest endeavours, for instance when he remarks in wonderment: “It is intriguing to think that the enteric nervous system” – that is, the gut – “might well have been the very first brain.”
But Damasio, while ever ready to salute his predecessors and peers, is wholly his own man, and The Strange Order of Things is a fresh and daring effort to identify the true spring and source of human being – of the being, in fact, of all living things – namely feeling. As he beautifully puts it, “The sick patient, the abandoned lover, the wounded warrior, and the troubadour in love were able to feel.” The truth of this is simple and profound; how else may we be said to live, except by feeling?
![[img]](https://stream.syscoi.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/application_pdf.png?w=776)
I did a PhD on 
Before that, I did a BEng in Computer Engineering at the 
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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