Computers, cybernetics, and information theory

1. science begins with math: a reliable language with which to describe (to both quantize ["evaluate"] as well as record) observations. Repeatability of experiments.
2. avoid number phobia (W.W. Sawyer)
3. numbers just counting, computers just number-crunchers (von Neumann)
4. counting digital: how computers get to 9 with only 1's and 0's (Turing's vision)
5. information theory: just counting differences with only 1's and 0's (Shannon)
6. cybernetics the analysis of feedback systems in info. theory terms (Weiner)
7. this analysis involves statistics, the study of averages of large numbers
8. using such statistics, systems theory observes the emergent and/or ongoing properties of the cybernetic system as a whole; systems theory the prototype or fledgling complexity studies (D'Arcy Thompson, C.H.Waddington, Weinberg, Bateson)

Dimensions and Attractors

1. Logical Typing
   1. Bertrand Russell
   2. Biological Epistemology: the meta-thinking of Gregory Bateson
2. Distinct levels of reality
   1. subatomic: quantum-mechanical
   2. visual: clasical mechanics
   3. macroscopic: relativistic
   4. mental: edge-of-chaos dynamic (different levels are characterized by distinct qualities, described in different qualitative terms, and hence the descriptions of which are not always reducible to each others' terms.)
3. Types of dimensional shapes:
   1. Euclid (Linearity)
   2. Gauss, Riemann, Lobyachevski (Curved linearity)
   3. Mandlebrot, Cantor, Poincare (Strong nonlinearity)
4. Types of attractor shapes:
   1. point attractor (single point)
   2. limit cycle attractor (stable loop)
   3. chaotic or strange attractor (never-repeating, never-complete toral shape [as an example])
      1. mapped by fractals
      2. sensitive dependance on initial conditions
      3. unpredictability

Systems Theory & Emergence (& Alife)

1. But where does evolution (variation, adaption, selection) enter into all this?
2. Back to computers and cybernetics/systems theory, John von Neumann created something called game theory, in which programs compete along a certain set of rules with a certain degree of chance "play games". Ostensibly so, but in fact the history of their actions mapped out the set of spaces the system might ultimately resolve ("evolve") to. A graph of all the possible ways the game might resolve itself would be a "phase-space" map.
3. John Holland's genetic algorithms refined this basic idea, to the point where allowing players memory of previous rounds, certain games would attract towards the most stable strategy, tit-for-tat (Echo simulation of Prisonner's Dilemma, Waldrop 1992, pp. 263-66). This echoes John Maynard Smith's concept of evolutionarily stable strategies (ess s) surviving in species.
4. from genetic algorithms to alife (Chris Langton)
5. class-4 cellular automata at level of critical connectivity
6. Per Bak's self-organized criticality
7. Stuart Kauffman's order for free
8. Ilya Prigogine's far-from-equilibrium systems ("Let us take a closer look at the emergence of self-organization and the processes that occur when we go beyond this threshold." . . . "The important point is that, depending on the chemical process responsible for the bifurcation, this mechanism expresses an extraordinary sensitivity. Matter, as we mentioned earlier in this chapter, perceives differences that would insignificant at equilibrium. Such possibilities lead us to think of the simplest organisms, such as bacteria, which we know are able to react to electric or magnietic fields. More generally they show that far-from-equilibrium chemistry leads to possible 'adaption' of chemical processesx to outside conditions." (Prigogine 1984)
   1. far-from-equilibrium relation of potassium to sodium in the neuron (Asimov 1994)
9. studies of hydrogen and oxygen will not reveal the wetness of water
10. studies of amino acids will not reveal the behaviors of animals or plants
11. studies of neurons, electricity, chemistry will not reveal mind

Origin of Life on Earth

1. Reiterate the importance of the concept of scaffolding. "By developing aerobic bioenergetic processes, the prokaryotes produced oxygen which first, for 2,000 million years, was used up in the wxidation of iron and sulphur on the earth's surface but ultimately led to the appearance of free atmospheric oxygen. Since then, the self-organizing 'Gaia' system of biosphere and atmosphere (Margulis and Lovelock, 1974) regulates and stabilizes the conditions for complex life on earth, in particular the appearance of eukaryotic cells and multicellular organisms. In the same way, the development of life gave rise to complex ecosystems which, in turn, led to the development of specialized skills and thereby to societies with division of labor, and so forth." (Jantsch, 1982, 347)
2. Dawkins' Replicators
3. Kauffman's autocatalytic sets
   

   "[There are] good reasons to believe that sufficiently complex mixes of chemicals can spontaneously crystallize into systems with the ability to collectively catalyze the network of chemical reactions by which the molecules themselves are formed. Such collectively autocatalytic sets sustain themselves and reproduce. This is no less than what we call a living metabolism, the tangle of chemical reactions that power every one of our cells. Life, in this view, is an emergent phenomenon arising as the molecular diversity of a prebiotic chemical system increases beyond a threshold of complexity."

   -Stuart Kauffman, from At Home in the Universe
   
4. Margulis's theory of symbiotic origin of eukaryotic cells (Margulis, 1970)
5. Edelman: "A heritable change in morphoregulatory genes followed by natural selection for fitness based on the changed morophology may lead to molecular heterochrony." (1989, 242)
6. What's happened since, in broad strokes:
   1. Replicators --> Prokaryotes
   2. Prokaryotes --> Eukaryotes (Cambrian explosion?)
   3. Eukaryotes --> Metazoans
   4. Metazoans --> meme-carriers (social organisms w/ sense of self)

Evolution & Epigenesis

1. Natural selection upon variation
2. Epigenesis: interactive unfolding of genetic material into environment (physical/chemical feedback chains; Hebb's rectangle & Edelman's topobiology + neotenic learning [ND p.302])
3. random walks in biology (Waddington's chreodic attraction)
4. ecosystems with nested causal cycles (loops within loops)
5. punctuated equilibrium a fractal wave?
6. Dawkin's memes (we are caught between reflex input below, meme-matrix above: we are the emotional midbrain associating both to each other and to value)

The Brain: neurology and neurophysiology

1. the neuron (reiterate the far-from-equilibrium chemical nature of nerve cell)
2. neurotranmitters
   1. mostly glutamate (+) and GABA (-) in the neocortex
   2. dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, etc. in midbrain
3. a nucleus of neurons
4. major sulci and gyri
5. gross anatomy:
   1. brain stem
   2. midbrain structures
   3. cortical structures
6. Electrical activity of the nervous system: how does a structure that is 80% water (Asimov 1994) maintain physical coherence? (Constantly reiterate that the fractal structure of the brain is the result of the chaotic far-from-equilibrium dynamics that correlate exactly with the mind.)
7. circuits of nuclei (esp. reentrant circuits- Hebbian learning & Edelman's TNGS)-- "A standing wave of electricity in the head, mediated by chemicals."
8. Feedback between various levels moving at different speeds (aphasic reentry, how chaos might enter into the brain)
9. lower parts: homeostasis
10. middle parts: input/output correlation ("organs of succession"), hedonic centers (both genetic and learned) )
11. higher parts: concepts, perceptions, self/nonself distinction ("Vision is located at the back of the head . . . , hearing at the side, and touch at the top. Just in front of the somatosensroty region (touch) lie the areas that control the voluntary motor output- that is, the willed instructions to the muscles. The exact functions of the frontal regions are less certain. They probably deal with planning, especially long-term planning, and other high-level cognitive tasks. A small region in the frontal region (the frontal eye fields) seems to be involved in voluntary eye movements."- Crick (1994) p. 87.)

So What Is the Mind?

1. There's still a "hard problem" in connecting the quantitative facts of brain function with the qualia of personal phenomenology (Chalmers 1995, 1996)- but hard does not mean insoluble, merely difficult or counterintuitive
2. A very difficult hurdle is to stop intuiting a "Big Boss", a "Central Meaner" or an observer in the Cartesian Theatre (Dennett, 1991)- there is no movie theater or sound system in our heads.
3. The hardest part is "picturing" how neuronal groups, however complex, could give rise to primary consciousness- the phenomenal experience of, for starters, a visual field (Crick, 1994). "[Our new psychological understanding of the brain] concerns cell assemblies of lower and higher order, abstractions and generalization increasing as one goes from first-order to third- or fourth-order assemblies" (Hebb, 1968). Generalization for example:

   "In essence, suppose that the child's perception of an adult is the excitation of, say, 100 million neurons, a different set each time, but suppose also that there may be a thousand neurons common to all those different excitations. If those thousand become organized in an assembly, because of being active every time the child sees a human being, the activity of that assembly will be the idea of a person, generalized. Abstraction is involved also, for the assembly is representative only of characteristics that people have in common- head, hands, voice, and fso forth. The idea of a particular person, or a particular voice, would require the added activity of other assemblies ('schema with correction')."

   (Hebb 1980a, p.23)
   
4. The "A,B,C's of psychology": affect, behavior, and cognition. While we are concerned with affect and cognition, bear in mind that thoughts and feelings are inextricably intertwined with motor plans (behavior).
5. That having been said, we may think of mind as being constituted by 3 basic parts:
   1. Attention ("Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought . . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." -William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 403). This, paired with short-term memory, is what we experience as consciousness: we never have conscious control of the actual mechanisms of language production or memory retrieval. Memories come back to us, verbal responses arise in ways we don't (can't!) understand- we simply remember, we simply speak. However, the "train of thought" is frequently concerned with navigating a particular linguistic sequence in addition to attending to whatever combination of sensory modalities (sight, smell, etc.). Attention, the ongoing remembered present, is the "flow of consciousness" described in Joyce's Ulysses; memory and language are support mechanisms, absolutely necessary scaffolding for our higher-order consciousness.
   2. Memory:
      1. short-term (part of consciousness)
      2. long-term (all unconscious, until reactivated):
         1. episodic
         2. categorical
         3. proceedural
   3. Language
      1. Uncontroversial referentiality at simplest level ("Grunt and point" origin of language)
      2. universal grammer (S-V-O structure underlying all human languages [though not necessarily in that order])
         1. Hebb (1980, last section in Chapter 7): Perception in the development of language: "nounness" and generalizations to action ("What are those things, Mommy?")
      3. some essential features of language, such as recurring metaphors "up = more" and "down = less", are learned but may be considered as basically hard-wired in the sense that they are simple products of how our bodies interact with the physical environment (M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind, also Hebb, Essay on Mind pp.116-17)
      4. higher order / abstract concepts contained in multiple and conflicting metaphors, such as "mind as cutting tool" and "mind as growing thing" ("She's got a razor-sharp mind" and "He's got a fertile imagination") (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors to Live By) This may indicate that higher-order concepts don't have a simple location in the cortex, but are instead triggered by reentrant loops between various circuits (e.g.- between one center for cutting things and another for growing things).
6. Attention and short-term memory constitute "Primary Consciousness" (defined as such), possessed by most mammals.
7. Language and long-term memory constitute "Higher-Order Consciousness" (again by consensus definition), possessed only by humans (with apologies to Nim Chimpsky!).

  Human Consciousness by Negative Example: Disturbances of the Body-Brain-Mind

1. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
2. William's Syndrome: gregarious ("Talk show" personality), musically apt yet mathematically impaired and physically somewhat similar to Down's syndrome)
3. Down Syndrome
4. Autism (Dr. King?)
5. Schizophrenia (Gregory Bateson's "double-bind" hypothesis)
6. Dyslexia
7. Attention Deficit Disorder
8. Aphasias:
   1. prosopagnosia
9. Agnosias
   
10. Parkinson's
    
11. Alzheimer's
    
12. senility

Education (or: Eupsychia, after Abraham Maslow)

1. The assumptions of humanistic psychology, Carl Roger's "facilitator" rather than "teacher": feedback between learners, creativity and curiosity as innate drives.
2. Learning occurs in stages: phase transitions in the brain/mind [Consciousness as an emergent process]
   1. Sharp distinction between neonate's flat-field perception and later depth perception
   2. Piaget's stages (sensorimotor, concrete, abstract, etc.)
   3. Montessori method
3. Within genetically-determined stage parameters, individual development is profoundly historical, dependent upon experience. Therefore, academic cirricula should be adaptively structured, working around individual students' learning styles.
   1. Carl Roger's "Freedom to Learn"
   2. Open Democratic Schools
4. From understanding both how learning involves overlapping neural prototypes and also how schizophrenia results from children being placed in cognitive "double-binds", the need for clear and non-conflicting metaphors/analogies should be obvious.
5. Multimedia as an adaptive technology
   1. moves at child's pace
   2. accomodates different learning styles (reading, hearing, seeing) as well as promoting multi-modal understanding of concepts
   3. danger: develops only cognitive skills, leaving out social interaction and bodily development. Children must be routinely engaged in group activities to prevent atrophying of physical and social skills
6. Physical education (acquisition of motor skills): avoid temptation to turn physical recreation into an excuse to inculcate young ones into the dominant paradigm (ex.: competion athletics --> unfettered "every-man-for-himself" free-market capitalism). Explore cooperative/non-competitive exercises and activities. (Gandhi's tripartite approach to education: learning crafts will develop fine motor skills beyond whole-body agility.)
   
7. Social education (conflict-resolution skills): dialogue should be regarded as one of the most fundamental skills a child is to gain, the ultimate task of education is to produce a clear-thinking and consequently articulate young adult. Again, avoid the temptation to inculcate into the dominant paradigm: learning to negotiate real issues on a student council is a much more adaptive skill than simply learning to argue arbitrary points of view for a debate club. (Cite life-long study: nuns better able to articulate complex thoughts in their teens much less likely to develop Alzheimer's in old age.)