Noise and morphogenesis: Uncertainty, randomness and control

This thesis presents a processual ontology of noise by virtue of which morphogenesis (in its most general understanding as the processes by which order/form is created) must be instantiated. Noise is here outlined as the far from equilibrium environment out of which metastable temporary ‘solutions’ can emerge as the system transitions through the pre-individual state space. While frequently addressed by humanities and arts studies on the basis of its supposed disruptive character (often in terms of aesthetics), this thesis aims to thoroughly examine noise’s conceptual potencies. To explore and amplify the epistemic consequences not merely of the ineliminability of noise but of its originative power as well as within the course of the elimination of givenness by epistemology. This philosophical work is informed by many different fields of contemporary science (namely: statistical physics, information theory, probability theory, 4E cognition, synthetic biology, nonlinear dynamics, complexity science and computer science) in order to assess and highlight the problems of the metascientific and ideological foundations of diverse projects of prediction and control of uncertainty. From algorithmic surveillance back to cybernetics and how these rendered noise “informationally heretical”. This conveys an analysis of how contemporary prediction technologies are dramatically transforming our relationship with the future and with uncertainty in a great number of our social structures. It is a philosophico-critical anthropology of data ontology and a critique of reductive pan-info-computationalism. Additionally, two practical examples of noise characterised as an enabling constraint for the functioning of complex adaptive systems are presented. These are at once biophysical and cognitive, : 1) interaction-dominance constituted by ‘pink noise’ and 2) noise as a source of variability that cells may exploit in (synthetic) biology. Finally, noise is posited as an intractable active ontological randomness that limits the scope of determinism and that goes beyond unpredictability in any epistemological sense due to the insuperability of the situation in which epistemology finds itself following the critique of the given

Quantitative Ecology: A New Unified Approach

This ebook is available for download as a PDF.Quantitative Ecology introduces and discusses the principles of ecology from populations to ecosystems including human populations, disease, exotic organisms, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity and global dynamics. The book also reformulates and unifies ecological equations making them more accessible to the reader and easier to teach

Interaction dynamics and autonomy in cognitive systems

The concept of autonomy is of crucial importance for understanding life and cognition. Whereas cellular and organismic autonomy is based in the self-production of the material infrastructure sustaining the existence of living beings as such, we are interested in how biological autonomy can be expanded into forms of autonomous agency, where autonomy as a form of organization is extended into the behaviour of an agent in interaction with its environment (and not its material self-production). In this thesis, we focus on the development of operational models of sensorimotor agency, exploring the construction of a domain of interactions creating a dynamical interface between agent and environment. We present two main contributions to the study of autonomous agency: First, we contribute to the development of a modelling route for testing, comparing and validating hypotheses about neurocognitive autonomy. Through the design and analysis of specific neurodynamical models embedded in robotic agents, we explore how an agent is constituted in a sensorimotor space as an autonomous entity able to adaptively sustain its own organization. Using two simulation models and different dynamical analysis and measurement of complex patterns in their behaviour, we are able to tackle some theoretical obstacles preventing the understanding of sensorimotor autonomy, and to generate new predictions about the nature of autonomous agency in the neurocognitive domain. Second, we explore the extension of sensorimotor forms of autonomy into the social realm. We analyse two cases from an experimental perspective: the constitution of a collective subject in a sensorimotor social interactive task, and the emergence of an autonomous social identity in a large-scale technologically-mediated social system. Through the analysis of coordination mechanisms and emergent complex patterns, we are able to gather experimental evidence indicating that in some cases social autonomy might emerge based on mechanisms of coordinated sensorimotor activity and interaction, constituting forms of collective autonomous agency

Exile: The Writer's Experience

This work is a collection of twenty-four fundamental essays on the many-sided topic of German exile literature during and after Hitler's Third Reich. Exile literature, which emerged in the 1980s as a special field of critical investigation within German Studies, embraced the diverse works of writers who were scattered from Hollywood to Moscow but were related by the common bond of exile from Germany. Leading American and European specialists in the field are contributors to the volume, which discusses the work of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch and Karl Wolfskehl among others

The Appropriation of Autopoiesis in Architecture

This thesis investigates the merits of cross-disciplinary appropriations of natural-scientific theory in architecture, particularly of the theory of autopoiesis as appropriated in Patrik Schumacher’s two-volume tome The Autopoiesis of Architecture. This investigation began with an interest in perceived connections between urban dynamics and autopoietic processes in biological cells. In this context, Schumacher’s work was expected to offer, but did not deliver, an explanatory theoretical framework. This raised questions about the role of cross-disciplinary appropriations of natural-scientific theory in architecture in general and the appropriation of autopoiesis in architectural theory in particular. A review of related literature shows that investigations of these questions are confounded by the conceptual broadness granted to theoretical ideas and the indirect route along which autopoiesis has been appropriated in architecture. From its original conception by Maturana et al. in microbiology in the 1970s to its appropriation by Luhmann in sociology in the 1980s, on to the appropriation of its sociological interpretation by Schumacher in architecture around 2011, the phenomena described by the three instances of autopoiesis theory, and their varying grounding in empirical evidence, have changed significantly. Meanwhile, natural-scientific theories inform architectural practice and research across a broad spectrum between metaphorical ambiguity and literal exactitude, from conceptual inspiration in applied design and literal design guidance as is common in biomimicry, to scholarly explanation and empirical prediction. Between these intricacies, the following research question arises: What are the merits of Patrik Schumacher’s appropriation of the theory of autopoiesis from the perspective of academic architectural research? To address this question from an academic architectural research perspective, this study uses a mixed-method approach, drawing on discourse analysis, close reading, visual interpretation, and inference to the best explanation to analyse 16 pertinent samples from The Autopoiesis of Architecture both individually as well as in aggregate, using previously-established categorisations of language use and merits of theory appropriation. It thereby determines how Schumacher’s theory relates “architecture” to prior (i.e., Luhmann’s or Maturana et al.’s) instances of autopoiesis theory, the degree of literality of these references, and their likely beneficiaries. The outcomes of this analysis show that the connections drawn between architecture and autopoiesis in The Autopoiesis of Architecture evoke (or at least do not preclude evoking) biological systems rather than aligning exclusively with Schumacher’s conceptualisation of architecture as a social system. They also suggest that a significant portion of these connections appear to benefit the author (Schumacher) rather than the reader by legitimising and obfuscating rather than providing explanatory convergence. Furthermore, the analysis shows how these connections are not committed to a uniform use of language, ranging across literal, metaphorical, analogical, and similised modes. Schumacher thus seems to operate somewhat ambiguously across all analytical frameworks and distinctions applied in this study, taking an approach that may benefit conceptual inspiration of the design practice rather than rigorous descriptions of academic research his theory purports to do. In this view, Schumacher’s theory appropriation appears to enjoy the conceptual tolerance cultivated on the design practice side of the field but seems unlikely to substantially benefit either the professional practice or academic research arms of the discipline

The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change

Abstract The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Elizabeth Bishop has been widely celebrated as a painterly or photographic poet, a naturalist and geographer, and yet she was a subtly exquisite musician of wordplay attuned to subvocal effects. This dissertation examines a network of Bishop\u27s affinities and aesthetic commitments, including her wish to say the most difficult things and be funny, if possible. One surprising claim regarding the poet\u27s variously called All Eye, the famous eye, etc., is that her sense of the spiritual is rather antithetical to an ocular regime: even those extremely fluid, revising, surprising land and seascapes for which she is celebrated, are but the tip of the seas we are to attend. Tracing her more properly experimental challenge to her explorations at Vassar, humoring her interest to get an intense sense of consciousness in the tongue, in sensational revisionary moments, I argue that she is a much more radical: and witty) poet than has been granted, and that even those taking her up in a postmodern vein have underappreciated this. Hers is the Emersonian/Pragmatist challenge of transition, and she positioned it particularly in the surface sounds of her words, profoundly attuned as she was to the liminal fringes of a Jamesian stream of thought. Her wish to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking is a commonplace in the criticism, whereas the discussion of the phonotextual creations of sound by way of breath, gestures of transformation, and the affirmation of play, are less lit up. Her poems early to late, and comments outside them, assert her Transcendentalist and Pragmatist affinities, folding them into a radical aesthetic she called the proliferal style. Though her use of religious imagery and language are often believed to evince nostalgic longings, or signal her entrapment in outmoded forms of thinking, I argue that, as part of this project, she made a canny and rigorous effort to adapt her religious inheritance toward the Darwininan understandings of proliferation, error and the ear-rational, pleasure and the chances of change

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 227)

This bibliography lists 418 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in May, 1988

Religious Individualisation

This volume brings together key findings of the research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies. Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past