Crowd synchrony

in symb(i/o)tika's video collection you can find a short film about the unexpected sway from side to side that emerged under the synchronization of pedestrians step... it is a very clear example where local action produces and emergent behaviour that then feeds back and drives that local action.

more on Steven H. Strogatz et al. paper "Theoretical mechanics: Crowd synchrony on the Millennium Bridge". published in Nature 438, 43-44 (3 November 2005).

Beyond Autopoiesis II

"the key innovation effected by autopoiesis is to grant to living systems a dynamical capacity for change through self-maintenance, which means, at least in part, that such systems must function as open systems (only relatively). the functioning of the autopoietic organism or machine is not reducible to its particular genetic structure or composition. In other words, what are inportant are not the component of the system but the dynamic relations between them. Autopoietic entities engender and specify their own organization and limits/boundaries, functioning as unitary, individuated, and closed to relations input and out put. Such entities are understood as being 'organizationaly closed', which does not mean that they do not interact with an environment but rather that such interaction is always informed and determined by the organization of the particula autopoietic entity. An autopoietic organism evolves by engaging in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous petrubations and compesation of these petrubations. Any inference with their operation outside their domain of compensations will result in disintegration ( see Maturana and Varela in Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living, 1980).

We see here that the theory of autopoiesis equates change that does not conform to the internal and self-directed organization of the entity in question with destruction, dissolution, and abolition.

For a machinic thinking autopoiesis fails to appreciate the extent to which all living systems and their boundaries are caught up in machinic assemblages that involve modes of transversal becoming."

Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze

By Keith Ansell-Pearson

Henry Markram: Designing the Human Mind

Adaptiveness

the last two days I am working on a great text callled "From Robots to Rothko" by cognitive scientist Michael Wheeler and I found a very nice (dual) definition of adaptation

in page 211 he writes: "Naturally occuring adpative behavior is the result of evolutionary determined pressures on the survival and reproduction prospects of embodied systems. However he will continue that in the animat domain Adaptiveness is a matter of surviving long enough in an environment to achieve certain goals. These goals may not necessarily include reproduction."

2 notes

01/. by animats Wheeler implies artificial animals or alternatively artificial autonomous agents. The class of such systems involves

-robots with actual sensory-motor mechanisms, and

-simulated autonomous agents embedded in simulated environments.

02/. Kampis will clarify the pressures of natural selection in evolution by saying evolution can only act on the phenotype but the real subject of evolution is the genotype.

a life | the self

John Rajchman will write, in his introduction to Deleuze's book Pure immanence: essays on A life,

"we may think of a life as an empiricist concept in contrast to what John Locke called "the self". A life has quite different features thatn those Locke associated with the self - conciousness, memory and personal identiy. it unfolds according to another logic: a logic

of impersonal individuation rather than personal individualization,

of singularities rather than particularities.

it can never be completely specified. it is always indefinite - a life.

In short, in contrast to the self, a life is impersonal and yet singular, and so requires a "wilder"sort of empiricism - a transcendental empiricism.

A conception of empirisism that departs from the classical definition that says that all our ideas can be derived from atomistic sensations through logic of abstraction and generalization. the real problem of empiricism is rather to be found in a new conception of subjectivity."

David Hume: "thinking with AND instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret."

Deleuze, G.(2001)Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Zone Books, New York

the constitution of organism

Living systems communicate not only through filiative relationships but also through transversal modes that lead to heterogeneous populations and assemblages. This is the point Richard Dawkins, the writer and advocate of the theory of the "selfish gene", made in his book. However an important aspect that Dawkins is missing or under-theorizes is the insight that organisms need to be treated as complex assemblages.

territory and deterritorialization

we shouldn't think in an abstract and strong opposition between the 'territiory' and deterritorialization'. It is clear that for Deleuze and Guattari any given territory, enclosure of things or closed systems enjoy vectors of deterritorialization which in fact they constitute a territory.

so inhabitants are protectors of the territory and vectors of deterritorialization of the system in-formation.

>/."in ATP detteritorialization is said to become 'absolute' when it enhances 'lines of flights' to the power of germinal or vital line of life and draws a plane of consistency (the non dialectical synthesis of heterogeneous and disparate elements)."

>/."it is a world of intensities where 'all forms come undone' "

>/."the absolute doesn't denote a quantity but a certain mode of movement that is held to be neither transcendent nor undifferentiated."

in Germinal Life by Keith Ansell Pearson