Khan, Zaid (2020) Responding to Complexity with Humility: A Systems-oriented Approach to Strategic Communication. [MRP]

Responding to Complexity with Humility: A Systems-oriented Approach to Strategic Communication – OCAD University Open Research Repository

2022-05-09May 9 (the second Monday of the month) is the 100th meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration is on Eventbrite at https://intention-attention.eventbrite.ca .Intention or Attention? Humbling Design through ‘Systems Changes Learning’

Systems Thinking Ontario – 2022-05-09

Neo-SigmaThe aim of this paper is to connect the history of art to its future via a political fantasy.by Andrew Pickering

Neo-Sigma · Contemporary Arts and Cultures

The Energy Homeostasis Principle: A naturalistic approach to explain the emergence of behaviourMario Villalobos and Rodrigo VergaraUniversidad de Tarapacá y Universidad Metropolitana de las Ciencias de la EducaciónMay 5, 2022, 3 p.m. UTC // May 5, 2022, 3 p.m. in UTC

ENSO Seminar Series

Exploring the Complexity of MusicMonday, May 16, 2022, 7pm at SITE Santa FeSITE Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Institute are proud to present Exploring the Complexity of Music, a concert highlighting “complexity in music” as interpreted by individual composers and performers.This event coincides with the opening of a forum on Complexity and Structure of Music: Universal Features, Evolutionary Processes and Cultural Diversity that will be held at the Santa Fe Institute in the following days, and bring together network and complexity scientists, musicologists, music theorists, composers, performers, and neuroscientists to trade licks about the intersections of music and complexity from as many angles as possible. The program will feature a broad palette of works from a diverse group of composers/performers, including some from the forum participants, who will be present to engage in creative discussions with the audience.

Exploring the Complexity of Music – SITE Santa Fe

CYBERNETICS REVISITED

Posted by Lanfranco Aceti (LEA Editor in Chief) on April 14, 2018

Cybernetics Revisited

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 22 Issue 2

Description: This volume is a hybrid collection of essays which explore current critical discourses on possible future developments in cybernetics. It investigates marginal and interstitial areas of cybernetics—conceived as a cybernetics of the third order—theorizing alternative possibilities, opportunities, and threats. Cybernetics become not solely a panacea to all the evils of humanity but also the unpredictable opportunity for new life forms that can be alternatives to current ecologies and hierarchies or that can reveal existing and unexpressed ontological possibilities inherent to nature itself.

Cybernetics Revisited – Leonardo Electronic Almanac

Technoetic Arts|| A Journal of Speculative Research

Technoetic Arts focuses upon the juncture between art, technology and the mind, drawing from academic research and often unorthodox approaches. Technoetic Arts is a peer-reviewed journal that explores the juncture of art practice, technology and the human mind, opening up a forum for trans-disciplinary speculative research. This website serves the Editorial Organism of Technoetic Arts. We keep here notes, drafts, and other internal documents. At times, we initiate projects, such as A Cybernetic Picnic, and keep related information here. Recent calls can also be found here. If you have an idea for an article but are unsure whether the topic is within the realm of what we would consider, you are welcome to use the comments below the call to ask questions. You can also write us an email at editors[.at.]technoeticartsjournal.org.For further information about the journal and author instructions, please visit the journal’s website at intellect.

Technoetic Arts

Borth from the American Association for Cybernetics email discussion group

Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model.F. G. Varela, H. Maturana, R. UribePublished 1 May 1974

Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. | Semantic Scholar

I’m a little surprised this wasn’t already here (it may be one of the things that was on model.report and therefore the link was lost). This has cropped up again on the American Society for Cybernetics mailing list – mainly contra Luhmann. If you want a lot of these sorts of cybernetics debates, the ASC member list and the CYBSOC open mailing list (see other posts) are good.

Transformation LiteracyPathways to Regenerative Civilizatio

Transformation Literacy | SpringerLink

This open access book brings science and practice together and inspires a global movement towards co-creating regenerative civilizations that work for 100% of humanity and the Earth as a whole. With its conceptual foundation of the concept of transformation literacy it enhances the knowledge and capacity of decision-makers, change agents and institutional actors to steward transformations effectively across institutions, societal sectors and nations.

Humanity is at crossroads. Resource depletion and exponential emissions that not only cause climate change, but endanger the health of people and planet, call for a decisive turnaround of human civilization. A new and transformative paradigm is emerging that advocates for regenerative civilizations, in which a narrative of systemic health as much as individual and collective vitality guide the interaction of socio-economic-ecological systems. Truly transformative change must go far beyond technical solutions, and instead envision what can be termed ‘a new operating system’ that helps humankind to live well within the planetary boundaries and partner with life’s evolutionary processes. This requires transformations at three different levels:

·  Mindsets that reconnect with a worldview in which human agency acknowledges its co-evolutionary pathways with each other and the Earth.

·  Political, social and economic systems that are regenerative and foster the care-taking for Earth life support systems.

·  Competencies to design and implement effective large-scale transformative change processes at multiple levels with multiple stakeholders.

This book provides key ingredients for enhancing transformation literacy from various perspectives around the globe. It connects the emerging practice of stewarding transformative change across business, government institutions and civil society actors with the most promising scientific models and concepts that underpin human action to shape the future collectively in accordance with planetary needs.

(Re)Design: frameworks, tools and scenarios for the Systemic Design ApproachDATEOn Wednesday, 4th May 2022 from 17:00 p.m. to 18:30 p.m. (UTC+2)PLACEOnline Meetup (you will receive the access link by email after your registration)

(Re)Design: frameworks, tools and scenarios for the Systemic Design approach – foryouandyourcustomers

SAVVI – a system approach to identifying vulnerability

Government Transformation | From The Public Service Transformation Academy and RedQuadrant

May 05Book Launch: Design Journeys through Complex Systemsby NamahnFollowFreeActions and Detail PanelLike EventRegisterEvent InformationKristel Van Ael and Peter Jones discuss their new book “Design Journeys through Complex Systems”.

Book Launch: Design Journeys through Complex Systems Registration, Thu, May 5, 2022 at 5:00 PM | Eventbrite

Guest editorial: Complexity as a model for social innovation and social entrepreneurship: is there order in the chaos?

Guest editorial: Complexity as a model for social innovation and social entrepreneurship: is there order in the chaos? | Emerald Insight

Introduction: social innovation, social entrepreneurship and complexity: exploring the linkages

Whether describing a looming social problem or a proposed innovative solution, it is increasingly commonplace to find the word “complex” affixed as a descriptor. Complexity is a particularly malleable term, denoting inter alia that something is poorly understood, politically contested or difficult to accomplish. Complexity can be adopted in this sense as a framework for approaching issues constructively or less helpfully, as a management gloss or an excuse for inaction. However, as the articles in this special issue demonstrate, the concepts, theories and methodologies of the complexity sciences can offer both constructive theoretical advancements and practical insights to help better address contemporary societal challenges.

As nation-states confront intractable social problems and adapt to system-changing shocks like financial crises, climate emergencies and the COVID-19 pandemic, social innovation and social entrepreneurship are often invoked as routes to needed systemic change (Ashoka, 2020; Avelino et al., 2019; Domanski et al., 2020; Westley and Antadze, 2010). Social innovation and social entrepreneurship charge practitioners with the development of novel ideas for increasingly unknown futures. For Goldstein et al. (2010, p. 102), this brings forth a paradox: “if the novelty generation inherent in social innovation cannot be planned, how can social entrepreneurs bring about social innovation?”. In grappling with this question, the interrelated social innovation and social entrepreneurship literatures shifted focus from localised problems to “systemic and structural issues” (Nicholls et al., 2015), from individual “heroic” entrepreneurs to self-organising actors within ecosystems (Moore and Westley, 2011) and from a deterministic theory of change approach to a dynamic and non-linear process of scaling, spreading and impact (Corner and Ho, 2010). By dint of the questions that now drive its inquiry, social innovation and social entrepreneurship might be considered innately complex concepts.

Complexity science – as a multidisciplinary and indeed multitheoretical philosophical field (Castellani and Hafferty, 2009) – are as Mulgan (2012, p. 28) noted, “instinctively at home” with social innovation and social enterprises involving “organic development, trial and error, [and] dispersed power”. Complexity theorists have explored “the unprecedented, the unpredictable, and the non-deductible” nature of both social innovation (Goldstein et al., 2010; Grimm et al., 2013; Matei and Antonie, 2015; Mulgan, 2012b; Taylor and Arundel, 2019; Westley and Antadze, 2010) and social entrepreneurship (Rhodes and Donnelly-Cox, 2008; Swanson and Zhang, 2011; Tapsell and Woods, 2010), and for developing novel means of promoting both processes (Geobey et al., 2012; Hervieux and Voltan, 2019; Zivkovic, 2018). This has involved complexity-derived concepts like emergence (Wheatley and Frieze, 2006), the adaptive cycle (Moore and Westley, 2011; Westley and Antadze, 2010), self-organisation (McCarthy, 2017; Tapsell and Woods, 2010), fitness landscapes (Rhodes and Dowling, 2018) and attractor states (Goldstein et al., 2010), while complexity-related concepts like disequilibrium, non-linearity, feedback and feedforward and path dependency feature regularly, if more colloquially, in the literature.

Beyond academia, complexity theory and systems-informed approaches now feature much more strongly in the policy landscape and related grey literature. International organisations such as the OECD and the UN have explored systems theory as a development trajectory in recent years while leading foundations like Ashoka, Schwab and Skoll have all explored elements of complexity in their research programmes. Yet, as more people look to systems thinking and complexity theory to provide insights and practical guidance for the development, management and sponsorship of social innovation and entrepreneurship, there is a pressing need for complexity-informed scholarship to move beyond providing just a “menu of metaphors” (Mulgan, 2012, p. 29) and speak directly to a developing practice.

Complicating this drive for practical utility, however, is the reality that the complexity sciences are not a singular perspective but rather an extended and quarrelsome family of theories. Research traditions which have developed from von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory, Forrester’s System Dynamics, Cybernetics and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Adaptive Systems approach focus primarily on modelling, predicting and ultimately influencing the behaviour of complex systems. Other traditions deriving from Cilliers’ postmodernism (Cilliers, 2002), Byrne and Callaghan’s (2013) complex realism and critical systems thinking (Jackson, 2016) consider the challenges of complexity more fundamental and irreducible, demanding rapid adaptation rather than merely better-informed attempts at prediction. The breadth of inquiry and incommensurability of worldviews operant within the complexity sciences is often glossed over in the literature and researchers (including those working within social innovation and social entrepreneurship) often adopt a “pick and mix” approach, drawing from the complexity science’s vast conceptual library with little attention paid to philosophical consistency or practical complementarity.

In many academic disciplines, complexity is also often subsumed into an oppositional rhetoric, framing insight into problems more than solutions. For Mulgan (2015, p. 14), this is “the constant challenge with systems thinking – how to see the interconnections between things without becoming intellectually overwhelmed, and trapped by them into a fatalism which presumes that change is impossible”. Conversely, while complexity’s constructive potential is foregrounded in policy discourse by consultants and think tanks as a toolkit to unlock systems change, it can be positioned as a high-concept cure-all lacking analytical depth and criticality. It, therefore, seems particularly important now for academics to explore with consistency and scrutiny how the complexity sciences might inform a burgeoning policy interest while also offering constructive inroads to the disciplinary mainstream. Notable academic events like the International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship, Systems Thinking and Complexity at Adelphi University, which led to a 2008 special issue of the Journal Emergence: Complexity and Organization contributed groundwork for this agenda. More recently, complexity thinking in social innovation has been carried forward through conference streams at the International Research Society for Public Management Conference and the International Social Innovation Research Conference, from which this special issue emerged. The articles in this special issue from (Abraham and Geobey, 2021; Lythberg et al., 2021; Rhodes et al., 2021; McGowan and Geobey, 2022) build on this body of work and further demonstrate the value of the complexity sciences as a theoretical tradition and empirical lens in social innovation and social entrepreneurship scholarship.

This review article opens this special issue. We survey the adoption and application of complexity science-related ideas in the social innovation and social entrepreneurship literatures to consider the former’s contributions and implications for the latter’s practice and theory, and we reflect on the contributions which this special issue makes to this area of research. In the following sections, we focus our discussion on the fields of social innovation and entrepreneurship while also acknowledging contributions from closely related fields like social finance. We also draw from pertinent literature from cognate disciplines of public administration, public policy, socialecological systems and operations management, where subject matter overlaps with social innovation and social entrepreneurship topics. Drawing from the papers in this volume as well as wider literature review, we address two central questions:

Q1.

How have the complexity sciences been applied to the fields of social innovation and social entrepreneurship? and

Q2.

How can complexity contribute to improved theoretical understanding and practical insight in these two fields?

Metacognition as a Consequence of Competing Evolutionary Time Scales

Entropy | Free Full-Text | Metacognition as a Consequence of Competing Evolutionary Time Scales | HTML

Abstract

Evolution is full of coevolving systems characterized by complex spatio-temporal interactions that lead to intertwined processes of adaptation. Yet, how adaptation across multiple levels of temporal scales and biological complexity is achieved remains unclear. Here, we formalize how evolutionary multi-scale processing underlying adaptation constitutes a form of metacognition flowing from definitions of metaprocessing in machine learning. We show (1) how the evolution of metacognitive systems can be expected when fitness landscapes vary on multiple time scales, and (2) how multiple time scales emerge during coevolutionary processes of sufficiently complex interactions. After defining a metaprocessor as a regulator with local memory, we prove that metacognition is more energetically efficient than purely object-level cognition when selection operates at multiple timescales in evolution. Furthermore, we show that existing modeling approaches to coadaptation and coevolution—here active inference networks, predator–prey interactions, coupled genetic algorithms, and generative adversarial networks—lead to multiple emergent timescales underlying forms of metacognition. Lastly, we show how coarse-grained structures emerge naturally in any resource-limited system, providing sufficient evidence for metacognitive systems to be a prevalent and vital component of (co-)evolution. Therefore, multi-scale processing is a necessary requirement for many evolutionary scenarios, leading to de facto metacognitive evolutionary outcomes.

Keywords: metacognition; metaprocessor; coevolution; coadaptation; temporal scales; active inference; predator–prey models; coupled genetic algorithms; generative adversarial networks