CascadiaPrime Cognition

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CascadiaPrime Cognition - Emergence


The "emergence" of order and structure in complex and apparently chaotic systems appears to give rise to intelligence systems spontaneously. Students who have not already looked at complexity theory, chaos theory, and constructal theory will find explorations there to compliment their appreciation of cognitive systems.

The emergence of consciousness from the physical world has over the millennia given rise to a host of mythological explanations. Scientific explanations are within our grasp.

My own conjecture is that because organisms (entities) exist in a world of action they are guided in their evolution toward consciousness by interaction with the physical world which inherently involves energy, mass, space, perception, specialization and changing environment. These shape the river of emerging consciousness. The flow appears to arise because of energy differentials. The shape and structure of the flow arises to facilitate flow.

A potentially key idea is that there are pressures propelling systems forward. From the macro to the nano there are differences in concentrations of energy and mass - pressure gradients.

The form of the double helix is deeply rooted in the structure and properties of the universe and from that the emergent properties of consciousness and cognition appear to be found.

Initially organisms interact and communicate in simple stimulus response modes but, like the chords in the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", with increasing strength and sophistication.

With careful attention to emergence properties we may be able to hasten the reverse engineering of aspects of cognition that can be put to use in creating beneficial artificial general intelligence.

    
  FQXi Essay Contest 2016 ($40K): Wandering Towards a Goal How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intentions? (December 14, 2016)
  
  Talk by Max Tegmark at the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM) Connections between physics and deep learning (August 29, 2016)
  
  The Extraordinary Link Between Deep Neural Networks and the Nature of the Universe (September 9, 2016)
  
  How Can Evolution Learn? (December 16, 2015)
  
  Brain map of semantic regions and individual words - emergence of meaning (April 27, 2016)
  
  Two properties - the sizes as well as the polarities of amino acids - were necessary and sufficient to explain how the amino acids behaved in folded proteins (June 2015)
  
  First direct experimental evidence for the rapid synthesis of two classes of proteins necessary to create the first life on Earth (June 2015)
  
  Self-organized patterns identify emergent behavior near critical transitions (April 2015)
  
  Biologists Home in on Turing Patterns (March 2013)
  
  Nature speaks: Saket Navlakha, "Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems (January 2015)
  
  Robert Sapolsky "Emergence and Complexity" (May 2010)
  
  European Conference on Artificial Life (July 2015)
  
  How complex environments push brain evolution (January 2015)
  
  Richard Dawkins - This is my vision of life (April 2015)
  
  Evolution of Integrated Causal Structures in Animats Exposed to Environments of Increasing Complexity (December 2014)
  
  Repurposing non-coding elements in genome gave rise to great 'mammalian radiation' (January 2015)
  
  Gene regulation underlies the evolution of social complexity in bees (May 2015)
  
  Artificial molecular pump mimics evolution - non-equilibrium chemistry (May 2015)
  
  A New Physics Theory of Life (January 2014)
  
  Bejan: Constructal Law Explained
  
  Alex Nugent, Introduction to AHaH (Neuromorphic) Computing and self-organizing learning emergence (April 2015)
  
  The First Stage of Perception: Growth of the assembly - Donald O Hebb - Presentation by Srivaths Ranaganathan
  
  Stephen Wolfram - A New Kind of Science
  
  Jonathan Lawhead - Self ­Organization, Emergence, and Constraint in Complex Natural Systems (February 2015)
  
  Joanna Bryson - Cognition, Consciousness and Ecology (October 2011)
  
  Slides - Joanna Bryson - Cognition, Consciousness and Ecology (October 2011)
  
  Adrian Bejan: Constructal law, emergence & evolution
  
  Jeremy England: Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy.
  
  Jeremy England - What is life-lecture: A new theory for evolution (Sept 2014)
  
  Jeremy England Lab @ MIT - Natural selection of forms as a physical process
  
  What is life? Denis Noble (May 2014)
  
  Scientific American: Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio and Others Debate Christof Koch on the Nature of Consciousness
  
  Complexity (Wiki)
  
  Emergence (Wiki)
  
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