Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
The scientific process plays out in a multi-scale system comprising subsystems, each with their own properties and dynamics. For the practice of science to generate useful world models — and lead to the development of enabling technologies — practicing scientists, their theories, methods, dissemination, and infrastructure (e.g., funding and laboratories) must all fit together in an orchestrated manner. Scientific practice has broad societal implications that go beyond mere scientific progress: we base our decisions on theoretical (i.e., models and forecasts) and technological (e.g., vaccines and smartphones) scientific advances. This paper applies the free energy principle to provide a multi-scale description of science understood as evidence-seeking processes in a nested hierarchy of living (biological and behavioural) and epistemic (linguistic) structures. This allows us to naturalise the scientific process — as distributed self-evidencing — in terms of dynamics that can be read as inference or Bayesian belief updating; i.e., processes that maximize the evidence for a generative model of the sensed and measured world. The ensuing meta-theoretical approach dispels the notion of science as truth-pointing and foregrounds inference to the best explanation — as evinced by the beliefs of scientists and their encultured niche. Crucially, it furnishes a way of simulating the practice of science, which may have a foundational role in the next generation of augmented intelligence systems. Epistemologically, it also addresses some key questions; e.g., is science a special? And in what ways is scientific pursuit an existential imperative for all beings? These questions may be foundational in how we use and design intelligent systems.
Are we a species at war with itself? What does our African unconscious reveal about all of us? Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum urges people to come together in his new book Our African Unconscious: The Black Origins of Mysticism and Psychology. Science, evolution, and deep religion all point us in the same direction. According to Dr. Bynum, ultimately, we must love each other or die.
He also a licensed psychologist and Diplomat in clinical psychology, and a senior fellow in the National Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback. His focus is psychosomatic medicine, hypnosis and individual psychotherapy.
Both the quantum physicist and the poet make prescient guides to living into the mystery, the unsettled, the unknown. Never simple abstraction, such exploration has material consequences for how we live and make the world; it opens new ways and doors to examine what it means to be a self and to work towards justice together. Reaching out to explore intimacy, interconnection, and intra-action, to feel the touch and hear the voice of the void, the quantum physicist feminist theorist Karen Barad writes from within and deeper into the quantum indeterminacy that is the space of all possibility. In this lecture, we will follow Barad into the inhuman and the infinite, finding the vastest of multitudes in the smallest particle, and spirited ghosts teetering in the void.
Seven parameters are described that distinguish three hierarchically nested system dynamics that are characteristic of partially-bounded open subsystems. These are used to characterize the transition from self-organized inorganic to self-regulated living systems which exhibit self-synthesis, self-reproduction, and self-reconstitution in response to damage. This analysis demonstrates that yoked self-organizing processes that generate each-others’ boundary conditions can produce a form of co-dependent unity that exhibits these end-directed properties. A simple empirically testable molecular model system — an autogenic virus — is described for exploring these dynamical properties.
Keywords: organism, constraint, dissipative processes, self-organization, morphodynamics, autogenesis, MEPP, virus
