Carlos Gershenson
There is no agreed definition of intelligence, so it is problematic to simply ask whether brains, swarms, computers, or other systems are intelligent or not. To compare the potential intelligence exhibited by different cognitive systems, I use the common approach used by artificial intelligence and artificial life: Instead of studying the substrate of systems, let us focus on their organization. This organization can be measured with information. Thus, I apply an informationist epistemology to describe cognitive systems, including brains and computers. This allows me to frame the usefulness and limitations of the brain-computer analogy in different contexts. I also use this perspective to discuss the evolution and ecology of intelligence.

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Gary S. Metcalf and Stuart A. Kauffman

Systems science, cybernetics, and complexity all evolved out of concerns for understanding complex phenomena in science. They also share many of the same theoretical roots, as well as histories which converge across leading figures and places in time. They can be conceived as three realms which shared and competed for prominence. All have influenced and been incorporated into scientific disciplines, though much of the history has been forgotten by current generations. Those historical roots remain relevant and important to future progress in science. This chapter provides a brief summary of the history and foundations of these domains.

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Philip Ball

J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2021, 12, 27, 6336–6340

The issue is not, then, whether and how science can resist being “politicized”, but how the political and ideological dimensions of science can best be managed to make it most effective and beneficial both as an intellectual quest and as a means of, as Bacon put it, relieving (hu)mankind’s estate.

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Klaus Jaffe, Edrey Martinez, Ana Cecilia Soarez, Jose Gregorio Contreras, Juan C Correa, Antonio Canova
Based on what we know about thermodynamics of synergy, we explored the relationship between countries socio-cultural order (negentropy), estimated through their constitutions, indicators of Rule of Law and their academic development; with countries indicators of Free Energy (amount of useful work, productivity, socioeconomic health). The analysis of 219 indicators unveiled strong correlations between estimates of the Rule of Law and the number of Academic Publications, with the socioeconomic health indicators: GDP, Human Development Index and Infant Mortality. In contrast, correlations with the length of constitutions (number of words and of articles), suggest that the proliferation of legal rules hinders the rule of law and socioeconomic development, or that under-development and/or the lack of the rule of law foments the proliferation of legal rules. These findings suggest that not any order favors productivity (Free Energy) and that excess regulations and state tutelage increase social entropy decreasing socioeconomic health.

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Xiaoyu Li, Chao Gao, Songxin Wang, Zhen Wang, Chen Liu & Xianghua Li 

The European Physical Journal B volume 94, Article number: 137 (2021)

The community structure, owing to its significant status, is of extraordinary significance in comprehending and detecting inherent functions in real networks. However, the community structures are always hard to be identified, and whether the existing algorithms are based on optimization or heuristics, the robustness and accuracy should be improved. The physarum (i.e., slime molds with multi heads) has proved its ability to produce foraging networks. Therefore, we adopt physarum so that the optimization-based community detection algorithms can work more efficiently. Specifically, a physarum-based network model (pnm), which is capable of identifying inter-edges of the community in a network, is used to optimize the prior knowledge of existing evolutional algorithms (i.e., genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization algorithm and ant colony algorithm). the optimized algorithms have been compared with some advanced methods in synthetic and real networks. experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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