Andrzej Bielecki 

Foundations of Science volume 26, pages807–824 (2021)

In this paper the truth is studied in the frame of autonomous systems theory. The method of the truth verification is worked out in its functional aspect. The verification is based on comparison of the predicted inner state of the autonomous agent, that is the cognitive subject, to the achieved inner state of the agent. The state is achieved as the result of performing the action in the real world—the agent’s environment. The action design is created on the basis of the agent’s model of the world. The truth is defined as the adequacy of the model of the real world in the context of the goal that is assumed to be reached as the effect of the performed action. The concepts of the cognitive subject, the truth bearings and the knowledge are redefined. The classical problems of aletheiology and epistemology are discussed in the light of the proposed approach. The cybernetic construct of an autonomous agent allows the researcher to consider a wide class of cognitive entities, which, in the previous approaches, have been limited only to human beings as cognitive subjects.

Read the full article at: link.springer.com

Rodney Brooks

IEEE Spectrum

I’m just going to come out and say it: Human cognition might have nothing whatsoever to do with computation.

Read the full article at: spectrum.ieee.org

Fiona Spooner, et al.

Social Science & Medicine Volume 291, December 2021, 114461

• A microsimulation framework for modelling disease transmission within communities.

• Integration of data from multiple, diverse sources to estimate exposure and risk.

• Computationally efficient implementation allows rapid assessment of scenarios.

• Allows the effects of different non-pharmaceutical interventions to be assessed.

• Results show substantial reduction in infections associated with earlier UK lockdown.

Read the full article at: www.sciencedirect.com

Federico Battiston, Enrico Amico, Alain Barrat, Ginestra Bianconi, Guilherme Ferraz de Arruda, Benedetta Franceschiello, Iacopo Iacopini, Sonia Kéfi, Vito Latora, Yamir Moreno, Micah M. Murray, Tiago P. Peixoto, Francesco Vaccarino & Giovanni Petri 
Nature Physics volume 17, pages1093–1098 (2021)

Complex networks have become the main paradigm for modelling the dynamics of interacting systems. However, networks are intrinsically limited to describing pairwise interactions, whereas real-world systems are often characterized by higher-order interactions involving groups of three or more units. Higher-order structures, such as hypergraphs and simplicial complexes, are therefore a better tool to map the real organization of many social, biological and man-made systems. Here, we highlight recent evidence of collective behaviours induced by higher-order interactions, and we outline three key challenges for the physics of higher-order systems.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com

Jian Gao, Yian Yin, Kyle R. Myers, Karim R. Lakhani & Dashun Wang 
Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 6188 (2021)

Mass communication over social media can drive rapid changes in our sense of collective identity. Hashtags in particular have acted as powerful social coordinators[1], playing a key role in organizing social movements like the Gezi park protests, Occupy Wall Street, #metoo, and #blacklivesmatter[2, 3, 4]. Here we quantify collective identity from the use of hashtags as self-labels in over 85,000 actively-maintained Twitter user profiles spanning 2017-2019. Collective identities emerge from a graph model of individuals’ overlapping self-labels, producing a hierarchy of graph clusters. Each cluster is bound together and characterized semantically by specific hashtags key to its formation. We define and apply two information-theoretic measures to quantify the strength of identities in the hierarchy. First we measure collective identity coherence to determine how integrated any identity is from local to global scales. Second, we consider the conspicuousness of any identity given its vocabulary versus the global identity map. Our work reveals a rich landscape of online identity emerging from the hierarchical alignment of uncoordinated self-labeling actions.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com