The Brain as an Emergent System and ... Characterizer of/Participant in Emergent Systems Paul Grobstein Emergent Systems Working Group 28 May 2003 (Participant List)

Looking for the Pattern: From the head to the heart: Some thoughts on similarities between brain function and morphogenesis, and on their significance for research methodology and biological theory, 1988 Variability in Brain Function and Behavior, 1994 Who's Afraid of Emily Dickinson? Or ... How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Brain, 2002 The Brain's Images: Co-Constructing Reality and the Self, 2002 Getting It Less Wrong, The Brain's Way: Science, Pragmatism, and Multiplism, 2002-2003 Biology 202, Neurobiology and Behavior, current

• Assemblies of assemblies of assemblies ... of assemblies of neurons
• Neurons (and all levels of assemblies) are input/output boxes (information processors, subject to/consistent with/making use of all know physical laws, including the second law of thermodynamics), interconnected with each other and (in minority of cases) with "outside" world
• non-linear, threshhold ("integrate and fire") processors at all levels from neuron up
• THEREFORE "irreversible" in sense that one cannot tell from output what input was
• therefore ALSO "categorizers", "interpreters" - treat lots of different things as same thing ("infinite bounded variant sets")
• therefore ALSO both information erasers and information creators, the latter by virtue of their own contained information ("improbable assembly"), hence "info slippage"
• include spontaneous and "randomizing" elements, which further erase/create information, make it difficult/impossible? to say what output will be for give input
• are altered by their own activity, creating strong history dependence, stigmergic effects, contributing to information addition/loss/alteration

Looking at a higher level of organization - Lateral inhibition

• again irreversibility
• again information loss and creation, based on pre-existing information/structure
• creation of new structure dependent on structure created by loss ("abstraction")
• "pattern recognition" as erasure, "info slippage"
• suggests still higher level of organization - painter/author and audience

And one level higher - the painter/author and the audience

once again irreversibility once again information loss and creation, based on pre-existing information/structure creation of new structure dependent on structure created by loss info not "lost" but repackaged? greater improbability because of organization of previous improbabilities? details lost as abstraction becomes part of more complex structure? NO ONE IN CHARGE - bidirectional causation "consciousness" is extension of novelty generation by intepretation within laws of physics, including second law of thermodynamics is an emergent characteristic of a material exploratory process accelerates that process

And higher still - the brain as a part

• etc. as above?
• Fading Species and Dying Tongues - NY Times Science Times, 27 May 2003
  • do languages die?
  • do species die?
  • not if one accepts emergence, as compared to esentialism
• Language as compression/expansion (Norretranders, The User Illusion, 1998)
• Culture as compression/expansion?
  • "to take the time to feel and reflect and think, to tell and listen to each others' stories, to commit ourselves anew to finding new ways to tell our collective human story in a way from which no one feels estranged"
  • "Theorizing Interdisciplinarity" - Dalke, Grobstein, McCormack, in progress

• Brain a multilevel emergent system
• Depends on info gain and "loss"
• "Understanding" involves similar processes at different levels of organization
• Does not require something outside limits of second law of thermodynammics, but may require new construals of that law
• Do we see "reality" as emergent because of brain as an emergent system?

Home | Calendar | About | Getting Involved | Groups | Initiatives | Bryn Mawr Home | Serendip Home

Director: Liz McCormack - emccorma@brynmawr.edu | Faculty Steering Committee | Secretary: Lisa Kolonay
© 1994- , by Center for Science in Society, Bryn Mawr College and Serendip
Last Modified: Wednesday, 02-May-2018 10:51:16 CDT