Expect the unexpected: the co-construction of assistive artifacts

This paper aims to explain emerging design activities within community-based rehabilitation contexts through the science of self-organization and adaptivity. It applies an evolutionary systematic worldview (Heylighen, 2011) to frame spontaneous collaboration between different local agents which produce self-made assistive artifacts. Through a process of distinction creation and distinction destruction occupational therapist, professional non-designers, caregivers and disabled people co-evolve simultaneously towards novel possibilities which embody a contemporary state of fitness. The conversation language is build on the principles of emotional seeding through stigmergic prototyping and have been practically applied as a form of design hacking which blends design time and use time. Within this process of co-construction the thought experiment of Maxwell’s Demon is used to map perceived behavior and steer the selecting process of following user-product adaptation strategies. This practice-based approach is illustrated through a case study and tries to integrate both rationality and intuition within emerging participatory design activities

Self-organization in Communicating Groups: the emergence of coordination, shared references and collective intelligence\ud

The present paper will sketch the basic ideas of the complexity paradigm, and then apply them to social systems, and in particular to groups of communicating individuals who together need to agree about how to tackle some problem or how to coordinate their actions. I will elaborate these concepts to provide an integrated foundation for a theory of self-organization, to be understood as a non-linear process of spontaneous coordination between actions. Such coordination will be shown to consist of the following components: alignment, division of labor, workflow and aggregation. I will then review some paradigmatic simulations and experiments that illustrate the alignment of references and communicative conventions between communicating agents. Finally, the paper will summarize the preliminary results of a series of experiments that I devised in order to observe the emergence of collective intelligence within a communicating group, and interpret these observations in terms of alignment, division of labor and workflow

Seven properties of self-organization in the human brain

The principle of self-organization has acquired a fundamental significance in the newly emerging field of computational philosophy. Self-organizing systems have been described in various domains in science and philosophy including physics, neuroscience, biology and medicine, ecology, and sociology. While system architecture and their general purpose may depend on domain-specific concepts and definitions, there are (at least) seven key properties of self-organization clearly identified in brain systems: 1) modular connectivity, 2) unsupervised learning, 3) adaptive ability, 4) functional resiliency, 5) functional plasticity, 6) from-local-to-global functional organization, and 7) dynamic system growth. These are defined here in the light of insight from neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience and Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART), and physics to show that self-organization achieves stability and functional plasticity while minimizing structural system complexity. A specific example informed by empirical research is discussed to illustrate how modularity, adaptive learning, and dynamic network growth enable stable yet plastic somatosensory representation for human grip force control. Implications for the design of “strong” artificial intelligence in robotics are brought forward

Bioethics: Reincarnation of Natural Philosophy in Modern Science

The theory of evolution of complex and comprising of human systems and algorithm for its constructing are the synthesis of evolutionary epistemology, philosophical anthropology and concrete scientific empirical basis in modern (transdisciplinary) science. «Trans-disciplinary» in the context is interpreted as a completely new epistemological situation, which is fraught with the initiation of a civilizational crisis. Philosophy and ideology of technogenic civilization is based on the possibility of unambiguous demarcation of public value and descriptive scientific discourses (1), and the object and subject of the cognitive process (2). Both of these attributes are no longer valid. For mass, everyday consciousness and institutional philosophical tradition it is intuitively obvious that having the ability to control the evolutionary process, Homo sapiens came close to the borders of their own biological and cultural identity. The spontaneous coevolutionary process of interaction between the «subject» (rational living organisms) and the «object» (material world), is the teleological trend of the movement towards the complete rationalization of the World as It Is, its merger with the World of Due. The stratification of the global evolutionary process into selective and semantic (teleological) coevolutionary and therefore ontologically inseparable components follows. With the entry of anthropogenic civilization into the stage of the information society, firsty, the post-academic phase of the historical evolution of scientific rationality began, the attributes of which are the specific methodology of scientific knowledge, scientific ethos and ontology. Bioethics as a phenomenon of intellectual culture represents a natural philosophical core of modern post- academic (human-dimensional) science, in which the ethical neutrality of scientific theory principle is inapplicable, and elements of public-axiological and scientific-descriptive discourses are integrated into a single logic construction. As result, hermeneutics precedes epistemology not only methodologically, but also meaningfully, and natural philosophy is regaining the status of the backbone of the theory of evolution – in an explicit for

Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

Development of bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion in humans from a dynamical systems perspective

The first phase in the development 0f locomotion, pr,öary variability would occur in normal fetuses and infants, and those with Uner Tan syndrome. The neural networks for quadrupedal locomotion have apparently been transmitted epigenetically through many species since about 400 MYA.\ud The second phase is the neuronal selection process. During infancy, the most effective motor pattern(s) and their associated neuronal group(s) are selected through experience.\ud The third phase, secondary or adaptive variability, starts to bloom at two to three years of age and matures in adolescence. This third phase may last much longer in some patients with Uner Tan syndrome, with a considerably delay in selection of the well-balanced quadrupedal locomotion, which may emerge very late in adolescence in these cases

Delegated causality of complex systems

A notion of delegated causality is introduced here. This subtle kind of causality is dual to interventional causality. Delegated causality elucidates the causal role of dynamical systems at the “edge of chaos”, explicates evident cases of downward causation, and relates emergent phenomena to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Apparently rich implications are noticed in biology and Chinese philosophy. The perspective of delegated causality supports cognitive interpretations of self-organization and evolution

Computational and Robotic Models of Early Language Development: A Review

We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete theories of language learning as a complex dynamic system, complementing traditional methods in psychology and linguistics. We review different modeling formalisms, grounded in techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence such as Bayesian and neural network approaches. We then discuss their role in understanding several key mechanisms of language development: cross-situational statistical learning, embodiment, situated social interaction, intrinsically motivated learning, and cultural evolution. We conclude by discussing future challenges for research, including modeling of large-scale empirical data about language acquisition in real-world environments. Keywords: Early language learning, Computational and robotic models, machine learning, development, embodiment, social interaction, intrinsic motivation, self-organization, dynamical systems, complexity.Comment: to appear in International Handbook on Language Development, ed. J. Horst and J. von Koss Torkildsen, Routledg