GMoLS4E19 AI Learning with Donald Clark
https://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25763334/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/tdest_id/2994581/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/
Jan 29, 2023
Once the stuff of science fiction, Artificial Intelligence is now a part of everyday life. But the story of how it came into being is not often told. This episode reveals its roots in neuropsychology and observations of the physical processes in the brain that lead to learning. The theorists who Donald and John discuss began their work at a time when behaviorism, which by and large disouraged attempts to look within the mind, dominated academic psychology. But despite a few ‘winters’, AI has developed to the point where it is now all-pervasive, and a driving force of change in learning.
- 1:20 Introducing AI Learning
- 8:06 Eric Kandel (1929 – )
- 13:29 Donald Olding Hebb (1904 – 1985)
- 23:29 Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898 – 1969) & Walter Pitts (1923 – 1969)
- 37:37 Frank Rosenblatt (1928 – 1971)
- 44:16 David Everett Rumelhart (1942-2011) & Geoffrey Everest Hinton (1947–)
- 57:06 Demis Hassabis (1976–)
- 1:07:23 Summing Up
Read Donald’s book, Artificial Intelligence for Learning: https://www.koganpage.com/product/artificial-intelligence-for-learning-9781789660814
- Kandel bit.ly/3oiiYDo
- Hebb bit.ly/3kq3z2A
- McCulloch & Pitts bit.ly/3kn6Fo8
- Rosenblatt bit.ly/31PZmih
- Rumelhart & Hinton bit.ly/3bXU3zd
- Hassabis bit.ly/3qrYgmT
The Blog that started it all: https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2021/09/these-were-written-as-quick-readable.html
Great Minds on Learning: GMoLS4E19 AI Learning with Donald Clark
Author Archives: antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor
Gerald Midgley – Nov 2022 – SCiO Open Event – YouTube – Moving Beyond Value Conflicts: Systems Thinking in Action
Gerald Midgley – Nov 2022 – SCiO Open Event
Gerald Midgley – Nov 2022 – SCiO Open Event – YouTube
New Books Network Podcast | Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael, “Design Journeys Through Complex Systems”
Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael
Jan 29, 2023
Practice Tools for Systemic Design
BIS PUBLISHERS 2022
Podcast | Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael, “Design Journeys Through…
On the Ambiguities in Complexity:
In today’s post, I am looking at the ambiguities in complexity. I am inspired by the brilliant French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir. She was a proponent of existentialism, the school of philosophy that puts emphasis on human existence first and foremost. Their motto, as noted by Jean Paul Sartre, is “existence precedes essence.” This basically means that we create the meaning of our lives. There is no authority outside of us dictating what our essence must be. We are responsible for our construction of what we become.
The ideas of existentialism have many similarities with the philosophical school of constructivism in Cybernetics. I have written about this before. Similar to existentialism, constructivism says that we construct a version of reality and that we are responsible for our construction. In the social realm, constructivists believe that we aim for consistency through our continuous interactions with the other constructors. If I…
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Metascience – seeking transdisciplinary-like breakthroughs through ethnography and sociology of science
Michael Nielsen’s interview with Jim Rutt emphasised in my mind how his ‘metascience’ project is in itself a form of systems convening and also describes systems convening and systems change in science.
It’s also most likely connected in inspiration with ethnography of science, I suspect.
The trouble in comparing different approaches to science funding
Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu
February 9, 2022
https://scienceplusplus.org/trouble_with_rcts/index.html
A Vision of Metascience
An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science
By Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu
October 18, 2022
https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/index.html
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen
https://numinous.productions/ttft/
Why Logosofia for an assault on situational complexity? Alexander Kritstakis – online, Wed 1 Feb 2023 at 13:30 UK time
The Operational Research Society Systems Thinking Special Interest Group, the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull (UK), and the Linnaeus University Systems Thinking Community (Sweden) are partnering in a new seminar series. Our first seminar is announced below.
Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/why-logosofia-for-an…
If you want to be on our mailing list for future events, sign up here: https://www.theorsociety.com/…/specia…/systems-thinking/
WHY LOGOSOPHIA FOR AN ASSAULT ON SITUATIONAL COMPLEXITY? Seminar from Aleco Christakis
1.30pm to 3pm (UK time) on 1 February 2023 (online – register using the above link.
ABSTRACT. Situational complexity is a phenomenon that emerges when groups of stakeholders congregate to address wicked problems. It emerges as the combined effect of three distinct observational complexities. The seminar will discuss the role of the Logosofia software platform, which has been developed to support the methodology of Structured Dialogic Design (SDD), in launching an efficient, effective, and ephemeral assault on situational complexity. SDD is a problem structuring approach that integrates proposed policy options from multiple stakeholders into a model that all the stakeholders can commit to implementing.
Why Logosofia for an assault on situational complexity? Tickets, Wed 1 Feb 2023 at 13:30 | Eventbrite
Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisations – Integration and Implementation Insights
Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisationsJanuary 24, 2023By Angela Espinosa
Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisations – Integration and Implementation Insights
Complex systems in the spotlight: next steps after the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics
Ginestra Bianconi et al 2023 J. Phys. Complex. 4 010201
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized the fundamental role of complex systems in the natural sciences. In order to celebrate this milestone, this editorial presents the point of view of the editorial board of JPhys Complexity on the achievements, challenges, and future prospects of the field. To distinguish the voice and the opinion of each editor, this editorial consists of a series of editor perspectives and reflections on few selected themes. A comprehensive and multi-faceted view of the field of complexity science emerges. We hope and trust that this open discussion will be of inspiration for future research on complex systems.
Read the full article at: iopscience.iop.org
RIP Javier Livas
Very sad to receive the below message from Allenna, Angela and Jon at Metaphorum
It is with sorrow that we inform the Metaphorum Community of the death of Javier Livas-Cantu on January 17 of this year at age 76. Javier was a Mexican constitutional lawyer who became interested in cybernetics and came to the 1981 SGSR (Now ISSS) Conference in Toronto to meet Stafford. Many conversations followed, culminating in Javier bringing Stafford to Mexico City for the better part of 1983 to assist his attempts to introduce cybernetics into the Mexican government. Although these efforts were not ultimately successful, they did help Javier advance his cause of fair voting and government improvements in Mexico. Javier was very passionate about Sttaford’s theories: he wrote articles (See “The Cybernetic State’), made videos and recorded podcasts in both Spanish and English over decades and participated in several Metaphorum conferences – most recently in Huizen in the Netherlands and Leeds, UK. He was a dear friend and an important member of our community and will be missed.
Allenna, Angela and Jon
Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose | Saches (2023)
Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose
Abstract
The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas’s phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas’s phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas.
Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose | SpringerLink
Stigmergic coordination and minimal cognition in plants
Ric Sims and Özlem Yilmaz
Adaptive Behavior
The tricky question in the plant cognition debate is what theory of cognition should be used to fix the reference of cognitive concepts without skewing the debate too much one way or the other. After all, plants are rather different to animals in many respects: they are not motile, do not possess central nervous systems or even neurons, do not exhibit an invariant morphology, interact with the world in a distributed multi-centred manner, and behave through changes in their physiology. Nonetheless, there is a significant strand in the debate that asserts that plants are indeed cognitive. But what theory of cognition makes sense of this claim without baking in prior zoological assumptions? The aim of this paper is to try out a theory of minimal cognition that makes the claim of plant cognition plausible. It is primarily inspired by the distributed cognition literature…
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Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Resources | Open University
Resources available online
Members of the Systems group at the OU had a significant influence in piloting what is now the University-wide Open Research Online (ORO) – making OU research publications freely available online.
We have also had a long tradition of developing resources that may be used by others externally in pursuit of supporting the application of systems thinking in practice, particularly on OpenLearn.
Badged Open Course
A freely available open online 8 week course (approximately 3 hours/week) called Mastering Systems Thinking in Practice introduces systems thinking in practice at postgraduate level.
Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Resources | School of Engineering and Innovation
Many other resources in source:
Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Resources | School of Engineering and Innovation
Analogies at the edge of reason
Making analogies is the engine of human intelligence, but for humanity as a whole, and our collective-intelligence enterprise called science, it is an obstacle. I’ll try to expand on that in this, maybe not the sharpest of posts.
Hypotheses
In science and life alike, we use analogies as shortcuts to form hypotheses. Any other strategy—experimenting, making observations, statistical inference, etc.—is more expensive and time-consuming. It’s like a dude excited about how different his new girlfriend is from his ex, but cheers her up with fresh flowers because it worked in the past. … hmm, did that analogy bring my point home? Maybe not entirely, and that is the point. Whatever picture analogies put in our minds are biased approximations at best, often setting us off in the wrong direction.
When network science became popular among physicists about 20 years ago, the research questions and assumptions were, with few exceptions, straight…
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Objects of consciousness – Hoffman and Prakash (2014)
Objects of consciousness
Donald D. Hoffman1* and
Chetan Prakash2
- 1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
- 2Department of Mathematics, California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA
Current models of visual perception typically assume that human vision estimates true properties of physical objects, properties that exist even if unperceived. However, recent studies of perceptual evolution, using evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth. Moreover, shifting from evolutionary biology to quantum physics, there is reason to disbelieve in preexisting physical truths: Certain interpretations of quantum theory deny that dynamical properties of physical objects have definite values when unobserved. In some of these interpretations the observer is fundamental, and wave functions are compendia of subjective probabilities, not preexisting elements of physical reality. These two considerations, from evolutionary biology and quantum physics, suggest that current models of object perception require fundamental reformulation. Here we begin such a reformulation, starting with a formal model of consciousness that we call a “conscious agent.” We develop the dynamics of interacting conscious agents, and study how the perception of objects and space-time can emerge from such dynamics. We show that one particular object, the quantum free particle, has a wave function that is identical in form to the harmonic functions that characterize the asymptotic dynamics of conscious agents; particles are vibrations not of strings but of interacting conscious agents. This allows us to reinterpret physical properties such as position, momentum, and energy as properties of interacting conscious agents, rather than as preexisting physical truths. We sketch how this approach might extend to the perception of relativistic quantum objects, and to classical objects of macroscopic scale.
Frontiers | Objects of consciousness
Article on Hoffman:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
And video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJukJiNEl4o
Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception – Prakash et al (2020)
Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception
Chetan Prakash 1, Kyle D Stephens 2, Donald D Hoffman 3, Manish Singh 4, Chris Fields 5
Affiliations expand
- PMID: 33231784
- DOI: 10.1007/s10441-020-09400-0
Abstract
Does natural selection favor veridical percepts-those that accurately (if not exhaustively) depict objective reality? Perceptual and cognitive scientists standardly claim that it does. Here we formalize this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory. We state and prove the “Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem” which shows that the claim is false: If one starts with the assumption that perception involves inference to states of the objective world, then the FBT Theorem shows that a strategy that simply seeks to maximize expected-fitness payoff, with no attempt to estimate the “true” world state, does consistently better. More precisely, the FBT Theorem provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception (e.g. Hoffman et al. in Psychon Bull Rev https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8 , 2015), which proposes that our perceptual systems have evolved to provide a species-specific interface to guide adaptive behavior, and not to provide a veridical representation of objective reality.
Keywords: Bayesian decision theory; Evolutionary game theory; Evolutionary psychology; Fitness; Interface theory of perception; Perception; Veridicality.
Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception – PubMed
Paper (some kind of preprint?):
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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