The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Abeba Birhane
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Complexity Science ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Embodied Cognitive Science ◽  
The One

Abstract On the one hand, complexity science and enactive and embodied cognitive science approaches emphasize that people, as complex adaptive systems, are ambiguous, indeterminable, and inherently unpredictable. On the other, Machine Learning (ML) systems that claim to predict human behaviour are becoming ubiquitous in all spheres of social life. I contend that ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ML systems are close descendants of the Cartesian and Newtonian worldview in so far as they are tools that fundamentally sort, categorize, and classify the world, and forecast the future. Through the practice of clustering, sorting, and predicting human behaviour and action, these systems impose order, equilibrium, and stability to the active, fluid, messy, and unpredictable nature of human behaviour and the social world at large. Grounded in complexity science and enactive and embodied cognitive science approaches, this article emphasizes why people, embedded in social systems, are indeterminable and unpredictable. When ML systems “pick up” patterns and clusters, this often amounts to identifying historically and socially held norms, conventions, and stereotypes. Machine prediction of social behaviour, I argue, is not only erroneous but also presents real harm to those at the margins of society.

scholarly journals The Substrate-Independence Theory: Advancing Constructor Theory to Scaffold Substrate Attributes for the Recursive Interaction between Knowledge and Information

Systems ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
John Turner ◽  
Dave Snowden ◽  
Nigel Thurlow
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Structure Learning ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Complex Environments ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Construction Tasks ◽  
Post Hoc

The substrate-independence theory utilizes sensemaking techniques to provide cognitively based scaffolds that guide and structure learning. Scaffolds are cognitive abstractions of constraints that relate to information within a system. The substrate-independence theory concentrates on the flow of information as the underlying property of the host system. The substrate-independence theory views social systems as complex adaptive systems capable of repurposing their structure to combat external threats by utilizing constructors and substrates. Constructor theory is used to identify potential construction tasks, the legitimate input and output states that are possible, to map the desired change in the substrate’s attributes. Construction tasks can be mapped in advance for ordered and known environments. Construction tasks may also be mapped in either real-time or post hoc for unordered and complex environments using current sensemaking techniques. Mapping of the construction tasks in real-time becomes part of the landscape, and scaffolds are implemented to aid in achieving the desired state or move to a more manageable environment (e.g., from complex to complicated).

scholarly journals The Natural Medium as Carrier of Meanings and Their Decoding by Living Beings: Biosemiotics in Action

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-218
Author(s):  
Helena Knyazeva
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Theoretical Biology ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Cognitive Agent ◽  
Life Activity ◽  
Autopoietic System ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Von Uexküll

The synthetic, integrative significance of biosemiotics as a modern interdisciplinary research program is under discussion in the article. Aimed at studying the cognitive and life activity of living beings, which are capable of recognizing signals and extracting the meanings, biosemiotics serves as a conceptual node that combines some important notions of theoretical biology, evolutionary epistemology, cognitive science, phenomenology, neuroscience and neurophilosophy as well as the theory of complex adaptive systems and network science. Worlds of perception and actions of living beings are built in the process of co-evolution, in structural coupling and in enactive interaction with the surrounding natural environment (Umwelt). Thereby the biosemiotic theories developed by the founders of biosemiotics (J. von Uexküll, Th. Sebeok, G. Prodi, H. Pattie) are conceptually closed to the system-structural evolutionary approach developed in synergetics by H. Haken and S.P. Kurdyumov, the conception of autopoiesis (H. Maturana and F. Varela), second-order cybernetics (H. von Foerster), the conception of enactivism in cognitive science (F. Varela, E. Thompson, A. Noë). The key to comprehending the processes of extracting and generating meanings is that every living organism lives in the subjectively built world (Umwelt), so that its Umwelt and its internal psychic organization become parts of a single autopoietic system. According to the well-known expression of G. Bateson, information is a not indifferent difference or a difference that makes a difference. Differences become information when a cognitive agent as an interpreter, acting as part of an autopoietic system, sees signs in these differences that make meanings.

Web Knowledge Turbine as a Proposal for Personal and Professional Self-Organisation in Complex Times

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Rubio Royo ◽  
Susan Cranfield McKay ◽  
Jose Carlos Nelson-Santana ◽  
Ramiro N Delgado Rodríguez ◽  
Antonio A. Ocon-Carreras
Keyword(s):  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Collective Narratives ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Complex Ecosystem ◽  
Professional Self ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
Web Knowledge

This article describes a proposal for sustainable way to adapt to current complex process of global transformation, using the ‘Web Knowledge Turbine' (WKT) as a self-organised ecosystem for the co-creation of personal and collective narratives. The authors contemplate all human social systems as Complex Adaptive Systems with the capacity for self-organisation derived from a permanent learning process. Accordingly, a shift in the focus of teaching programmes from mere mechanisms of knowledge transmission, to a process focused on learning and in particular, a process of self-directed, connected, and deep learning which has at its core the profile of the eLearner as the central protagonist. The cornerstone of this process is a Complex Ecosystem of Personal Knowledge (CEPK) which will support teaching at an undergraduate level, progressively and transversely, from its outset. Considering the classroom as a networked community of learners whose objective is not only to gain a command of a particular subject (WHAT content do they need to learn?), but also HOW and WHY they need to learn it.

scholarly journals Globalization and the erosion of geo-ethnic checkpoints: evolving signal-boundary systems at the edge of chaos

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-109
Author(s):  
Chris Girard
Keyword(s):  
Signal Processing ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Extraction Process ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Zero Sum ◽  
Economic Specialization

AbstractSpatial boundaries, thermodynamic–economic specialization, and signal processing are at the core of evolution’s major transitions. Centered on these three dimensions, a proposed evolutionary informatics model roots ethnic and racial cleavages in zero-sum contests over rivalrous resources within geophysical sites. As the geophysical boundaries and signal-processing complexity of social systems coevolved, zero-sum contests centered on metropoles extracting resources from hinterlands. In this colonial extraction process, racialization arose from non-market spatial segregation of populations tagged with hinterland lineage. Subsequent post-industrial erosion—and greater permeability—of racial and ethnic boundaries has been enabled by the progressive uncoupling of more highly evolved complex adaptive systems from geophysical location (non-territorial adaptation). Signal and physical topologies are becoming more distinct. This uncoupling from physical location is driven by cybernetic parallelism in complex adaptive systems: diverse and independent agents learning from their mutual exchange of signals. Cybernetic parallelism has generated epistemic and geopolitical challenges to formal apartheid and racializing immigration policies, but not without friction or reversals.

Agent-Based Modeling

2017 ◽  
pp. 36-51
Keyword(s):  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Complexity Science ◽  
Agent Based Modeling ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Linear Behavior ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Economic Markets ◽  
The Common ◽  
Policy Problems

Agent based modeling is one of many tools, from the complexity sciences, available to investigate complex policy problems. Complexity science investigates the non-linear behavior of complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems can be found across a broad spectrum of the natural and human created world. Examples of complex adaptive systems include various ecosystems, economic markets, immune response, and most importantly for this research, human social organization and competition / cooperation. The common thread among these types of systems is that they do not behave in a mechanistic way which has led to problems in utilizing traditional methods for studying them. Complex adaptive systems do not follow the Newtonian paradigm of systems that behave like a clock works whereby understanding the workings of each of the parts provides an understanding of the whole. By understanding the workings of the parts and a few external rules, predictions can be made about the behavior of the system as a whole under varying circumstances. Such systems are labeled deterministic (Zimmerman, Lindberg, & Plsek, 1998).

XXI secolo: l’universo fisico-cibernetico e le grandi sfide emergenti

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Mauro Lombardi
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Ubiquitous Computing ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Cyber Physical Systems ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Diffusion Of Information ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
The One

In this chapter we outline the cyber-physical world we entered following the pervasive diffusion of information processing devices that are able to able to interact through exchanging information (cyber-physical systems). In this way ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous connectivity are changing how people think, act and produce. Indeed processes and products are becoming smart and connected on a potentially global level. The possibility of realizing a digital of everything representation from the subatomic level and nanoscale to the astronomical level implies that the physical world is surrounded and pervaded by a digital sphere that interacts with and influences it. Are we in a world like the one hypothesized by Borges' famous paradoxes of the 1: 1 map? The reality Is very different from the imagery Borges’s map: hyperstructures self-organize and emerge, global players act and influence the dynamics of complex adaptive systems.

Managing Complex Adaptive Social Systems

2011 ◽  
pp. 1034-1045
Author(s):  
Roy Williams
Keyword(s):  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Emergent Properties ◽  
Adaptive Networks ◽  
Open Communication ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Complex Adaptive Social Systems

Complex Adaptive Systems, for our purposes, are social systems that that evolve and display new, emergent properties, and self-organizing behavior of their components; they are based on a reasonably stable infrastructure, on the satisfaction of the most basic needs, and flexible, frequent, and open communication and interaction. Complex Adaptive Systems may be based on a few, simple rules, but can yield complex and unpredictable outcomes. The ‘Hole in the Wall’ project is an interesting case in point in the design of spaces for complex adaptive systems, or complex adaptive networks. In this project, touch screen computers were literally put in ‘holes in walls’ in places where unschooled children congregated. The children were given no instructions on how to use the computers, or what to do with them, but with startling results: the children soon taught themselves how to use the computers and the Internet, and much more (Mitra, 2003).

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