Conor Heins, Beren Millidge, Lancelot Da Costa,  Richard P. Mann,  Karl J. Friston, Iain D. Couzin

PNAS

We introduce a model of collective behavior, proposing that individual members within a group, such as a school of fish or a flock of birds, act to minimize surprise. This active inference approach naturally generates well-known collective phenomena such as cohesion and directed movement without explicit behavioral rules. Our model reveals intricate relationships between individual beliefs and group properties, demonstrating that beliefs about uncertainty can shape collective decision-making accuracy. As agents update their generative model in real time, groups become more sensitive to external perturbations and more robust in encoding information. Our work provides fresh insights into understanding collective dynamics and could inspire strategies in the study of animal behavior, swarm robotics, and distributed systems.

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Ángel Goñi-Moreno

Communications of the ACM

Leveraging the synergies between theoretical CS and synthetic biology to create powerful cellular computers and move beyond Turing computation.

Read the full article at: cacm.acm.org

Marten Scheffer, Claudi L. Bockting, Denny Borsboom, et al.

JAMA Psychiatry

Importance Psychiatric disorders may come and go with symptoms changing over a lifetime. This suggests the need for a paradigm shift in diagnosis and treatment. Here we present a fresh look inspired by dynamical systems theory. This theory is used widely to explain tipping points, cycles, and chaos in complex systems ranging from the climate to ecosystems.

Observations In the dynamical systems view, we propose the healthy state has a basin of attraction representing its resilience, while disorders are alternative attractors in which the system can become trapped. Rather than an immutable trait, resilience in this approach is a dynamical property. Recent work has demonstrated the universality of generic dynamical indicators of resilience that are now employed globally to monitor the risks of collapse of complex systems, such as tropical rainforests and tipping elements of the climate system. Other dynamical systems tools are used in ecology and climate science to infer causality from time series. Moreover, experiences in ecological restoration confirm the theoretical prediction that under some conditions, short interventions may invoke long-term success when they flip the system into an alternative basin of attraction. All this implies practical applications for psychiatry, as are discussed in part 2 of this article.

Conclusions and Relevance Work in the field of dynamical systems points to novel ways of inferring causality and quantifying resilience from time series. Those approaches have now been tried and tested in a range of complex systems. The same tools may help monitoring and managing resilience of the healthy state as well as psychiatric disorders.

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See Also: A Dynamical Systems View of Psychiatric Disorders—Practical Implications: A Review

Francis Heylighen, Shima Beigi, Clement Vidal

This report is a first survey of a new, evolutionary narrative, called the Third Story, intended to replace and complement the earlier religious (First) and mechanistic (Second) worldviews. We first argue that the confusions created by a world that is ever more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) have eroded people’s sense of coherence, that is, the degree to which they experience the world as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. The First Story provides meaning and values, but its descriptions no longer provide an accurate understanding of how the universe functions. The Second Story, which sees the universe as a clockwork mechanism governed by the laws of nature, provides more accurate predictions that allow us to build powerful technologies. However, it does not provide meaning or values. The Third Story sees the universe as self-organizing towards increasing complexity and consciousness, subsequently producing matter, life, mind and society. It understands the fundamental mechanism of evolution as mutual adaptation or “fit” between interacting systems, thus generating synergetic wholes that in turn interact, so as integrate into even more complex wholes. Its implicit value is the search for fitness and synergy, thus inviting individuals to work towards a further integration of the noosphere, i.e. the planetary superorganism formed by humanity, its technological extensions, and the ecosystem.

Read the full article at: researchportal.vub.be