God, Mind, Evolution, and Quantum Reality Based on Process Metaphysics

The genesis of actuality from potentiality, with the apparent role of the observer, is an important and unsolved problem which essentially defines science‟s view of reality in a variety of contexts. Observation then becomes lawful and not emergent. Panentheism is needed to provide a mechanism for order outside of blind efficient causality, in a Universal final causality. Classical physics is over a hundred years out of date, yet scientific models remain mechanistic and deterministic. Deism, a remnant of classical cosmology, is examined and rejected by scientists and philosophers, and certain pre-scientific notions of religion are scorned, putting the matter to rest. Quantum physics, in its basic form, is necessary if there is to be any philosophical or scientific notion of free will and self-determination, as potentiality. Quantum metaphysics is also needed because classical physics is fundamentally limited to localized external relations, lacking the internality and non-locality of relatedness. God, or the equivalent, is necessary to complete the equation. Physicists now tell us that reality is fundamentally mental and is created by observation. Observation is here taken to mean experience, with experience going all the way down to the lowest order of a Universal mentality

Wider school effects of engaging with the Further Mathematics Support Programme to introduce Further Mathematics: Final Report

Case studies were conducted in four 11-18 schools where Further Mathematics (FM) A-level has recently been introduced with some input from the Further Mathematics Support Programme (FMSP). The aim was to probe teachers’ accounts of the range of effects of that introduction beyond the targeted FM students, so as to inform policy makers, other schools and teachers, potential students and their parents. Interviews with Heads of Departments and A-level teachers investigated any reported impact on teachers, structures, pedagogy and students at four points as the new course(s) developed. Intervening lesson observations served to elucidate and challenge the researchers’ understanding

Exploring emergence in corporate sustainability

As the impacts of climate change intensify, businesses are increasingly committing to ambitious sustainable development goals, yet an enduring disconnect remains between corporate sustainability activities and declining global environment and society. This study adopts a complexity view that reductionism associated with Newtonian thinking has played a key role in creating many of the sustainability issues now faced by humanity. This dissertation departs from the premise that sustainability needs to be integrated into an organisation and uses a complexity view to argue that corporate sustainability is a co-evolutionary process of emergence. Whilst many studies have examined how sustainability can be integrated into a business, less is known about corporate sustainability as an emergent process. To address the knowledge gap, this research answered three questions: (1) How does sustainability emerge in financial institutions? (2) What is the role of coherence in the emergence of sustainability? and (3) What conditions enable the emergence of sustainability? A mixed method sequential design was used. In the initial quantitative strand of the research, a holistic business assessment survey based on integral theory was implemented in two financial services organisations in Southern Africa. The results were analysed using self-organising maps and explored in narrative interviews in the subsequent qualitative strand of the research. The study makes three contributions to our understanding of emergence in corporate sustainability. First, by proposing four modes by which corporate sustainability is enacted; these elucidate how integral domains are enacted in corporate sustainability. Second, by clarifying the process of emergence by articulating how zones of coherence emerge between embodied and embedded dimensions. Third, by explaining how the shift to corporate sustainability occurs by means of four conditions. These contributions serve to advance our understanding of corporate sustainability as a fundamental shift in the functioning of an organisation towards coevolutionary self-organisation. It is recommended that corporate sustainability is holistically cultivated to support emergence and self-organisation, rather than being integrated through a linear process of change

Precarious citizenship: Rights claims of EU migrants in the UK

EU citizenship comprises a set of rights, but it is most closely associated with free movement across member states. However, while free movers formally enjoy equal civil, social, economic and residence rights throughout the European Union, informal application of these rights is spatially uneven. Further, political rights of EU citizens remain curtailed as free movers usually cannot vote in national elections in their country of residency, but they can vote in local and external elections. This dynamic of inclusion and exclusion generates a democratic deficit, but it also produces emergent spaces of political action. My thesis engages with this opening to analyse how EU migrant citizens claim their electoral, socioeconomic, and residence rights in Bristol: a culturally and economically vibrant English city, where the density of migrant networks generates a fertile ground for both political engagement and engaged research. The study is theoretically informed by geographic and political literatures on citizenship and interdisciplinary citizenship studies – with the acts of citizenship approach being particularly useful – as well as social and political theory. It is empirically grounded in the English context and relies on qualitative, place-based research in Bristol. This includes interviews and ethnography with migrant voters and political campaigners, and interviews with labour and community organisers. Data collection took place over an extended period before and after the EU referendum. The thesis distinguishes between the means and modes of political action. The means are defined as organised social practices that enable acts of citizenship, and include voting, organising, and campaigning. Three overarching modes of claiming European rights emerge through this analysis, and they include enactments along, across, and beyond national frames. In this way, personal and collective rights claims serve as empirical proxies, or windows onto, European migrant citizenship. The thesis argues that vulnerability is a powerful catalyst for political action unfolding through citizenship. It also shows that acts of citizenship, while often cast as revolutionary moments, are in fact processual and iterative. Citizenship understood in this way endows individuals with capacities and infrastructures to collectively learn, question, and rebel – to identify matters of concern, to identify sites of intensive relations of power, and to articulate interests and take action

Music as complex emergent behaviour : an approach to interactive music systems

Access to the full-text thesis is no longer available at the author's request, due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Access removed on 28.11.2016 by CS (TIS).Metadata merged with duplicate record (http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/770) on 20.12.2016 by CS (TIS).This is a digitised version of a thesis that was deposited in the University Library. If you are the author please contact PEARL Admin ([email protected]) to discuss options.This thesis suggests a new model of human-machine interaction in the domain of non-idiomatic musical improvisation. Musical results are viewed as emergent phenomena issuing from complex internal systems behaviour in relation to input from a single human performer. We investigate the prospect of rewarding interaction whereby a system modifies itself in coherent though non-trivial ways as a result of exposure to a human interactor. In addition, we explore whether such interactions can be sustained over extended time spans. These objectives translate into four criteria for evaluation; maximisation of human influence, blending of human and machine influence in the creation of machine responses, the maintenance of independent machine motivations in order to support machine autonomy and finally, a combination of global emergent behaviour and variable behaviour in the long run. Our implementation is heavily inspired by ideas and engineering approaches from the discipline of Artificial Life. However, we also address a collection of representative existing systems from the field of interactive composing, some of which are implemented using techniques of conventional Artificial Intelligence. All systems serve as a contextual background and comparative framework helping the assessment of the work reported here. This thesis advocates a networked model incorporating functionality for listening, playing and the synthesis of machine motivations. The latter incorporate dynamic relationships instructing the machine to either integrate with a musical context suggested by the human performer or, in contrast, perform as an individual musical character irrespective of context. Techniques of evolutionary computing are used to optimise system components over time. Evolution proceeds based on an implicit fitness measure; the melodic distance between consecutive musical statements made by human and machine in relation to the currently prevailing machine motivation. A substantial number of systematic experiments reveal complex emergent behaviour inside and between the various systems modules. Music scores document how global systems behaviour is rendered into actual musical output. The concluding chapter offers evidence of how the research criteria were accomplished and proposes recommendations for future research

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Divergent Criticality – A Mechanism of Neural Function for Perception and Learning

The natural world presents opportunities to all organisms as they compete for the biological-value afforded to them through their ecological engagement. This presents two fundamental requirements for perceiving such opportunities: to be able to recognise value and learning how to access new value. Though many theoretical accounts of how we might achieve such selectionist ends have been explored – how ‘perception’ and ‘learning’ resonate with life’s challenges and opportunities, to date, no explanation has yet been able to naturalise such perception adequately in the Universal laws that govern our existence – not only for explaining the human experience of the world, but in exploring the true nature of our perception. This thesis explores our perceptions of engaging with the world and seeks to explain how the demands of our experiences resonate with the efficient functioning of our brain. It proposes, that in a world of challenge and opportunity, rather than the efficient functioning of our neural resources, it is, instead, the optimising of ‘learning’ that is selected for, as an evolutionary priority. Building on existing literature in the fields of Phenomenology, Free Energy and Neuroscience, this thesis considers perception and learning as synonymous with the cognitive constructs of an ‘attention’ tuned for learning optimisation, and explores the processes of learning in neural function. It addresses the philosophical issues of how an individual’s perception of subjective experiences, might provide some empirical objectivity in proposing a ‘Tolerance’ hypothesis. This is a relative definition able to coordinate a ‘perception of experience’ in terms of an learning-function, grounded in free-energy theory (the laws of physics) and the ecological dynamics of a spontaneous or ‘self- organising’ mechanism – Divergent Criticality. The methodology incorporated three studies: Pilot, Developmental and Exploratory. Over the three studies, Divergent Criticality was tested by developing a functional Affordance measure to address the Research Question – are perceptions as affective-cognitions made aware as reflecting the agential mediation of a self-regulating, optimal learning mechanism? Perception questionnaires of Situational Interest and Self-concept were used in Study One and Study Two to investigate their suitability in addressing the Research Question. Here, Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modelling assessed the validity and reliability of these measures, developing robust questionnaires and a research design for testing Divergent Criticality. In Study Three, the Divergent Criticality hypothesis was found to be significant, supporting that a Divergent Criticality mechanism is in operation: When individuals are engaging with dynamic ecological challenges, perception is affective in accordance with Tolerance Optimisation, demonstrating that a Divergent Criticality mechanism is driving individuals to the limits of their Effectivity – an optimal learning state which is fundamental to life and naturalised in Universal laws

Nonnormative Ethics: The dynamic of trans formation

In this thesis I propose to address trans as nonnormative ethical formation. In the current definition (Stryker, 2008) trans is defined as a movement outside of constraints that encapsulate normative genders. Preciado (2012) argues that trans involves the constitution of a soma-political project, beyond identity. As opposed to theories that describe identity formation as aspirational, the thesis extends Aristotle’s arguments for ethical formation in terms of interactive engagement within environments through an agents’ dunamis – the powers of its Soul (Lee 1992). The limits of the Aristotelian model will be overcome by use of Anzaldúa (1987) and Lugones (2003). The navigation away from imposed normative environments through agential action will be shown to lead to nonnormative logos: a formational logic shaping perception, action, and practical reflection culminating in practical truth. This reading enables centering somatechnical processes (Sullivan 2009) as generative of forms of life. Wittgenstein suggests that agential logic informs forms of life, shaping validity of both principles and decisions. I use this insight to claim that the polis is ordered by a single logic that informs norms. I propose nonnormative ethics to encompass agents with differing logos. Reading eudaimonia as the demon standing behind the agent, I will suggest that nonnormative ethics takes place outside of the polis on the ‘demonic grounds’ (McKittrick 2015, Wynter 1990). Nonnormative ethical connections are multilogical and are bridged by collective codes. I will draw from Glissant (2002) to make a case for acknowledging agential opacity away from a pathologising claim to interiority. I will argue for nonantagonistic playfulness and loss (Lugones, 2003) as keys to the emergence of nonnormative codes enabling shared forms of life. I propose that the distinction with the codes of the polis is the willingness to share loss, instead of exploitation. The thesis makes the case that bodily change is central to changing one’s understanding of, and relation to one’s surroundings. Furthermore, I argue such change is a collective process, and that emerging epistemologies are connected to contextual ethics

Development of Cognitive Capabilities in Humanoid Robots

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/645 on 03.04.2017 by CS (TIS)Building intelligent systems with human level of competence is the ultimate grand challenge for science and technology in general, and especially for the computational intelligence community. Recent theories in autonomous cognitive systems have focused on the close integration (grounding) of communication with perception, categorisation and action. Cognitive systems are essential for integrated multi-platform systems that are capable of sensing and communicating. This thesis presents a cognitive system for a humanoid robot that integrates abilities such as object detection and recognition, which are merged with natural language understanding and refined motor controls. The work includes three studies; (1) the use of generic manipulation of objects using the NMFT algorithm, by successfully testing the extension of the NMFT to control robot behaviour; (2) a study of the development of a robotic simulator; (3) robotic simulation experiments showing that a humanoid robot is able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. The robot is able to learn to handle and manipulate objects autonomously, to cooperate with human users, and to adapt its abilities to changes in internal and environmental conditions. The model and the experimental results reported in this thesis, emphasise the importance of embodied cognition, i.e. the humanoid robot's physical interaction between its body and the environment