544 research outputs found
Institutional Cognition
We generalize a recent mathematical analysis of Bernard Baars' model of human consciousness to explore analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cogntivie modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, seem able to multitask, supporting several such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Surprisingly, such multitasking, while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it. This suggests that organizations (or machines) explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, would still be subject to analogs of the subtle failure patterns explored in Wallace (2005b, 2006). We compare and contrast our results with recent work on collective efficacy and collective consciousness
The Origins of Computational Mechanics: A Brief Intellectual History and Several Clarifications
The principle goal of computational mechanics is to define pattern and
structure so that the organization of complex systems can be detected and
quantified. Computational mechanics developed from efforts in the 1970s and
early 1980s to identify strange attractors as the mechanism driving weak fluid
turbulence via the method of reconstructing attractor geometry from measurement
time series and in the mid-1980s to estimate equations of motion directly from
complex time series. In providing a mathematical and operational definition of
structure it addressed weaknesses of these early approaches to discovering
patterns in natural systems.
Since then, computational mechanics has led to a range of results from
theoretical physics and nonlinear mathematics to diverse applications---from
closed-form analysis of Markov and non-Markov stochastic processes that are
ergodic or nonergodic and their measures of information and intrinsic
computation to complex materials and deterministic chaos and intelligence in
Maxwellian demons to quantum compression of classical processes and the
evolution of computation and language.
This brief review clarifies several misunderstandings and addresses concerns
recently raised regarding early works in the field (1980s). We show that
misguided evaluations of the contributions of computational mechanics are
groundless and stem from a lack of familiarity with its basic goals and from a
failure to consider its historical context. For all practical purposes, its
modern methods and results largely supersede the early works. This not only
renders recent criticism moot and shows the solid ground on which computational
mechanics stands but, most importantly, shows the significant progress achieved
over three decades and points to the many intriguing and outstanding challenges
in understanding the computational nature of complex dynamic systems.Comment: 11 pages, 123 citations;
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/cmr.ht
Institutional paraconsciousness and its pathologies
This analysis extends a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars consciousness model to analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, support several, sometimes many, such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Such highly parallel multitasking - institutional paraconsciousness - while clearly limiting inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic dysfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. Consequently, organizations (or machines designed along these principles), while highly efficient at certain kinds of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns similar to, but more complicated than, those afflicting individuals. Remediation is complicated by the manner in which pathogenic externalities can write images of themselves on both institutional function and therapeutic intervention, in the context of relentless market selection pressures. The approach is broadly consonant with recent work on collective efficacy, collective consciousness, and distributed cognition
Quantitative reactive modeling and verification
Formal verification aims to improve the quality of software by detecting errors before they do harm. At the basis of formal verification is the logical notion of correctness, which purports to capture whether or not a program behaves as desired. We suggest that the boolean partition of software into correct and incorrect programs falls short of the practical need to assess the behavior of software in a more nuanced fashion against multiple criteria. We therefore propose to introduce quantitative fitness measures for programs, specifically for measuring the function, performance, and robustness of reactive programs such as concurrent processes. This article describes the goals of the ERC Advanced Investigator Project QUAREM. The project aims to build and evaluate a theory of quantitative fitness measures for reactive models. Such a theory must strive to obtain quantitative generalizations of the paradigms that have been success stories in qualitative reactive modeling, such as compositionality, property-preserving abstraction and abstraction refinement, model checking, and synthesis. The theory will be evaluated not only in the context of software and hardware engineering, but also in the context of systems biology. In particular, we will use the quantitative reactive models and fitness measures developed in this project for testing hypotheses about the mechanisms behind data from biological experiments
Passively mobile communicating machines that use restricted space
We propose a new theoretical model for passively mobile Wireless Sensor Networks, called PM, standing for Passively mobile Machines. The main modification w.r.t. the Population Protocol model [Angluin et al. 2006] is that the agents now, instead of being automata, are Turing Machines. We provide general definitions for unbounded memories, but we are mainly interested in computations upper-bounded by plausible space limitations. However, we prove that our results hold for more general cases. We focus on complete interaction graphs and define the complexity classes PM-SPACE(f(n)) parametrically, consisting of all predicates that are stably computable by some PM protocol that uses O(f(n)) memory in each agent. We provide a protocol that generates unique identifiers from scratch only by using O(log n) memory, and use it to provide an exact characterization of the classes PMSPACE(f(n)) when f(n) = Ω(log n): they are precisely the classes of all symmetric predicates in NSPACE(nf(n)). As a consequence, we obtain a space hierarchy of the PM model when the memory bounds are Ω(log n). Finally, we establish that the minimal space requirement for the computation of non-semilinear predicates is O(log log n). © 2011 ACM.FOM
Analyzing Large Network Dynamics with Process Hitting
In this chapter, we introduce the Process Hitting framework, which provides the methodology of constructing the most permissive dynamics and then using successive refinements to fine tune the model. We present static analysis methods designed to identify fixed points or answer successive reachability questions, and introduce the stochastic semantics of Process Hitting too
Basics and Applications in Quantum Optics
Quantum optics has received a lot of attention in recent decades due to the handiness and versatility of optical systems, which have been exploited both to study the foundations of quantum mechanics and for various applications. In this Special Issue, we collect some articles and a review focusing on some research activities that show the potential of quantum optics in the advancement of quantum technologies
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