Constraint based phenomena

This page describes the organizational forces that limit change. It explains how to overcome them when necessary.

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user.
The constraints are described.
The techniques to overcome them are implied.

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS): Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched. The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift. Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial. Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged. Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material. The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development; It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why. Example systems frame
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of: Effective iterative planning and Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews. Complexity catastrophes
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. Adaptive ecology
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and energy goals. US vds alignment
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to: Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge; Push for prayer in public school Push Congress to promote prayer Make elections more about religious positions. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends on persistence. Inventing Christian America
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation: Junk bonds, Derivative deregulation, CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud, Financial network deregulation, Financial network consolidation, Short term incentives Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged. The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics. He sees the result being a rigged system. Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. Financial WMD
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system. The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. Aligned justice
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of staff. Mechanics of power
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and libertarianism. Libertarianism
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. Startup PDCA
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces including famine and oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured that thoughtful leaders were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the crisis. Voltaire's disruptive network
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment. It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter. Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed. Constraining happiness
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of web services to explore Ada Lovelace's ideas about thinking machines and poetic science. He highlights the value of computer augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to fulfill the process. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and collaboration are discussed. Arts technology & intelligence
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the potential and challenges of associative neural networks. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that Haikonen's neural architecture, Smiley's Copycat architecture and molecular biology's intracellular architecture leverage the same associative properties. Associatively integrated robots
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented. Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Developing ideas
A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks: The evolving global scientific network. The Bell telephone network. And The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. Strategic innovation
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory and reviewed. BREXIT
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are monopolists that trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle class. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS). While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts with relevant CAS history and theory. Monopoly job killers
The IPO of Netscape is defined as the key emergent event of the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. New economy
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was enabled by the experience of Keynes and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard, the necessity of improving the situation between the wars and the opportunity created by the catastrophe of the Second World War. He describes how it was planned and developed. How it emerged from the summit. And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy. Like all plans there are mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as best it could. And then Conway describes the period after Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed and also compares the relative performance of the various periods before during and after Bretton Woods. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier. He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and against the development and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. Bretton woods
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst. Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Housing amplifiers
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system. Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions. He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Derivative systems
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently: Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR; Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich); Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does. They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem. And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future. They conclude the question is still political. They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations. They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. National debt
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second industrial revolution were the foundation for American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people into difficult rural America built a population base which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets, Clothes in department stores; that supported increasing productivity and standard of living. The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities; terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow the economy. Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of: Communications and advertising Credit and finance Public health and the health care network Health insurance Education Social and welfare services Counter intuitively the constraints introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2 provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970 creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post war America. Subsequently the rate of growth was limited until the shift of women into the workplace and the full networking of voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were muted by the narrow reach of the technologies. The development of Big Data, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth, but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of the middle class. Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. American growth
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of money based on the attractive features of precious metals. He compares the potential for government edicts to create money but sees them as lacking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts. Government backed promissory notes are analogous to: Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy transaction intermediates and Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in supporting survival and replication in the currently accessible niches. Emergence of money
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do this he replaces traditional economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an economy is a system in equilibrium, with complexity economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex adaptive system (CAS). He introduces Sugerscape to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics, Agents, Networks, Emergence, and Evolution. Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces map strategies to instances of physical and social technologies. And he identifies the interactors and selection mechanism of economic evolution. This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition of wealth. In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance, & Politics & Policy. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we leverage. Economic complexity
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected. Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states. Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. Completing the adaptive shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. Globalization from cotton
The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The network: Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without. The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network. The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters; Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse; Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies. This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees. Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to. As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is: Costly and inefficient Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies. Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems. Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the: Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to Physician networks Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation Hospital clinical supply and food production networks Medical school and academic research network and NIH Global transportation network Public health networks Health care IT supply network Health care
Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. Improving wellbeing
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations of the major problems afflicting US health care as of 2006. Problems of US health care
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network. And they explain: How they planned out the transformation, Leveraging an effective governance structure, Using a strategy to gain buy in, Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians. Geisinger's leverage of biologics. Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience. Where Geisinger is headed next. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. E2E insured quality care
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death. But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation. The health care network is built out of emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. Bad medical models
US healthcare is ripe for disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that technologies are emerging which will support low cost business models that will undermine the current network. Applying complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist these progressive forces. Disrupting health care
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent improvement in quality in medicine by organizing to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists. With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates the effects of complexity and how to organize to cope with it. Following the short review RSS additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within the network of US health care, contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping his various examples and reviewing facets of complex failures. Complexity checklists
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on 1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects' lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking broadly across each subject's: Personality, Education, Parental impacts, Energy levels, Partnering, Careers, Religion, Social networks, Gender, Impact from war and trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways, which each individual could be seen to select and travel along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long life. Others were problematic. The models imply that the US approach to health and wellness should focus more on supporting the development and selection of beneficial pathways. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network, starved of resources. Promoting longevity
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to show how technology has amplified this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the independent self, living fully while aging with the support of the extended family. Central planning responded to the technological and societal changes with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But Gawande then contrasts the power of bottom up innovations created by experts responding to their own family situations and belief systems. Gawande then explores in depth the challenges that unfold currently as we age and become infirm. He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will have to understand the dilemma of integrating medical treatment and hospice strategies. He notes that all parties involved need courage to cope. He proposes medicine must aim to assure well being. At that point all doctors will practice palliative care. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death, evolution, cooperation and adaptations to new technologies are discussed. Agent death
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. Malaria
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science. Medical science events
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems. They do this through a focus on modularity. Modular designed systems
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer company IBM. Compartmented systems
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer software design. Object based systems
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data types and inheritence make object orientation a superior methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy to the use of objects. Software construction
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred. Tools
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the World. He highlights: A list of preconditions resulting in Additional niche capture & more free time Building a network to interconnect memes processes & tools which Enabling inter-generational transfers Innovations that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil fuels Memetic trading networks
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man building cultures and later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a change of approach. He: Explores creativity: how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter gatherer, enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the evening around the campfire. He notes the power of fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing signature of aesthetic surprise. Looks at the current limitations of the humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect. Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and culture: Ultimate causes viewed through art, & music The bedrock of: Ape senses and emotions, Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied by humanities, & Exponential change in science and technology. How the breakthrough from our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat, supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory & language. Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution. The impact on human nature. Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are destroying. Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes, exploration, irony, and considers the potential for a third enlightenment, supported by cooperative action of humanities and science Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory: The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework for representing the cultural CAS while Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS. Evening campfire rituals
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy. They argue it has generated exponential growth. This has been due to innovation. It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth. But the wealth is spread unevenly across society. They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. Brilliant technologies
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles. He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan: Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity. The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework. Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education; Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? Education versus guilds
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed by CAS theory and reviewed. What drives success
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. Warrior groups
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain. Natural systems
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can take hold. Various social insects have developed strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable available niches. Like humans they invest in specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped competitors. Insect superorganisms
Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind. He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war. These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life. Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints. The implications are discussed. Computationally adapted mind
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS. Evolved female brain
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy. CAS behavior
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time: A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge: Our familiar time emerges Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions Emergence of time
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries. Now it is finally being characterized scientifically. That required a transformation of approach. Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. He describes the research methods. He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. Conscious access
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved. And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture. He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture. Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge. Evolved reading
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In particular he explains how: Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. Receptor indirection
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific investigation of meditation's impact on the brain. They introduce the book by describing their experiences with meditation, science and the research establishment, their friendship, how meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to back them up. Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern tradition of exploring and altering the mind. Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of consciousness. It took over twenty years for scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align with this model. Much of the prior experimental data had to be abandoned. They introduce meditation's impact on the amygdala responding to pain and stress. They look at the changes in: Stress Compassion Attention Self-awareness; and the potential for use of mediation in psychiatry. And they warn of the occurrence of dark nights. They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters, starting with Mingyur Rinpoche, and detect meditation altering traits. Finally they discuss the potential benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it broadly to a busy America. Meditating neurons
Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded by developing Radical Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to: Initially attend to the sensations of our body, Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love. Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free. Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others. Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness. Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance. Realize our Buddha nature. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence. Compassionate CAS
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant. Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds. The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence. Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type. The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor: Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants. The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies. Enneagram strategies
Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of nervous systems and feelings. These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives. But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems: Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. Emergence of feelings
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven to create, and successfully invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and especially portraits. Vincent worked hard to allow artists like him-self to innovate. But Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis. Nemeczek also provides a brief history of Vincent's life. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Vincent creates
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse and eventual recovery. Elton stresses the serendipitous nature of his emergence as a musician. He describes the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's sister, and her mother Ivy; who formed his early childhood proximate environment which prepared him for a job in entertainment: he developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs; entering a network based around Dick James Music. And he almost got married. DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the food. A first album supported touring and the formation of a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an overnight sensation. And during this period of time Elton's testosterone level ramped. Life changed dramatically. Stardom provided many rewards but there were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated. His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him. But he was saved by the challenge of transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life. Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints, Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he hopes will bring him happiness: trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying Renata. He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is frightened by a cancer scare, AIDS, inspired by Ryan White, angered by the Sun, and saddened at breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton about his string of addictions. Elton finally agreed he had a problem. He went to rehab, stopped hating himself, gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other people. It seemed the higher force was supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all; they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni was murdered. Princess Diana died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral. He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina Turner. While his new records sold well he found himself in debt and terminated the management relationship with John Reid Enterprises. Elton and Bernie improved their situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with his seminal influence: Leon Russell. Elton and David became parents of two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate mother and network in California. They quietly get married when the UK allows. Elton's mum remains difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents increases the long-term stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys. But Elton needs to go out with a bang! And everyone helps. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details of the creative process from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. My song
Richard Feynman outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story. Richard's personality encouraged him to patiently seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and practice through building and fixing radios. Leonardo's life inspired him to try innovation, which he concluded was hard. He played with the emotion in communications, a skill which he used later at Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following orders at MIT. Working during the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and practice. Feynman enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton, where the successful approach to science was just like his. His approach was based on patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental techniques. He would test the assertions in articles with amusing investigations; with his mind aligned by feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized. He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer recess he explored biology. Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his creativity. And his practical orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway, supported his desire for choices and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he developed different approaches to problems than the standard strategies provided by mass education. Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very different? While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about the implications of the European war. After a friend enlisted he decided to dedicate his summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the physics of the project, him on Niels Bohr; but was freed from them by Von Neumann. The records & reports of the project were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of the locks and safes deployed to secure these secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally unfit. After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell. He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on fun. He enjoyed knowing about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate and approximate a value the fastest. Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much fun for Richard. So he used the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque frequenting one, and later ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he drank with to sleep with him. Richard reflects on various times when he made government officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape; Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making, but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste of time and he saw risks in a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech and stay there. Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse effectively, but stops when he finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his individualism. Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the latest details, fearful that he could not cope; as the community worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard felt terrified and could not understand what they said. His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student having fun, read every line and equation of their paper; he would understand it. And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay. Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply describing the details of beta decay. He had identified the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip, where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese ambassador. Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of experiences. Richard lobbies for integrity in science. In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science, Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the logistical details of planning. He loved percussion, playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He eventually discovered art could be fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great art teacher. But he discovered although he could eventually draw well he did not understand art. Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful, who were interested in integrating art and science, did not understand either subject. He found the situation was similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects made him angry and disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing culture to the physicists! He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets involved in the California public school text book selection process which he concluded was totally broken, but also reveals how his father provided him with a vision of how our world works, inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical theory. Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported his creative development from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Richard draws
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. Accumulating small changes
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. Autonomous emergence
Constraint based phenomena

Primary Navigation

In this page we:

Introduce some current problems of complexity for humanity
Explain how to use the site.

There are two main starting points:

The example systems frame and
The presentation frame.
And then there is how we use the site.

The site uses lots of click through. That's so that you can see the underlying principles that are contributing to the system being discussed. We hope that as you internalize and reflect on the principles the system should appear in a new light. At this site clicking is good!

Opportunities

This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A proposal that does not conform is wrong.

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented.

Theory

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS):

Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift.
Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial.
Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged.
Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material.
The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development;

It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.

Examples

This page presents a search result list covering each linked region of rob's strategy studio.

Search

Rob's Strategy Studio aims to celebrate and illuminate complex adaptive systems (CAS) just as an art studio does art.

By way of introduction it notes the complex interactions that led to the partnership that discovered the DNA double helix and genetic code.

The page introduces the RSS vision 'I act, therefore I think' approach and the RSS mission.

It describes how many key aspects of the world are CAS including businesses.

Finally the page explains each of the framed pictures displayed at the studio including the other aspects explored in this vision frame.

Vision

This page introduces the programs that the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF) develops and uses to deploy Rob's Strategy Studio (RSS).
The programs are structured to obey complex adaptive system (CAS) principles. That allows AWF to experiment and examine the effects.
A production program generates the web pages.
A testing system tests the production program. It uses a framework to support the test programs. This is AWF's agent programming framework as described in the agent-based programming presentation.
An example of the other AWF agent-based programs that are also described in the frame is the virtual robot.
Finally a strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats assessment is presented.

Perl

This page introduces a series of asymmetries which encourage different strategic approaches.
The differences found in business, sexual selection, gamete structure, as well as in chess encourage escalations in the interactions.
And yet the systems including these asymmetries can be quite stable.

Asymmetries

This web frame includes a set of presentations about complex adaptive systems (CAS)

Presentations

Dynamic constraint based phenomena

Summary

Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

Incomplete Nature

Terrence Deacon's book 'Incomplete Nature' is structured as four parts:

The problem of end-directedness.
Problems with previous approaches to explaining end-directedness.
Deacon's alternative approach.
Applying Deacon's approach to enable an expanded science.

End-directedness

Deacon introduces a number of benefits and problems of end-directedness. The functional design of living things appears well matched to the task of survival, competition and reproduction. But explaining how the end-directed functional designs were achieved has been difficult. The end-directed nature seems to imply some purpose to existence and the presence of a designer. The conscious mind seems to peer from within us. The nature of these functions, values, information, purposes and references appeared ill-defined and incomplete.

Problems of previous approaches

Deacon sees merit in the study of failed approaches which he asserts can highlight what to avoid in a replacement strategy.

Deacon reviews a number of historic and currently used approaches to explaining or coping with the existence of end-directedness. His classes of approaches are: homunculi, golems, teleonomy and emergence;

Homunculi

Deacon demonstrates that history is littered with explanations of end-directedness which depend on a designer. But the possibility of creation by a higher being results in a recursive trap. Who created the creator? Teleology identifies an origin, but could not provide a mechanism for the operation of the origin. When science becomes able to explain the mechanism it has eliminated the need for the teleological logic.

Golems

Deacon argues that a second approach is to ignore the designer and his end-directed effects. Scientists unhappy with the nature of recursive self-reference, dualism and creationism have focused their studies on material aspects of systems. They adopted methodologies which ignore end-directed phenomena, or identify them as place-holders to be replaced with physical or statistical mechanisms.

Unfortunately, this approach limits the scope of scientific research and can result in confusion. By ignoring sources of final cause scientists do not apply the scientific method to end-directedness. As such the domain remains mysterious. No scientific models or methods are expanded to account for the effects.

When science has misdiagnosed these phenomena the failures remain, and can introduce confusion. Deacon outlines how DNA (DNA), a polymer composed of a chain of deoxy ribose sugars with purine or pyrimidine side chains. DNA naturally forms into helical pairs with the side chains stacked in the center of the helix. It is a natural form of schematic string. The purines and pyrimidines couple so that AT and GC pairs make up the stackable items. A code of triplets of base pairs (enabling 64 separate items to be named) has evolved which now redundantly represents each of the 20 amino-acids that are deployed into proteins, along with triplets representing the termination sequence. Chemical modifications and histone binding (chromatin) allow cells to represent state directly on the DNA schema. To cope with inconsistencies in the cell wide state second messenger and evolved amplification strategies are used. has been viewed as a recipe, and a blue-print. But neither model advances a mechanism for how DNA emerged as a source of information controlling evolution, or explains the nature of that information. End-directed properties of the

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organism are associated with the DNA without explanation of the process involved. Natural Selection results in the emergence of ententional phenomena. But scientific explanations have been limited. Information has been viewed as shorthand for true mechanistic operations.

Chomsky argued language was based on a deep grammar. But what interprets this grammar?

Artificial intelligence aims to use large numbers of stupid machines to create intelligence mechanistically. But algorithms are programmed by human programmers, to operate according to their designs. IBM's chess playing computer Deep Blue extends this approach including applying Bayesian is an iterative form of statistics invented by Thomas Bayes. It uses a 'prior' statistic to represent the prior situation and then performs a calculation that integrates the probability of new events occurring into a 'posterior' probability. This posterior becomes the prior for the next iteration with the application of the Bayesian identity xpost = xprior*y/(xprior*y + z(1-xprior)). The magic in Bayesian statistics is in accurately generating the prior xprior and the current event probabilities y and z. R. A. Fischer was so skeptical of the legitimacy of the prior that he advocated an alternative statistical framework and experimental process. statistics to Internet data. Again any intelligence seems to be provided by the Deep Blue designers and creators of the Internet data.

Teleonomy

Deacon describes Teleonomy, which by only specifying the way a mechanistic process can be organized so that it converges toward a specific state, rather than behavior for the sake of an end. This conception avoided sneaking mentalistic assumptions about teleology back into biological design.

If evolution can also be understood as nothing more than retained and reproduced accidental organization then end-directedness can be reasonably viewed as mechanistic. But Deacon argues that Teleonomy's mechanism agnosticism just hides the existence of the end-directedness. The mechanistic programs are still designed by humans. He is concerned that natural selection includes replication which is a self-referential loop.

Consequently Deacon asks 'What kind of system properties are required to transform a mere physical pattern embedded within that system into information that is both able to play a constitutive role in determining the organization of this system and constraining it to be capable of self-generation, maintenance and reproduction in its local

This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which supports the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Kauffman describes the mechanism by which the system expands across the space.

environment?'

Additionally Deacon argues reproduction and generation of

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organism forms are necessary requirements for Darwin's evolutionary logic, even though how this is accomplished is largely irrelevant to the existence of natural selection's consequences. This disconnect makes the process non-teleological. But natural selection depends on lower layer ententional properties. These are not a product of natural selection even if preserved by it.

What sort of physical process is necessary for evolution to take place and locally overcome the second law of thermodynamics requires that the Boltzmann entropy of a closed system increases.
? Besides the genetic string there must be a system to utilize and copy the pattern and itself, and a way to counter the thermodynamic degradation. That necessitates specific molecular substrates, potential difference in energy to synthesize and drive reactions, work required to generate the structures and processes that get reproduced with variation. Deacon notes that most computer based systems take the physics for granted, including the computer's physical architecture implicitly, and hence fail to represent the essential physical constraints of the real world.

Emergence

By the mid-nineteenth century, a mechanistic and statistical approach to natural philosophy had begun to coalesce and displace the previously more teleological and platonic forms of explanation. Deacon comments ... Nature's designs, including living and mental processes, were now viewed through the lens of materialism. A methodology, reductionism, for analyzing nature's designs was adopted. Decompose the whole into parts. But what is a part is not always obvious. Reductionism pulls the focus away from the contribution of the interaction complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:

Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization
Systems that are adaptive
More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
Balance at the edge of chaos

within systems.

Emergentists focused their attention toward the details of emergent functional properties. Deacon outlines Roger Sperry's logic about a wheel having key translational properties which its disassembled components do not have.

Two perspectives were developed by emergence researchers:

Ontological - Emergence changes the causal landscape by introducing discontinuous functional properties.
epistemological - Discontinuities arise from our intrinsic inability to predict emergent properties from the lower level laws. Non-linear features of chaotic systems illustrate this alternative.

Deacon explains that Jaegwon Kim showed that if all higher-order causal interactions are between objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.
constituted by relationships among these ultimate building blocks of matter, then assigning causal power to various higher-order relations is redundant. Deacon accepts that this totally undermines the ontological emergence of functionalism. But he continues that our understanding of physics has not identified ultimate particles or simple atoms devoid of lower-level compositional organization. Instead, he suggests, the particulate features of matter are statistical regularities of a dynamically unstable substrate.

Deacon asserts that the dynamics are irreducibly process like and thus are by definition organized. Following Mark Bickhard he argues if process organization is the irreducible source of the causal properties at a particular level, then it, to quote Bickhard, 'cannot be de-legitimated as a potential locus of causal power without eliminating causality from the world.' Static notions of part and whole are for this reason suspect since the wholes we are interested in are dynamical and the parts are constantly in flux. The parts are constantly being synthesized, damaged, and replaced, while the whole persists. Deacon sees this framework as compatible with Stuart Kauffman's emergence work. Deacon argues that once part/whole distinctions and their supervenience indicates that a high level property does not exist as and of itself but because lower level properties determine the higher level property, which Abbott views as epiphenomena. Deacon argues that instead of supervenience relations Bickhard's dynamic processes allow the emergence of high level phenomena.
relations are replaced by Bickhard's dynamic processes emergence of discontinuous properties becomes legitimate.

Deacon's alternative approach - a process based mechanism of emergent dynamics and self-assembly

Deacon argues for an alternative scientific strategy which accepts the existence of end-directed phenomena. He models how they emerge, and illustrates how the approach allows science improved access to key aspects of our world including: work, information, significance, evolution, self, sentience and consciousness.

Constraints

Deacon's theory relies on the effects of constraints on flows. Deacon views constraints as the physical characterization of a habit allow higher organisms: humans, rats, flies; to perform important behaviors automatically, without involvement of consciousness. Habits are adaptive, being promoted by the release of dopamine into the PFC and striatum, generating a feeling of pleasure and conditioning us. As the dopamine detaches from the synaptic receptors in the PFC and striatum the motivation to perform the behavior subsides. If the dopamine remains at the synapse for an extended period, because it is not removed as occurs when cocaine is present, or when too much dopamine is generated, the habit can become an addiction. (a regularity of behavior) following Charles Peirce. Peirce argued that emergence is instantiated as some form of realism with dynamic constraints. This contrasts with Nominalists, such as Occam who viewed all universals as mental groupings mistakenly viewed as real based on specific individual instances. As such Deacon aims to show how real physical effects emerge. He outlines how constraints can:

Generate real classes of process based on exclusion. The constraint removes any components from the process which do[n't] contain, particular properties. This allows an emergent general class of dynamic process to exist based on exclusion of components with particular properties. The objects in the class have not been assessed by any positive attribute. Deacon writes 'The concept of constraint is, in effect, a complementary concept of order, habit and organization, because it determines a similarity class by exclusion. Hence abstract properties do not have to have physical potency, but certain general properties can produce other general properties as causal consequences. ' ... 'If certain physical interactions also tend to drop out selective details, then there can also be a purely physical analogue to the abstraction process.' And Deacon argues that constraint can also account for concrete abstractions since what something doesn't exhibit, it can't impose on something else via interaction. To the extent that differences in one system can produce differences in the other, those variations not expressed in one will not be transferred to the other during their interaction. It is precisely by virtue of what is not enabled, but could otherwise have occurred, that a change can be forced.
Support the capacity to perform work.
Appear as increased statistical likelihood. With assent of scale micro effects typically average out, while highly constrained, and consequently stable, interactions become much more likely to be expressed in any interactions with other components.
In massively componential dynamical systems where there is the possibility of extensive non-linear interactions (for example in systems persistently maintained far from equilibrium), constraints can amplify to become macroscopically expressed. The emergence of new constraints at the macroscopic level can be a source of new forms of work.

The effects of constraints are amplified by scale hierarchies. Vast numbers of low level dynamics occur extremely rapidly, relative to higher level processes. Averaging, and coherence effects tend to average out so that only generalized attractor features have causal influence at the higher level. Conversely this means that reductionistic analysis cannot recover these differences.

Deacon argues that constraint is relational to the other dynamic options. States that are not realized or that occur only improbably in a given process can play the critical causal role in the formation of further constraints at higher levels.

Deacon analyses both near equilibrium homeodynamic processes, and far from equilibrium dynamical conditions (morphodynamics and teleodynamics).

Only far from equilibrium conditions enable spontaneous change of macroscopic state. When things change in non-spontaneous ways, they must be caused to do so extrinsically, by a force and through doing work. Using fuel uses up its capacity to do work, but conserves the energy transforming it from one form to another more widely distributed form, and reducing the difference in the distribution of some quantity of some constrained physical property of the fuel.

Homeodynamics

Our universe mostly consists of near equilibrium conditions. Deacon's homeodynamics describes these conditions as generally as possible. He distinguishes two contrasting dynamics (orthograde and contragrade) within any homeodynamic process.

Orthograde dynamics

The second law of thermodynamics requires that the Boltzmann entropy of a closed system increases.
is represented by Deacon's orthograde dynamics which reduce the spontaneous asymmetry of a constrained ('ordered') state to a less constrained ('disordered') state of dynamic change by filling the maximum number of microstates.

Contragrade dynamics

The reverse direction of change (Deacon's contragrade process), which does not tend to occur spontaneously is a response to the imposition of highly constrained external work. While the action of each component in the orthograde dynamic is fully reversible, the gross redistribution of microstates populated shifts irreversibly from the highly constrained towards the average. The general applicability of the second law to our universe is due to the universe's deeply asymmetric predisposition concerning any process involving many components. Contragrade change is the natural consequence of one orthograde process influencing (constraining) another orthograde process through some medium, each process in some way undoing the other's effects.

Constraint and ortho/contragrade dynamics

Deacon redefines constraint in orthograde/contragrade terms. Constraints are defined with respect to orthograde maxima (when orthograde dynamic change is no longer asymmetric). A constrained orthograde process is one in which certain dimensions of change are not available. This may be due to a barrier (wall) or a contragrade process countering the orthograde change. A contragrade process at one level can generate conditions for a higher-level orthograde process of constraint generation.

Deacon regards entropy as an inverse measure of constraint. He argues that the dissociation of macro- from micro-processes that characterizes thermodynamic systems means that we cannot attribute the asymmetry of thermodynamic change to the properties of individual molecular collisions alone. Molecular collisions are necessary for any change of state of a typical thermodynamic system, but they are not sufficient to determine its asymmetric direction of change. This is ultimately due to the highly asymmetric 'geometry' of the possible distributions of molecular properties and trajectories of their movements.

For Deacon homeodynamics, in comparison to thermodynamics, more generally describes the most basic orthograde dynamic. It is a dynamic that spontaneously reduces constraints to their minimum and thus more evenly distributes (reduces asymmetry) whatever property is being changed. He sees thermodynamic entropy increase as a more specific case of this focusing only on orthograde statistical mechanics. In contrast Deacon highlights a key principle of general homeodynamics: orthograde and contragrade dynamics reverse in dominance in adjacent layers of process. The special contragrade relationships that can be generated by the juxtaposition of different orthograde processes can produce complex forms of constraint. For Deacon homeodynamics is thus the engine of emergence.

In contrast to spontaneous homeodynamics Deacon's morphodynamics operates in far from equilibrium systems which do not occur spontaneously.

Morphodynamics

Deacon views understanding the [morpho]dynamics of inorganic order-promoting processes as offering hints that can be carried forward into explorations of causality supporting life and mind.

So long as extrinsic constraints are continually imposed, creating a contragrade dynamic to the spontaneous orthograde dissipation of intrinsic constraints, new forms of intrinsic constraint can emerge and even amplify.

Morphodynamics characterizes the dynamical organization of a diverse class of phenomena which share in common the tendency to become spontaneously more organized and orderly over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time due to constant perturbation, but without the extrinsic imposition of influences that specifically impose the regularity (teleodynamics).

W. Ross Ashby defined a self-organizing system as one that spontaneously reduces its entropy, but not necessarily its thermodynamic entropy, by reducing the number of its potential states. Deacon argues functional complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:

Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization
Systems that are adaptive
More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
Balance at the edge of chaos

and synergy of

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organisms ultimately depends on Ashby's logic of self-simplification.

Deacon explores a Benard cell (Rayleigh-Benard convection) as a morphodynamic exemplar. He explains that there are intrinsic biases available (buoyancy differences, viscosity effects and geometric distribution constraints in this case). The persistent imposition of constraint (constant heating) will tend to redistribute this additional constraint into the added dimensions of potential difference of the intrinsic biases. The additional dimensions are boundary conditions. Because the additional dimensions are system wide and ubiquitous they are on a higher level of scale than the constraints of molecular interaction. The transfer of constraints from molecular-level differences to global-level differences also increase the propagation of constraint from lower- to higher-order dynamics.

Deacon concludes these are common dynamic features that characterize morphodynamic phenomena, and make them an emergent level removed from subvenient homeodynamic processes whether at the thermodynamic or sub-atomic level. In each case he explains we find a tangled hierarchy of causality, where micro-configurational particularities can be amplified to determine macro-configurational regularities. Where these in turn further constrain and/or amplify subsequent cycles of this process, producing a compounding. The special reflexive regularities and the recurrent causal architecture of the cycles of interaction have come to overshadow the system's lower-order orthograde properties. These systems must be open to the flow of energy and/or components, which is what enables their growth and/or development, but they additionally include a higher order form of closure as well. Such flows propagate constraints inherited from past states of the system, which recurrently compound to further constrain the future behavior of its components interactions. Deacon continues 'The new higher-order orthograde dynamic that is created by this compounding of constraints is what defines and bounds the higher order of constraints that we identify as the system. This centrality of form-begetting-form is what justifies calling these processes morphodynamic. The generation of new orthograde dynamical regimes is what justifies describing morphodynamic processes as emergent from thermodynamic processes.'

Teleodynamics

Deacon argues there is an additional emergent transition which is dynamically supervenient on morphodynamics and thermodynamics. Morphodynamic processes generate order, but not representation or functional organization and they lack any normative (or evaluative) character because there is nothing like a self to benefit or suffer. Deacon's teleodynamics has characteristic end-directedness and consequence-organized features.

Living processes create protected local domains in which orthograde increase in entropy is effectively reversed by contragrade processes that generate order and new structural components at the expense of a net entropy increase in their surroundings. Living processes persistently decrease entropy within themselves and their progeny over the course of evolution, by developing and evolving complex supportive correlations between structures and processes for maintaining bodies and ecosystems.

Deacon regards evolutionary diversity as key. He argues the most dramatic expression of the emergent nature of life's distinctive dynamic is the generation of increasingly diverse and complex forms of

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organisms that have evolved during the past 3.5 billion years of Earth history and have adapted to an ever-increasing range of

environmental conditions. This process is spontaneous based on its dynamic asymmetry, and hence is orthograde. The global asymmetric dynamic of evolution is only an indirect higher-order product of the work done by organisms resisting degradation long enough to reproduce. It is the result of formal asymmetries in the space of options (niches) for adaptation in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage. Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents. Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces. For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery. He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's. When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward. Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas. The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness'; In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary.
that spontaneously arise over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time for living systems. This higher-order break in orthograde symmetry is a defining characteristic of an emergent dynamical transition.

Deacon explains that living systems incorporate morphodynamic processes at nearly every level of their organization, from complex cycles of catalytic, an infrastructure amplifier. molecular reactions to the embryonic cellular interactions which determine the elaborate theme-and-variation organization of plant and animal body architecture. But he says organisms as whole dynamical systems, evolving lineages or embedded within ecosystems exhibit properties that differ radically from those characterizing morphodynamic processes:

Organisms depend on and utilize energetic and material gradients to perform work to sustain constraints on their persistent, far from equilibrium dynamics.
Organisms actively reorganize their internal dynamics and relationships with the environment to counter or compensate for any depletion of necessary gradients.
Many organisms have evolved means of gradient assessment and spatial mobility that enable them to anticipate and avoid conditions of depleted gradients.
Organisms and ecosystems evolve toward forms of organization that increase the indirectness of the 'dissipation-path-length' of energy and material throughput in order to extract more work from the available gradients.

Deacon concludes the ways that these processes all serve to maintain the capacity for self-repair and self-replication exemplify a clear inversion of the typical features of morphodynamic systems. So an additional inflection separates living processes from morphodynamic processes. This higher order dynamical form of organization promotes its own persistence and maintenance by modifying these dynamics to more effectively utilize supportive extrinsic conditions. Deacon identifies an open orthograde recursive self-reconstitution and reproduction of the systems of constraint.

Deacon argues organisms and the evolutionary process are not separable. Explaining life requires explaining its evolutionary predisposition, because it must have emerged coextensive with whatever form of molecular teleodynamic process characterized the dawn of life. Deacon focuses on accounting for the phase change in dynamical organization that necessarily occurred with the origins of life, irrespective of any specific molecular details. Living and mental processes orthograde tendencies are triply complicated compared to the orthograde asymmetry of thermodynamic processes. This is what provides their final causal character. To resist the spontaneous degrading of thermodynamics requires work. The maintenance of non-equilibrium conditions is essential, both for stabilization and for the generation of replacement components. The work required is not merely energetic. The incessant need to replace and reconstruct organism components depends upon synthetic form-generating processes, not merely resistance to breakdown.

For Deacon reproduction is the construction of a dynamical physical system which is a replica of the system that constructed it, in both its structural and functional respects, though not necessarily a faithful replica in every detail. Self-reproduction is thus an end-directed dynamic in which the end is only a potential general form represented within the dynamical system that produced it, but which is a physical system with the same general properties of its progenitor.

Finally Deacon reviews Schrodinger's dual characterization of life as a marriage between transmission of information and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the informational functions of life are emergent from and dependent on more basic non-equilibrium dynamical processes. Generalizing the notions of metabolism supports the conversion of complex bonded structures present in food stuffs into simpler molecular structures and high energy molecules which can later be used to supply the energy needed to build complex bonded structures. Nucleotide bases such as Adenosine (A) are used by biological cells as high energy 'intermediate' molecules. Metabolism emerged in prokaryotic cells and in eukaryotic cells mitochondria provide this function.
and containment, respectively, these processes can be described in terms of their roles in countering two thermodynamic challenges:

There must be a mechanism that counters the incessant tendency for component elements of the system to degrade--either by repairing damaged components or by synthesizing new ones.
There must be a mechanism that resists the degradation of constraints on potential interactional relationships among components, such that the critical synthetic processes are reliably achieved.

Deacon argues that this approach (autogenesis) is compatible with explaining the origin of teleodynamics since both approaches assume that the informational functions of life emerge from simpler dynamical foundations.

Autogenesis

Deacon comments the

Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes.

logic of evolution must have emerged in the transition to ententional phenomena (teleodynamic processes). Ententional properties like function and information will only be explained when we can demonstrate how they emerge from non-ententional precursors (thermodynamic/morphodynamic) through autocatalysis and self-assembly. Deacon proceeds to do this.

Autocatalysis

A cooperative set of catalysts, an infrastructure amplifier. for a series of reactions results in autocatalysis. Deacon comments that there are many analogs of autocatalysis in living cells. It can arise spontaneously as a transiently locally deviant, non-equilibrium process. But it requires a remarkably coincidental coalescence of reciprocally interlocking molecules, multiple atoms bonded together. The physical and chemical phenomena associated with the molecule such as charge, size, shape, and potential energy reflect the constituent atoms, the types of bonds between them and the topology of the bonding. Charged molecules dissolve in aqueous solutions (water). Uncharged molecules dissolve in lipid bilayers. , which is rare and seems on first thought improbable. But Stuart Kauffman disagrees - he thinks in a polymeric soup many of the precursors will be somewhat catalytic. Increasing the network connectivity will increase the catalysis of this set. Then catalysis increases the key nodes and their products increasing the homogeneity of the reaction set. Still eventually the success of the process will make the soup more homogeneous first amplifying and subsequently undermining the basis of the catalysis.

Containment and self-assembly

Self-containment is a ubiquitous feature of life because life depends on the structural contiguity of its molecular systems remaining intact and unchanging. The cell membrane, formed from a lipid (fat) bilayer which creates a barrier between aqueous (water soluble) media. In AWF a key property of membranes - their providing a catalytic environment and supporting the suspension of enzymatically active proteins within the membrane; is simulated with a Workspace list where 'active' structures can be inserted and codelets can detect and act on the structure's active promise configured as an association in the Slipnet. is a boundary distinguishing a continuously maintained self-similar milieu inside from a varying and unconstrained outside. The finiteness of contained materials also makes the state space of their interrelationships manageable. But a closed thermodynamic system quickly and inevitably runs down to a maximum entropy state. Deacon consequently is interested in partial or periodic containment.

Containment of

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organisms and viruses is a relatively small capsule containing genetic material which utilizes the cellular infrastructure of its target host to replicate its genetic material and operational proteins. The relationship with the host is short term, relative to parasites, with the virus entering the host cell, leveraging the host infrastructure to replicate its self massively and then exiting the host cell by rupturing it.
is generally achieved by a ubiquitous molecular process of self-assembly. The growth of multi-unit macromolecular structures is an expression of the intrinsic geometry of component molecules, the collective symmetries these offer in aggregate, and the lower energy state of the resulting form. It is in this sense an expression of a thermodynamic orthograde tendency to reduce total entropy. The influence of their structural and charge characteristics may contribute to the amplification of constraints, thereby generating regularities in the ways they form aggregates; a morphodynamic consequence.

Synergy

Autocatalysis and self-assembly are self-limiting. But the limitations are a source of synergy. Together the two properties are reciprocally supportive.

Self-assembly provides the conditions that are most critical for sustaining autocatalysis: the proximity of reciprocally interdependent catalysts.

Reciprocally autocatalysis complements self-assembly. The major consequence of autocatalysis is the continual production of identical molecules in the same region, whereas self-assembly is most robust if the concentration of component molecules is maintained despite depletion due to this process.

Autogens

Deacon concludes the complementarity of the morphodynamic processes of self-assembly and auto-catalysis produces a special kind of emergent stability, unavailable to either process alone. The reciprocal complementarity of these two self-organizing processes creates the potential for self-repair, self-reconstitution, and even self-replication in a minimal form.

An autogen is an empirical type determined only by the continuity of those dynamic constraints which are themselves expressions of dynamical limitations - potential modes of change not expressed.

Autogenic organization only exists with respect to a relevant supportive

environment. So autogenic individuation is also only defined with respect to a particular type of environment.

The character of autogenic systems is a functional property.

Autogenic evolution

Requirements for autogenic natural selection:

Sufficient substrates to enable catalysis, but not so much as to disperse the catalytic set.
Competition among the autogenic lineages
Variation among lineages

The self-reconstitutive dynamical synergy is the essential ingredient that precedes and underlies life. This suggests that natural selection is ultimately an operation that differentially preserves certain alternative forms of morphodynamic processes compared to others, with respect to their synergy with one another, and with respect to the boundary conditions that enable them. Selection is not then fully defined only with respect to replication of genetic information. A self-maintaining formative power is critical. This requires processes that generate, preserve and propagate constraints. Morphodynamic processes are the only spontaneous processes that generate and propagate constraints, and autogens demonstrate that reciprocity between morphodynamic processes can preserve and replicate constraints.

The ratchet of life

Autogens are not alive. They are missing the ability to actively accumulate and mobilize energy within themselves. But Deacon argues they do support a higher level ratchet effect which limits the increase in entropy. Teleodynamic processes are constituted by the interactions between morphodynamic processes. But the entropy flow maximization of these component processes is not additive in this interaction. This is because the attractor basins toward which morphodynamic processes tend are specifically structured, and thus constitute constraints in their own right. The complementary constraints that each generates with respect to the other are self-undermining. Their progression toward optimal entropy production rate is also to a state where dynamical change ceases. Regularity is built up, only to be frozen by closure. Full dissipation is prevented at a point where optimal conditions for rapidly reinitiating the process are achieved. An autogen is a negative entropy ratchet.

The emergence of teleodynamics

Autogens mark the transition from maximum entropy production to constraint production and preservation, and from orthograde processes characterized by self-simplification to orthograde processes exemplified by self-preservation teleodynamics. It's an emergent transition in the sense that the new orthograde organization is contrary to what proceeded.

Deacon highlights the emergence of function. The autocatalysis, the container, and the relationship between them are generated in each replication precisely because they are of benefit to an individual autogen's integrity and its capacity to aid the continuation of this form of autonomous individual. It is the teleodynamic organization that causes this, and not merely some collection of interacting molecules, multiple atoms bonded together. The physical and chemical phenomena associated with the molecule such as charge, size, shape, and potential energy reflect the constituent atoms, the types of bonds between them and the topology of the bonding. Charged molecules dissolve in aqueous solutions (water). Uncharged molecules dissolve in lipid bilayers. , since these are replaceable. Each component autogenic process is there for the sake of the autogen integrity. Different features of the surrounding molecular

environment contribute. These are not glosses provided by a human observer, but intrinsic and functionally relevant features of the consequence-organized nature of the autogen itself.

Deacon uses the identification of common logic in the hierarchy of emergent transitions to define emergence: An emergent dynamical transition is signaled by a change in the topology of the phase space of probable dynamic trajectories. He writes 'Emergence is, in effect, defined by a polarity reversal in orthograde dynamics with ascent in scale'.

Autogen dynamics demonstrates that there must be a morphodynamic intermediate between thermodynamics and living system dynamics.

Ground work for an expanded science

Deacon applies his framework to various aspects of the world: work, information, significance, evolution, self, sentience and consciousness.

Deacon's expanded conception of work

Contragrade change requires work utilizing a potential difference in entropy. Deacon argues that how much things change from what would have otherwise occurred spontaneously is a reflection of the amount of work exerted to produce this change. So long as contragrade change persists, work is involved, and thus it can accumulate over

Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:

A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized
The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables.
Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things

Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:

Our familiar time emerges

Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

time and distance.

Deacon argues that the generation of higher-order emergent dynamics depends on work at a lower order. To understand the emergence of novel forms of causality, Deacon's argues you must explain the emergence and nature of higher-order forms of work.

Deacon explores the nature of work broadly seeing it stretching into the realm of information. Deacon views energy and information as analogous leveraging Gregory Bateson's ideas regarding Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy.
's theory of communication, which interpret information as a measure of variety or difference. Information is not an actual thing. Deacon suggests the generation of information might also be understood as a form of work. While energy was initially viewed as a substance such ideas have been abandoned being replaced by a dynamic relational conception. Work involves something that doesn't tend to happen spontaneously being induced to happen by something else that is happening spontaneously.

Deacon argues that all forms of work as activity needed to overcome resistance to change. Work can be seen as resulting from an orthograde process difference which creates the focus of a contragrade process which does work. Macroscopic (orthograde) work depends on microscopic (thermodynamic) work being distributed in a very asymmetric way throughout the system.

Deacon identifies a general principle of causality that shows how work and the constraints that make it possible are to be understood in terms of levels of scale and supervenient organization. He continues framing a theory of morphodynamic work and of teleodynamic work. Teleodynamic work is dependent on morphodynamic work is dependent on thermodynamic work. In any context, orthograde processes will continue until they reach a state in which there is symmetry in the probable directions of change, or until the supportive conditions change. This dynamical terminus of an orthograde process is its attractor, which may or may not be a quiescent state.

Morphodynamic work

Morphodynamic orthograde processes are dynamically supervenient on incessant lower-order stable contragrade dynamics: the balance (symmetry) between incessant extrinsically introduced forms of destabilization, which introduce constraints, and the incessant spontaneous (orthograde) dissipation of these constraints. Asymmetry arises under these conditions as constraints compound non-linearly. As long as new extrinsic constraint is introduced faster than it is dissipated subsequent stages of change will exhibit progressively reduced ranges of variation.

Teleodynamic work

Teleodynamic orthograde processes are more complex because they supervene on morphodynamic processes. Teleodynamic patterns of change emerge from the contragrade interactions between morphodynamic processes. Autocatalysis does thermodynamic work by asymmetrically increasing the local concentration of substrates for self-assembly, and self-assembly does thermodynamic work in impeding catalyst, an infrastructure amplifier. diffusion. In addition the interaction involves countervailing constraint generation processes, and thus morphodynamic work. But morphodynamic regularities are rare under natural circumstances except in living systems. The self-organizing processes impede the chaotic interactions which undermine other morphodynamic processes. The process of biological evolution has discovered both how to setup a vast array of morphodynamic work processes and complex synergies and reciprocities between them that enable repeatable cycling. Teleodynamic work is the production of contragrade teleodynamic processes.

Deacon identifies what constitutes orthograde and contragrade processes in the teleodynamic domain of living

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organisms:

Orthograde -

The actions of organisms that function to maintain them against degrading influences such as thermodynamic breakdown.
Processes of growth, differentiation and reproduction which are involved in producing backup copies of the organism.

Contragrade - teleodynamic processes that are organized so as to impede or contravene the orthograde processes.

Deacon argues that these should be 'in some way' bad for the organism. Reproductive competition from other members of the species is used as one example.

Deacon argues that natural selection then allows teleodynamic work to transform one form of teleodynamic process into another, and to generate emergent phenomena at a higher level. He argues that work done to acquire resources, mates, and so on is also work that degrades the teleodynamic efficacy of competitors with respect to these same arrangements. This work is both directly and indirectly a source of distributed contragrade effects on other organisms.

Deacon concludes the power to affect change at all levels is interconnected and interdependent. Although the fundamental constants and laws of physics do not change, and there is no gain or loss of mass-energy during any physical transformation process, there can be quite significant alterations in the organizational nature of causal process. Work can restructure the constraints acting as boundary conditions that determine what patterns of change will be orthograde in some other linked system. The universe is open to organizational constraints on formal cause and the introduction of novel forms of efficient cause. New forms of work can and are constantly emerging. There is no limit to higher order forms of teleodynamic processes. Thus the possibility of generating increasingly diverse forms of non-spontaneous dynamics can produce causal relationships that radically diverge from simple physical and chemical expectations, and yet still have these processes as their ground. This is the essence of emergence, and the creative explosion it unleashes.

Deacon's expanded conception of information

Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy.
's entropy and information model ignores reference.

Deacon focuses on omissions, expectations and absences. Regularities (expression of a constraint) allow omissions to become significant. Hence Deacon concludes information is a feature of teleodynamic work. Specific details of a sign's embodiment can be largely irrelevant. Change of state requires a model that interprets it.

Two entropies

Deacon introduces Boltzmann entropy, the association of thermodynamic entropy with increasing disorder and Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy.
entropy a measure of how much information a medium can possibly carry. He notes that Boltzmann's conception is a dynamic property while Shannon's is structural. Deacon goes on to explore dynamic properties of information. He argues that work and selection can both be applied to signal dynamics. He notes that reduced uncertainty is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. This is different from Risk. equates to information - in the form of a referential sign about the nature of the work done in filtering the signal. Reference implies that the receiver has some redundancy with what is already known (context) about the information conveyed by the signal.

Deacon argues that though the external factors that alter a system's entropy are not intrinsic features of the medium, the signal constraint is an intrinsic feature. Referential information is in this sense inferred from the form of the constraints embodied in the relationship between unconstrained possibility and the received signal. In this way, Shannon information, assessed in term of this constraint, embodies a trace of the work that produced it. Shannon information and referential information are not the same because the constraint is both intrinsic and yet not located in the signal medium. Its a relationship between what is and what could be.

Deacon suggests the capacity to reflect the effect of work is the basis of reference. In the case of classic information theory, the improbability of receiving a given sign or signal with respect to the background expectation of its receipt compared to other options defines the measure of potential information. In the case of classic thermodynamics, the improbability of being in some far-from-equilibrium state is a measure of its potential to do work, and also a measure of work that was necessarily performed to shift it into this state. The linkage between the two theories hinges on the materiality of communication (e.g. the constitution of its sign and/or signal medium). So in a paradoxical sense, the absent content that is the hallmark of information is a function of the necessary physicality of the information process.

Deacon's conception of significance

Interaction is required for a physical difference to become information. Interpretation requires special forms of physical process to be produced. It organizes work in response to the state of a sign medium and with respect to some normative consequence (valued over others).

Information describes physical changes that get propagated from component to component in a designed or evolved feedback circuit only because the resultant attractor dynamics itself played the determinate role in generating the architecture of this mechanism.

Deacon argues the capacity for one form of work to produce the constraints that organize another, independent form of work is the source of the amplifying power of information. It provides the means for using the presence of a small energy gradient to create constraints that are able to organize the depletion of a much larger energy gradient. Information can serve as the bridge linking the properties of otherwise quite separate and unrelated material and energetic systems. Information expands the dimensions of Kauffman's adjacent possible in almost unlimited ways.

What determines that a given constraint is information is that the interpretive process is organized so that this constraint is correlated with the generation of work that would preserve the possibility of this process recurring under some (usually most) of the conditions that could have produced this constraint. The interpretive capacity is to generate a specific form of work in response to particular forms of system extrinsic constraints so that it generates intrinsic constraints that are likely to maintain or improve this capacity. Only morphodynamic processes spontaneously generate intrinsic constraints. Teleodynamics is needed to maintain the far from equilibrium conditions that maintain the morphodynamic processes.

Interpretation

With the inclusion of reference a potentially infinite term is included in the quantification of information. There must be interpretation to decide when the reference is fully resolved. Interpretation must pick one factor in the trail of causes and effects leading up to the constraint reflected in the signal medium. In different contexts and for different interpreters, the same sign or signal may thus be taken to be about very different things. Resolution depends on the interpreting system, its intrinsic information-carrying /producing capacity and its involvement in the same causal chain.

The causal history contributing to the constraints imposed on a given medium limits, but does not specify, what its information can be about. That point in this causal chain that is the referent must be determined by and with respect to another information process. All that is guaranteed by a potential reduction in Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy.
entropy of a signal is a possible linkage to something else. This is an open-ended set of possibilities, only limited by processes that spontaneously obliterate certain physical traces or that block certain physical influences.

An expansion of analytic tools effectively increases the Shannon entropy of a given physical trace - the interpretive process identifies a limited set of interpretable states from the total set. Hence the interpretive process is also a signal producing process with its own potential Shannon entropy. The maximum information that can be conveyed is the lesser of the Shannon entropies of the two processes.

Noise versus error

Information can be in error but this can be mitigated:

Signal corrupted - can be overcome by redundancy (Double helix, the structural helix generated when two DNA polymers nucleotide's pair and each polymer's bases stack. The development of the structure is statistically unlikely and only possible when at each point the bases in one of the polymers are a match for the paired base in the other polymer. The double helix is naturally redundant which has important evolutionary consequences due to the low error rate that can be achieved by leveraging the redundancy. Because this structure becomes beneficial to emergence and can be preserved by natural selection it is available to provide a data base of recipes for the proteins deployed by the cell and a massive state space for supporting the operation of the cell.
).
Reference mistaken - facts can be checked when there are multiple independent reports. Precision of the reference can be improved by highly specific sensitivity in the filter (which oddly reduces the entropy of the signal but improves the reference accuracy).
Action irrelevant - can be limited by the deployment of a
Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS). The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained.

Shewhart cycle.

Darwinian information

Evolution can be seen to use these error mitigation correspondences to generate information. Noise becomes an additional signal:

Mutation = corruption of the source adding new uncorrelated entropy.
Selection = fact checking
Individual
This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organisms with variant forms constitute a pool of options checked by competition to reproduce successfully. It passes on its comparatively better fittedness to prevailing conditions.

Information emerging

Deacon sees three nested conceptions of information. Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy.
information is the most minimal and basic. Referential information (Boltzmann) is emergent from Shannon information, and significant--or useful--information (Darwinian) is emergent from referential information.

Deacon concludes the ability to use extrinsically generated events and objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.
as information derives from the special dynamics of living processes. The maintenance of intrinsically unstable, far-from-equilibrium conditions entails mechanisms that effectively anticipate the possible variations of

environmental conditions by not excluding them.

Representation

He continues constraints don't do work, but they are the scaffolding upon which the capacity to do work depends. Even simple functional and representational relationships emerge from a nested interdependence of generative processes with constrained dynamics. At the intersection of thermodynamics, natural selection and information theory entropy reduction and constraint generation allow the emergence of representation, reference and normativity (usefulness).

Deacon's conception of evolution

Deacon argues that an adequate theory of

This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

evolution must include self-organization and selection. Deacon comments that Darwin's theory of natural selection leaves out nearly all mechanistic details. The ends justify the means by preserving them retrospectively. True functional generality emerges from the process. An adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary. Transmission of conserved constraints is critical (not energy, material or behavior). In excluding the least helpful, evolution creates a critical break in causal synergy that makes the concept of biological function an emergent general physical property.

Still, Deacon comments, evolution must overcome the:

Degeneration of material by the second law of thermodynamics.
Absence of a mechanism for generation, preservation and transmission of biological information.
Requirement for a set of emergent teleodynamic systems to support the evolutionary process.

He concludes that these are present in abiogenesis. He uses autogenic theory to act as a bridge from non-living to living processes. It shows why spontaneous generation is so exceedingly rare. Conditions that make it possible are highly precise and atypical of thermodynamically driven processes that are all but ubiquitous excepting life.

Genetic information

Genetic information provides separately sequestered constraints embodied in some non-dynamic attribute, which can be preserved unmodified across changes in dynamics, so that earlier dynamical achievements will not be continually undermined. It sequesters an independent source of constraint that is partially redundant to that intrinsic to the dynamics of the

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organism itself (Conserves and innovates). In Deacon's earlier analysis of information it is associated with the transmission of constraints, exemplified by some physical medium linking a teleodynamic system with its

environment. Deacon argues it is therefore a derived feature of life. This he concludes undermines Dawkin's Replicator is Richard Dawkin's name for the genotype since it has the evolutionary goal of surviving long enough to reproduce its schematic plan effectively. The action of genetic operators means that the results of successful reproduction may be different to the parental genotypes and phenotypes (Dawkin's vehicle).
approach. He views the DNA (DNA), a polymer composed of a chain of deoxy ribose sugars with purine or pyrimidine side chains. DNA naturally forms into helical pairs with the side chains stacked in the center of the helix. It is a natural form of schematic string. The purines and pyrimidines couple so that AT and GC pairs make up the stackable items. A code of triplets of base pairs (enabling 64 separate items to be named) has evolved which now redundantly represents each of the 20 amino-acids that are deployed into proteins, along with triplets representing the termination sequence. Chemical modifications and histone binding (chromatin) allow cells to represent state directly on the DNA schema. To cope with inconsistencies in the cell wide state second messenger and evolved amplification strategies are used. sequence as analogous to Shannon information only.

With an alternative autogenic interpretation Deacon explores a scenario where the semiotic status of autogens is extended with bonding, there are different types of chemical bonds. Ionic bonds stabilize two oppositely charged ionized atoms when the negative atom gives up an electron to the positively charged atom. Covalent bonds stabilize the two reactants when they adopt a more stable structure with electrons shared between them. Hydrogen bonds stabilize charged groups when they are surrounded by water molecules. In Copycat codelets can bond two Workspace objects together. In the Smiley implementation a bondbuilder adds a bonding descriptor to one of the objects bonding it to the other. of relevant substrate molecules, multiple atoms bonded together. The physical and chemical phenomena associated with the molecule such as charge, size, shape, and potential energy reflect the constituent atoms, the types of bonds between them and the topology of the bonding. Charged molecules dissolve in aqueous solutions (water). Uncharged molecules dissolve in lipid bilayers. from the local environment to the autogens surface. Deacon argues that if this increases the frequency of containment it also implies selective response to its environment (an adaptation in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage. Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents. Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces. For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery. He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's. When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward. Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas. The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness'; In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary.
). Binding of substrate becomes information about the suitability of the environment for successful replication. Deacon concludes that this information is specifically about the environment for the maintenance of this interpretive capacity.

Deacon goes on to extend the scenario to generate an additional level of referential information. He argues that if the binding substrate is a nucleotide its monomeric features (energy transfer and signalling) once leveraged by the autogen allow the later emergence of the information conveying capability. He argues that autogen catalysis and/or self-assembly is potentiated by the bound nucleotide. Subsequently during the reconstitution/replication phase of the autogen energy from the nucleotides is used as fuel. Such augmented autogen systems would have an evolutionary advantage through energy leverage. Significantly the autogen's inherent constraints would then be beneficially affected by the sequestering of 'spare' nucleotide in a compacted separated but internal phase allowing the autogen to conclude its general cycle.

Deacon argues that the sequestration of nucleotide independently enables the additional functions based on sequence when these support needed constraint creation/preservation/replication. Deacon concludes morphology reproducing autogens with energy cycling can enable the emergence of information replicating semeota.

Deacon's conception of Self

Deacon's central thesis is that the core property of self is a special form of dynamical organization: teleodynamics. All teleodynamic processes are implicitly individuated. They are closed with respect to other dynamical features of the world. Each component function contributes to the continued existence of the whole and the whole is required to generate each component function.

Deacon comments that the source of agency can be described as the generation of interactive constructions which do work to perpetuate the reciprocal maintenance of the constraints that maintain the organism.

Deacon sees evolution as freeing agents from nominalism. Physical responses, perceptions and mental categories aren't merely passive reflections on the world; they exist to structure adaptation in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage. Holland argues: complex adaptive systems (CAS) adapt due to the influence of schematic strings on agents. Evolution indicates fitness when an organism survives and reproduces. For his genetic algorithm, Holland separated the adaptive process into credit assignment and rule discovery. He assigned a strength to each of the rules (alternate hypothesis) used by his artificial agents, by credit assignment - each accepted message being paid for by the recipient, increasing the sender agent's rule's strength (implicit modeling) and reducing the recipient's. When an agent achieved an explicit goal they obtained a final reward. Rule discovery used the genetic algorithm to select strong rule schemas from a pair of agents to be included in the next generation, with crossing over and mutation applied, and the resulting schematic strategies used to replace weaker schemas. The crossing over genetic operator is unlikely to break up a short schematic sequence that provides a building block retained because of its 'fitness'; In Deacon's conception of evolution, an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary.
to the world. For this reason Deacon argues the mere resemblance of an object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.
to a perceptual class can be what causes the object to be modified in a particular way by an animal or person. This augmented efficacy of generals is a feature that emerges from teleodynamics. It is an attribute of life itself. Individuation and agency are intrinsic features of teleodynamics which brains have evolved to generate, because of the dynamical closure, constraint generation, and self-maintenance that defines teleodynamics. Deacon argues that the brains 'self' has a higher order teleodynamics since it must model itself. As such the self is embodied by dynamical constraints.

Deacon's conception of sentience

Deacon follows William James's view developed by William James & Carl Lange who, independently proposed that humans decide how they feel based on interoceptive signals, rather than from external ones. Sapolsky notes the theory reflects these signals influence on behavior where social emotion processing areas receive lots of projections from interoceptive networks. The most notable is pain. But he writes it fails to support specificity or speed of reactions since autonomic responses are too slow to precede awareness of an emotion.
of the background 'feeling are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:

As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time

of being here' which is seen as a distinctive quality of experience that is private, internal and self-referential and with which the non-self content is discriminated, as being sentience.

Because organisms are teleodynamic systems, they do not merely react mechanically and thermodynamically to perturbation, but generally are organized to initiate a change in their internal dynamics to actively compensate for extrinsic modifications or internal deficits. Feeling is in this basic sense active.

Deacon asserts that complex intentional features that characterize our thoughts and objective experiences emerge from a background of neurological morphodynamic and homeodynamic processes. Moreover, these lower-order subvenient dynamical features must also inevitably constitute significant aspects of our mental lives. Deacon believes that once a mechanistic and computational framework for intentional content is abandoned its characterization will be open to empirical analysis linking cellular-molecular processes to intentional features of mental experience.

As with Deacon's analysis of emergent constraints on evolution he sees the brain's mechanistic properties as being necessarily constrained by emergent requirements.

The relevant interpretive process must be intrinsic. Deacon assumes that neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a:

Receptive element - dendrites
Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.

have been adapted, over the course of evolution, to use some of their otherwise generic metabolic and intercellular communication capabilities for the special purpose of conveying point-to-point signals between one another. The mechanisms are unruly, noisy and only modestly reliable transducers and conveyers of signals. Neurons still have to perform a great many non-signal transmission tasks that are necessary for any call to stay alive.

Deacon adds that most brains, from simple to large and complex appear to be deployed based on a broadly similar amount of genetic material. Replication of architecture appears to allow for increases in size and complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:

Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization
Systems that are adaptive
More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
Balance at the edge of chaos

. Hence Deacon argues brains are not well suited to be digital computing systems, which require predictability, and reliability. Instead mammalian brains are astronomically huge, highly interconnected, highly reentrant networks, where noise is likely to get wildly amplified.

Deacon suggests instead noise must be a design feature of brains, rather than something to be eliminated. Deacon sees the network of neurons as supporting emergent dynamic processes. Deacon suggests whole brain sentience is a function of dynamical regularities at a more global level than signals within individual nerve cells, which equate more to the homeodynamic flow's individual components discussed earlier.

Deacon suggests that brains specifically evolved in animate multicelled creatures because being able to move about and modify the surroundings require predictive as well as reactive capabilities. He argues that the evolution of this 'anticipatory sentience' -- nested within, constituted by, and acting on behalf of the 'reactive sentience of the organism -- has given rise to emergent features that have no precedent.

As with his analysis of evolution Deacon extends the autogen. This time to support a minimal sentience. He proceeds to use this approach to explore the implications for

John Searle's influential thought experiment implied to him that computers cannot understand. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory indicates that this is not the case.

Searle's Chinese Room. Deacon concludes Searle intends to illuminate the difference between a mechanistic (homeodynamic) process and an ententional (teleodynamic) process. The Chinese room can be augmented to precisely identify what is missing which should be a metric for determining whether a given brain process is merely computational or is also sentient. Just as it was necessary to stop trying to identify the teleodynamics of life with molecular dynamics alone but instead one had to attend to the constraints embodied as well, computational mechanics alone cannot be viewed as mapping to intentional properties of mentality.

Deacon argues that first it is necessary to understand the teleodynamic features that emerge in a tangled hierarchy within nervous systems. Deacon describes starting this process in his final chapter on consciousness.

Deacon's conception of consciousness

Deacon views consciousness as a second order emergent sentience - a sentience of sentience. As such it is able to constrain, detect and alter the first order emergent functions of sentience. What results is a sentience of the normative features of sentience: pleasure is the outcome of the dopamine reward system, argues UCSF professor Robert Lustig. He, like the early Christians, contrasts [addiction oriented] pleasure with serotonin driven happiness & contentment.
, pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation.
, joy and suffering.

Deacon argues that any teleodynamic system generates an emergent sentience. Higher animals develop a multi-layer ententional hierarchy. He sees neuron networks, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions. In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional. He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:

Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states.

as providing a low level teleodynamic substrate. It is based on morphodynamics and thermodynamics. Deacon presents the flows of blood to the neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors. Neurons are supported by glial cells. Neurons include a:

Receptive element - dendrites
Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals. The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged.
Highly variable DNA schema using transposons.

, and control of these as essential thermodynamic characteristics and constraints. Attractors emerging from these teleodynamic and morphodynamic flows support higher level morphodynamics and teleodynamics.

Deacon writes 'There are emergent sentient properties produced by the teleodynamics of brains that are not produced by simpler, lower-order forms of sentience. Crucially, these are special normative properties made possible because the sentience generated by brain processes is, in effect, a second-order sentience.' He further explores the implications of having a teleodynamic process include within itself a representation of its own dynamical final cause tendencies. 'For animals with brains, the organism and its distinctive teleodynamic characteristics will likely fail to persist (both in terms of resisting death and reproducing) if its higher-order teleodynamics of self-prediction fails in some respect.'

He concludes 'Generation of a projected future self-in-context thus can become a critical source of constraints organizing the whole system. But generating these virtual selves requires both a means to model the causality of the

environment and also a means for modeling the causality of the teleodynamic processes that generate these models and act with respect to them.' ... 'In an animal with a brain that was evolved to project alternative future selves-in-context, such an assessment [of overall integrity] becomes a relevant factor. A separate dynamical component of its teleodynamic organization must continually generate a model of both its overall vegetative integrity and the degree to which this is (or might be) compromised with respect to other contingent factors. A dynamical sub process evolved to analyze whatever might impact persistence of the whole organism, and determine an appropriate organism level response, must play a primary role in structuring its overall teleodynamic organization.'

Deacon argues pain is how neural teleodynamics reorganizes in response to its sensory assessment of vegetative damage. Its effect is to interrupt less critical neural dynamics and activate specific processes to stop this sensory signal. To do this it must block the differentiation of most morphodynamic processes that are inessential to this end, and rapidly recruit significant metabolic and neural resources to generate action to avoid continuation of this stimulus.

Deacon views the expanded notion of science as enabling a fuller understanding of the architectures and operations of conscious brains. He writes even though this is a theory which defends the thesis that intentional relationships and sentient experiences are not material phenomena in the usual sense of that concept, it nonetheless provides us with a thoroughly empirical set of predictions and testable hypotheses about these enigmatic relationships.

Complex adaptive system

(CAS) theory depends directly on the

Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems. Examples of constraints are discussed.

dynamic flows, constraints, self-assembly and

This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena. Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible. Key research is reviewed.

emergence which Deacon explores.

He demonstrates key relationships between interacting flows, constraints on these flows, and the emergence of higher level dynamic phenomena.

This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

Evolution gains mechanistic support and remains essential to the development of CAS.

Our conception of

Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

agents intrinsically bound to

Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions. The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed.

schematic structures while consistent with Deacon's theories places more significance on their impact on higher level emergent systems. Deacon argues that genetic structures ensure successful dynamic systems persist across generations. We similarly extend Blackmore's memetic model to include dependencies on the infrastructure that supports the flows, constraints and associative signaling that enables the emergence of memetic systems. We view books, educational processes and neuronal long term memory in the brain includes functionally different types: Declarative, or explicit, (episodic and semantic), Implicit, Procedural, Spatial, Temporal, Verbal; Hebb suggested that glutamate receptive neurons learn by (NMDA channel based) synaptic strengthening: short term memory. This was shown to happen for explicit memory formation in the hippocampus. This strengthening is sustained by subsequent LTP. The non-real-time learning and planning processes operate through consciousness using the working memory structures, and then via sleep, the salient ones are consolidated while the rest are destroyed and garbage collected. structures as persisting valuable dynamic processes across generations of brains.

Deacon's frustration with computer based 'evolutionary systems' failing to represent the essential physical constraints of the real world seems justified. The failure distorts the representation of the

environment and the pressures on the agents making it difficult to explore the adjacent possible. AWF's agent programming framework

This page describes the Adaptive Web framework (AWF) test system and the agent programming framework (Smiley) that supports its operation.
Example test system statements are included. To begin a test a test statement is loaded into Smiley while Smiley executes on the Perl interpreter.
Part of Smiley's Perl code focused on setting up the infrastructure is included bellow.
The setup includes:

Loading the 'Meta file' specification,
Initializing the Slipnet, and Workspaces and loading them
So that the Coderack can be called.

The Coderack, which is the focus of a separate page of the Perl frame then schedules and runs the codelets that are invoked by the test statement structures.

Smiley's chemical foundation, barriers to bonding, there are different types of chemical bonds. Ionic bonds stabilize two oppositely charged ionized atoms when the negative atom gives up an electron to the positively charged atom. Covalent bonds stabilize the two reactants when they adopt a more stable structure with electrons shared between them. Hydrogen bonds stabilize charged groups when they are surrounded by water molecules. In Copycat codelets can bond two Workspace objects together. In the Smiley implementation a bondbuilder adds a bonding descriptor to one of the objects bonding it to the other. based on

This page describes the Copycat Slipnet.
The goal of the Slipnet is reviewed.
Smiley's specialized use of the Slipnet is introduced.
The initial Slipnet network used by the 'Merge Streams' and 'Virtual Robot' agent-based applications is setup in initchemistry and is included.
The Slipnet infrastructure and initialization functions are included.

Slipnet properties, salience, Douglas Hofstadter controlled the amount of attention a Workspace object in Copycat would receive from codelets via its salience. The more descriptions, analogous to geons, an object has and the more highly activated the nodes involved therein, the more important the object is. Modulating this tendency is any relative lack of connections from the object to the rest of the objects in the Workspace. Salience is a dynamic number that takes into account both these factors. In Smiley the instantaneous salience of a Workspace's objects is calculated by itsalience. In the brain salience is modeled by the salience networks.
requirements of the

This page describes the Copycat Coderack.
The details of the codelet architecture are described.
The specialized use of the Coderack by the adaptive web framework's (AWF) Smiley is discussed.
The codelet scheduling mechanism is discussed.
A variety of Smiley extensions to the Coderack are reviewed.
The Coderack infrastructure functions are included.

Coderack, the

This page discusses how Smiley provides deployment guarantees to its agent-based applications.
Smiley's transaction services are reviewed.
The complex interactions of codelets participating in a deployment cascade are discussed including:

The implementation of schematic switches.
The cooperative use of goal suppression.
Evaluator codelets promotion of other siblings.

Challenges of initiation of a cascade are discussed.
Tools to associate transaction protection to an operon deployed codelet are described.
Special support for sub-program codelets is described. Completion of transactional sub-programs presents special challenges. Priority and synchronization support includes:

Delaying the operaton of the cascade sponsor.
Delaying the notgcompleting cascade participant.
Waiting for completion of parallel operations with the wait and relay service.

The need to sustain resource pools is reviewed.
The use of signals to coordinate siblings is described.
The structural binding operon for the wait and relay service is included.
The codelets and supporting functions are included.

cascading flows of codelets and its consumption of free energy as the codelets operate starts to add back these constraints.

Deacon's opus provides a vision of an expanded science that includes frameworks for emergent systems. He demonstrates how dynamic processes can synergistically constrain entropy, self-assemble and auto catalyze inducing the emergent and evolutionary properties of real CAS systems.

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This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:

Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.

As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan.

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples.

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This page uses an example to illustrate how:

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