The Squiggle Sense: Sixth Sense of the Complementary Nature and the Metastable Brain~Mind, by J. A. Scott Kelso & David A. Engstrøm

Either/or thinking is a major stumbling block to human development and understanding. In this book Kelso & Engstrøm offer a whole new way of looking at the world, awakening a “sixth sense” that people didn’t realize they had. It draws on the profound relationship between nature’s many complementary contraries and the paradigm shifting science of coordination called Coordination Dynamics. The human brain~mind, through the multi- and metastable modes of its coordination dynamics, gives rise to a sentient faculty called the squiggle sense. Nature’s contraries are perceived not only as opposing polar states, but as coexisting complementary tendencies, symbolized by the squiggle (~). Use this book to nudge your brain~mind into its metastable mode again and again, to better perceive the complementary dances of contraries, and to transcend the detrimental narrow-mindedness of polarized, either/or thinking. As a “Metastabilian” you can wield your squiggle sense to enhance and advance your life!

Read the full article at: link.springer.com

Nested Pattern Detection and Unidimensional Process Characterization

Gerardo L. Febres

Entropy 2024, 26(9), 754

This document introduces methods for describing long texts as groups of repeating symbols or patterns. The process converts a series of real-number values into texts. Developed tailored algorithms for identifying repeated sequences in the text are applied to decompose the text into nested tree-like structures of repeating symbols and is called the Nested Repeated Sequence Decomposition Model (NRSDM). The NRSDM is especially valuable for extracting repetitive behaviors in oscillatory but non-periodic and chaotic processes where the classical Fourier transform has limited application. The NRSDM along with the two graphical representations proposed here form a promising tool for characterizing long texts configured to represent the behavior of unidimensional processes.

Read the full article at: www.mdpi.com

The Reality Ouroboros: Toward a new understanding of the nature of reality.

DAVID KRAKAUER & DAVID WOLPERT

What is reality? And is there just one reality or many, perhaps infinitely many? And how should we describe these realities, with mathematics, natural language, music, or visual art? The answer might be all of the above, but if so, can we justify these decisions based on a larger conception of reality?

Scientists tend to think about reality in one of two ways. The first perspective involves physically emergent hierarchies (ontologies)—ranging from the most “fundamental” elementary particles, through nuclear and atomic physics, collective chemistry, adaptive organisms and ecosystems, brains, minds, and, ultimately, human societies.

The second describes conceptually emergent hierarchies (epistemologies)—spanning logic, mathematics, natural language, natural science, and the arts. This perspective focuses on the cognitive and conceptual structures that humans create to describe the physical hierarchies in which they are embedded.

Increasingly these two ideas of reality—architectures of physical matter and conceptual information—are intersecting. Several contemporary areas of research are blurring the boundary between theories of reality and reality itself. The clearest example of this would be in the social sciences, where “social reality” and a model or theory of society are often difficult to disentangle. For example, does a formalism like John Nash’s non-cooperative game theory describe strategic interactions, or does game theory control strategic interactions? How might we ever disentangle these two possibilities?

Read the full article at: nautil.us

See Also: The Reality Issue

On the Positive Role of Noise and Error in Complex Systems

Roli, A.; Braccini, M.; Stano, P.

 Systems 2024, 12, 338.

Noise and error are usually considered to be disturbances negatively affecting the behavior of a system. Nevertheless, from a systemic perspective, taking into account openness and incompleteness of complex systems, noise and error may assume a creative, constructive, and positive role in that they are a source of novelty that can trigger the reorganization of the system, the growth of complexity, and the emergence of new meaning. Examples of this phenomenon can be found in evolutionary phenomena driven by affordances, the formation of new attractors in dynamic systems responding to external perturbations, and improvisation in music. We argue that it is possible to identify general properties that enable the positive effect of noise and errors in complex systems, namely, multilevel organization, redundancy, incompleteness, and criticality. These properties play a major role in living systems and can guide the design of robust and adaptive artificial systems.

Read the full article at: www.mdpi.com