Search Results (6)

In the context of socio-technical systems, traditional engineering approaches are inadequate, calling for a fundamental change in perspective. A different approach encourages viewing socio-technical systems as complex living entities rather than through a simplistic lens, which enhances our understanding of their dynamics. However, these systems are designed to facilitate human activities, and the goal is not only to comprehend how they operate but also to guide their function. Currently, we lack the appropriate terminology. Hence, we introduce two principal concepts, simplexity and complixity, drawing inspiration from how nature conceals intricate mechanisms beneath straightforward, user-friendly interfaces. Full article

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. Full article

This paper, aligned with contemporary thinking in terms of patient-centered care and co-creation of patient care, highlights the limitations of the reductionist approaches to psychiatry, offering an alternative, “emergent” perspective and approach. Assuming that psychopathological phenomena are essentially relational, what kind of epistemological framework and ‘logic of discovery’ should be adopted? I review two standard methods I call ‘ticking boxes’ and ‘drafting arrows’. Within the ticking boxes framework, the clinician’s main goal is to discover whether a patient showing psychopathological phenomena meets pre-given diagnostic criteria. The process of discovery can be compared to two people assembling a puzzle where the patient has the pieces and the interviewer has the image of the completed design. Drafting arrows consists in constructing pathogenetic diagrams that display linear causative relationships between variables connected by an arrow to other nodes. These explanatory narratives include psychodynamic (motivational) and biological (causal) diagrams. I argue for a third approach called ‘linking dots’, a method of discovery based on the emergent properties of psychopathological phenomena. I build on and develop the approach to images and discovery devised by art historian Aby Warburg in his atlas of images Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The visual constellations created by Warburg in the panels of the Bilderatlas can be understood as a method to reveal the layers of memory and the web of relationships manifested in them, inviting the viewer to participate in the production of meanings, forging ever new connections between the images. It is the viewer’s acts of perception that draw relationships between singularities. I suggest that this method is of enormous significance in the context of today’s socio-cultural transformation processes and related forms of psychopathological conditions, which can no longer be comprehended using the categories of existing knowledge systems. Full article

The different kinds of knowledge which were connected in Natural Philosophy (NP) have been later separated. The real separation came when Physics took its individuality and developed specific mathematical models, such as dynamic systems. These models are not adapted to an integral study of living systems, by which we mean evolutionary multi-level, multi-agent, and multi-temporality self-organized systems, such as biological, social, or cognitive systems. For them, the physical models can only be applied to the local dynamic of each co-regulator agent, but not to the global dynamic intertwining these partial dynamics. To ‘revive’ NP, we present the Memory Evolutive Systems (MES) methodology which is based on a ‘dynamic’ Category Theory; it proposes an info-computational model for living systems. Among the main results: (i) a mathematical translation of the part–whole problem (using the categorical operation colimit) which shows how the different interpretations of the problem support diverging philosophical positions, from reductionism to emergentism and holism; (ii) an explanation of the emergence, over time, of structures and processes of increasing complexity order, through successive ‘complexification processes’. We conclude that MES provides an emergentist-reductionism model and we discuss the different meanings of the concept of emergence depending on the context and the observer, as well as its relations with anticipation and creativity. Full article

The mind-body problem represents one of the most debated topics in the neurosciences. From a psychological standpoint, abstract/non-material data are an intrinsic part of the mind, intervening to a large extent in reasoning and decision making processes. Imaging studies also show a strong correlation between higher cognitive functions (such as working memory) and specific cerebral brain regions (a fronto-parietal network of interacting left and right brain areas). In contrast, the physical/material brain would be unable to interact with abstract-immaterial data, such that the psychological processing of abstract data (processes such as thinking, reasoning, and judgment) is attributed to the mind, with the mind representing a distinct entity interposed between the brain and abstract-immaterial data. Recent data suggest that the mind-body problem may simply be an artifact of human experience/ understanding, as the brain actually represents actually an intrinsic part of the mind. Even if the physical brain is not able to interact with abstract mental data, the brain still could process abstract data through a dynamic association between the abstract data and cerebral stimuli/ impulses. This form of processing without interaction defines the mind as a complex neurobiological structure, with the unconscious part of the mind processing abstract-immaterial data in a conscious/ mental format. In this overview, important concepts of psycho-physiologic emergentism, including internal mental reality, internal mental existence, internal mental interaction, and structural and informational dichotomies of the brain, are iterated. Such concepts/properties represent a neuro-informational support system capable of generating four distinct minds within the single brain. Future studies should further develop the dynamic and immaterial-material nature of the mind, as a possible premise for a scientific definition and understanding of mental events like affectivity, emotions, soul, etc. Full article

The main message of this paper is that systemism is best suited for transdisciplinary studies. A description of disciplinary sciences, transdisciplinary sciences and systems sciences is given, along with their different definitions of aims, scope and tools. The rationale for transdisciplinarity is global challenges, which are complex. The rationale for systemism is the concretization of understanding complexity. Drawing upon Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s intention of a General System Theory, three items deserve attention—the world-view of a synergistic systems technology, the world picture of an emergentist systems theory, and the way of thinking of an integrationist systems method. Full article