Categories
Complexity

Self-Organising Criticality in Brains, Battles and Universes

The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]

Categories
Complexity

Brain Function as Communications System

Context: Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. Brain as decentralised communications network that exists with optimal efficiency on a globally-distributed fractal boundary between order and disorder? “Specific brain networks seemed to communicate with each other in what looked like a “dance,” with one region appearing to “listen” […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Open Mind

Being that the combinatorial complexity of 86 billion neurons exists in an utterly vast state space of possible connection and structure, yet given that a limited sub-set of all possible network edges or computational and thermochemical functions as dynamical symmetry occurs, an intuition is that the patchwork quilt of neurocognitive or otherwise causal biological facts […]

Categories
Philosophy

Worlds Beyond Words

There is indeed a boundary and border between what might be said or defined and what might eventually be understood or known as reality, information, the physical facts that (or as they) exist beyond our descriptions of them. I am sympathetic with any philosophical position that seeks to build and inhabit the difference and distance […]

Categories
creativity

Creative Cognitive Semantics

From the article: “participants with higher creative activities and achievements had semantic memory networks that were less segregated and more efficient”. So, creative utility is a function of a globally-distributed semantic potential (as memory, encoding, storage). The more semantic combinatorial possibility, the greater the potential creative “depth” of a cognitive system. If “creative cognition involves […]

Categories
Philosophy

Experience as Negation

Apophasis was a Medieval mystical method as philosophical heuristic which sought to  remove all noise, all excess, all mental chatter until all that was left is Divine. However one feels about this, and a Zen resonance notwithstanding, the fact remains that this procedural cognitive morphology represents the equal and inverse to that of accumulative, aggregative […]

Categories
Science

A Thousand Brains

I’m about half way through reading Jeff Hawkins’ book “A Thousand Brains” which has been taking me quite some time, not because it is overly complicated or inaccessible, but because I tend to have so little spare time these days. It’s an interesting read with the key takeaway (so far) being that our mental world […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Science of Entropy: Anger, Bureaucracy and Systemic Self-Propagation

Complexity is a lot smarter than we are – all of our ratiobal interdictions into behavioural and sociological problems tend to amplify by displacement those problems.