Standard ethical frameworks struggle to deal with transhumanism, ecological issues and the rising technodiversity because they are focused on guiding and evaluating human behavior. Ethics needs its Copernican revolution to be able to deal with all moral agents, including not only humans, but also artificial intelligent agents, robots or organizations of all sizes. We argue that embracing the complexity worldview is the first step towards this revolution, and that standard ethical frameworks are still entrenched in the Newtonian worldview. We first spell out the foundational assumptions of the Newtonian worldview, where all change is reduced to material particles following predetermined trajectories governed by the laws of nature. However, modern physical theories such as relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and thermodynamics have drawn a much more confusing and uncertain picture, and inspired indecisive, subjectivist, relativist, nihilist or postmodern worldviews. Based on cybernetics, systems theory and the new sciences of complexity, we introduce the complexity worldview that sees the world as interactions and their emergent organizations. We use this complexity worldview to show the limitations of standard ethical frameworks such as deontology, theology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, evolutionary ethics and pragmatism. Keywords: Complexity, philosophy, ethics, cybernetics, transhumanism, universal ethics, systems ethics.

 

 

Ethics and Complexity: Why standard ethical frameworks cannot cope with socio-technological change
Clément Vidal & Francis Heylighen

Source: philpapers.org

While great emphasis has been placed on the role of social interactions as driver of innovation growth, very few empirical studies have explicitly investigated the impact of social network structures on the innovation performance of cities. Past research has mostly explored scaling laws of socio-economic outputs of cities as determined by, for example, the single predictor of population. Here, by drawing on a publicly available dataset of the startup ecosystem, we build the first Workforce Mobility Network among US metropolitan areas. We found that node centrality computed on this network accounts for most of the variability observed in cities’ innovation performance and significantly outperforms other predictors such as population size or density, suggesting that policies and initiatives aiming at sustaining innovation processes might benefit from fostering professional networks alongside other economic or systemic incentives. As opposed to previous approaches powered by census data, our model can be updated in real-time upon open databases, opening up new opportunities both for researchers in a variety of disciplines to study urban economies in new ways, and for practitioners to design tools for monitoring such economies in real-time.

 

Predicting Urban Innovation from the Workforce Mobility Network in US
Moreno Bonaventura, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia, Vito Latora

Source: arxiv.org

Information spreading on multiplex networks has been investigated widely. For multiplex networks, the relations of each layer possess different extents of intimacy, which can be described as weighted multiplex networks. Nevertheless, the effect of weighted multiplex network structures on information spreading has not been analyzed comprehensively. We herein propose an information spreading model on a weighted multiplex network. Then, we develop an edge-weight-based compartmental theory to describe the spreading dynamics. We discover that under any adoption threshold of two subnetworks, reducing weight distribution heterogeneity does not alter the growth pattern of the final adoption size versus information transmission probability while accelerating information spreading. For fixed weight distribution, the growth pattern changes with the heterogeneous of degree distribution. There is a critical initial seed size, below which no global information outbreak can occur. Extensive numerical simulations affirm that the theoretical predictions agree well with the numerical results.

 

Information Spreading on Weighted Multiplex Social Network
Xuzhen Zhu, Jinming Ma, Xin Su, Hui Tian, Wei Wang, and Shimin Cai

Complexity
Volume 2019, Article ID 5920187, 15 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/5920187

Source: www.hindawi.com

In this article we give an overview of the concept of universal dynamics near non-thermal fixed points in isolated quantum many-body systems. We outline a non-perturbative kinetic theory derived within a Schwinger-Keldysh closed-time path-integral approach, as well as a low-energy effective field theory which enable us to predict the universal scaling exponents characterizing the time evolution at the fixed point. We discuss the role of wave-turbulent transport in the context of such fixed points and discuss universal scaling evolution of systems bearing ensembles of (quasi) topological defects. This is rounded off by the recently introduced concept of prescaling as a generic feature of the evolution towards a non-thermal fixed point.

 

Non-thermal fixed points: Universal dynamics far from equilibrium
Christian-Marcel Schmied, Aleksandr N. Mikheev, Thomas Gasenzer

Source: arxiv.org

We celebrate 150 years of periodic systems that reached their maturity in the 1860s. They began as pedagogical efforts to project corpuses of substances on the similarity and order relationships of the chemical elements. However, these elements are not the canned substances wrongly displayed in many periodic tables, but rather the abstract preserved entities in compound transformations. We celebrate the systems, rather than their tables or ultimate table. The periodic law, we argue, is not an all‐encompassing achievement, as it does not apply to every property of all elements and compounds. Periodic systems have been generalised as ordered hypergraphs, which solves the long‐lasting question on the mathematical structure of the systems. In this essay, it is shown that these hypergraphs may solve current issues such as order reversals in super‐heavy elements and lack of system predictive power. We discuss research in extending the limits of the systems in the super‐heavy‐atom region and draw attention to other limits: the antimatter region and the limit arising from compounds under extreme conditions. As systems depend on the known chemical substances (chemical space) and such a space grows exponentially, we wonder whether systems still aim at projecting knowledge of compounds on the relationships among the elements. We claim that systems are not based on compounds anymore, rather on 20th century projections of the 1860s systems of elements on systems of atoms. These projections bring about oversimplifications based on entities far from being related to compounds. A linked oversimplification is the myth of vertical group similarity, which raises questions on the approaches to locate new elements in the system. Finally, we propose bringing back chemistry to the systems by exploring similarity and order relationships of elements using the current information of the chemical space. We ponder whether 19th century periodic systems are still there or whether they have faded away, leaving us with an empty 150th celebration.

 

Challenges for the Periodic Systems of Elements: Chemical, Historical and Mathematical Perspective

Guillermo Restrepo

Chemistry – A European Journal

Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com