II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

C. Earth Learns: Interactive Person/Planet, Self-Organizing, Daily Collaboratiions

Frontiers in Computational Methods for Active Matter. www.cecam.org/workshop1797. This is a workshop organized by the European Center for Atomic and Molecular Calculations CECAM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology held in Lausanne in mid February, 2020. Typical presentations are Collective Behavior and Self-Organization of Active Granular Particles and Active Matter Driven by Growth, with a book of abstract available from this site. We cite this event for itself and to record the annual series run by these agencies. Altogether they convey the multiversal scientific considerations going forth locally and worldwide. Some other workshop titles are Atomistic Simulations in Prebiotic Chemistry, Active Matter and Artificial Intelligence, Network analysis to elucidate natural system dynamics, Deep Learning in Materials Science, and Software Development in Quantum Dynamics.

In view of the broad range of active matter systems, various numerical approaches have been developed to model such systems. Some of the major challenges arising in modeling active systems are: (i) Active matter is a multiscale material similar to other complex fluids such as milk or blood, (ii) Active fluids are intrinsically out of equilibrium due to energy consumption on microscopic scale, (iii) The interactions between active particles can be highly nonlinear and are often of multibody character (e.g. hydrodynamic interactions or interactions due to chemical stimuli), (iv) Active particles are mostly not simple geometrical objects, such as hard spheres, but rather of complex shape due to propulsion and other functional units. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the experts in modeling soft condensed matter and biological systems to tie recent advances in computational techniques and the most recent ideas and concepts of active matter theory. (Summary)

FuturICT: New Science and Technology to Manage Our Complex, Strongly Connected World. www.futurict.eu. Inspired by ETH Zurich systems sociologist Dirk Helbing and colleagues, an array of universities, research institutions, businesses, and government agencies formed this consortium to plan and achieve a European and global computation internetwork so as to understand and solve problems that now daunt us as individuals. An enabling impetus is said to be the paradigm shift from objects alone to equally include relational dynamics, the nonlinear revolution. Click on a “Science” section to find a distinguished list of Partners, some 100 men and 10 women, across areas such as Planetary-Scale Reality Mining, Architectures and Processes for Social Supercomputing, Human Information Symbiosis and Ethics, Crisis Observatories, Smart Cities, and so on.

From the home page, under “Big Science” one can download a manifesto “What FuturICT Will Do: New Science and Technology to Manage Our Complex, Strongly Connected World.” News and info about the project can be found in the February 11, 2011 Science on Megadata, and an article by David Weinberger “The Machine that would Predict the Future” in Scientific American for December 2011. But a sense of a greater major emergence, an Earthwide evolutionary transition going on by itself, eludes, although by any vista our global Gaiakind seems to be intentionally forming an organic anatomy, physiology, and cerebral intelligence. We quote from the well meaning document.

Today, we know more about the universe than about our society. It's time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. Together, we can manage the challenges of the 21st century, combining the best of all knowledge. We think that integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society. Data from our complex globe-spanning ICT system will be leveraged to develop models of techno-socio-economic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inform the development of a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organized ICT systems. FuturICT as a whole will act as a Knowledge Accelerator, turning massive data into knowledge and technological progress. In this way, FuturICT will create the scientific methods and ICT platforms needed to address planetary-scale challenges and opportunities in the 21st century. Specifically, FuturICT will build a sophisticated simulation, visualization and participation platform, called the Living Earth Platform.

This is where the Planetary Nervous System comes in. It can be imagined as a global sensor network, where ‘sensors’ include anything able to provide data in real-time about socio-economic, environmental or technological systems (including the Internet). Such an infrastructure will enable real-time data mining - reality mining - and the calibration and validation of coupled models of socio-economic, technological and environmental systems with their complex interactions. It will even be possible to extract suitable models in a data-driven way, guided by theoretical knowledge.

Global Brain Institute. sites.google.com/site/gbialternative1.. The home page for this Free University of Brussels endeavor to engage and scope out into the 2010s the enveloping, vital presence of a worldwide cerebral faculty as it may gain an intelligence, knowledge and life of its own. The veteran director is Francis Heylighen, search for his comprehensive papers, and for members such as Clement Vidal, Marta Lenartowicz and Dirk Helbing.

We see people, machines and software systems as agents that communicate via complex network links. These agents contribute their own expertise to resolving problems and challenges. Thus the skills of different agents are pooled into a collective intelligence much greater than that of its individual members. This propagation across the global network is a complex process of self-organization. It is similar to the "spreading activation" that characterizes thinking in the human brain. This process will change the network by reinforcing useful links, while weakening less useful ones. So it can be said that the network learns and becomes more intelligent.

Information and Noise: Chemistry, Biology and Evolution Creating Complex Systems. www.beilstein-institut.de/files/abstractbook_beilstein_bozen_symposium_2018_download.pdf. This is an international June 2018 symposium held in Rudesheim, Germany sponsored by the Beilstein Institut, see quotes below. This URL reaches the conference book along with extensive abstracts. Leroy Cronin and Tim Clark were the main organizers. A diverse array of senior speakers included Antoine Danchin (Information/Matter Interplay Conceals Life’s Universal Laws), Susan Stepney, Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo (Information as a Principle of Organization for Biology), Ulrich Kutschera, Thomas Ouldridge, Irene Chen and David Wolpert.

When do chemical systems become biological ones? What needs to happen for molecules
behaving stochastically to join in networks and cooperate to produce non-random or directed chemical pathways? Biological systems consist of networks of interacting molecules over a large number of time and length scales, and with error tolerance: The larger and more organized the molecules, the more they behave cooperatively. Indeed, before the first genetically regulated ones, such systems had to self-encode into a replicating system. What mechanism led to self-encoding chemistry and was this the seed for biological evolution? (Synopsis)

Biology is often perceived as a collection of weird anecdotes. Attempts to find specific laws that would place life within the realm of physics often fail because investigators see the forest for the trees. Starting from the conjecture that cells are computers making computers we will explore the physico-chemical nature of the "vital force" that has long been the cause of animism or vitalism. This will ask us to strip biological descriptions from their details to clarify the underlying laws that make cells alive. Highlighting the information of the machine (as opposed to information of the genetic program), we will focus on the role of compartmentalisation and polymerization associated to the ubiquitous presence of water in shaping what life is. (Antoine Danchin)

Living phenomena involve both (i) individual systems carrying out very robust self-(re-)producing dynamics in far from equilibrium conditions (cellular-metabolic ontogenies) and, at a completely different time scale, (ii) populations of those systems undergoing an open-ended process of diversification (eco-evolutionary phylogenies). Without a deep theoretical re-assessment and re-elaboration of the notion of information, specifically tailored for biology, there will be no chance for us to understand how this high ‘squared complexity’ (physiological and evolutionary) came about during biogenesis and made life, globally speaking, a long-term-sustainable phenomenon on the surface of our planet. (Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo)

The non-profit Beilstein-Institut is one of the most respected organizations in the communication and dissemination of high-quality information in chemistry. Since 1951, when the foundation was established by the Max Planck Society, we have been fulfilling our mission to support the scientific community by providing high-quality information that is essential for research. Our role has evolved over the years: from the production of the Beilstein Handbook and Database, to being one of the first open access journal publishers in chemistry, to host of interdisciplinary symposia and supporter of open data initiatives. We believe that free access to scientific research results, giving everyone in the world an equal chance to read and reuse experimental findings and data, is the best way to advance science.

Ising Lectures – 2017. http://www.icmp.lviv.ua/ising/index.html. As the 20th Annual Workshop on Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena under the esteemed German-Jewish (as he is known) mathematical physicist Ernst Ising (1990-1998). It occurs in June in the ancient western Ukraine cultural city of Lviv, close to southern Poland. The presentations this year by senior European scientists include The Search for Universality in Finite-Size Scaling by Ralph Kenna (search), The Fate of Ernst Ising and the Fate of His Model by Thomas Ising (son), along with Reinhard Folk, Bertrand Berche, and Yurij Holovatch (search). From the page, as for previous years, an extended abstract can be accessed for each speaker. The Abstract below is from Tom Ising, and is also posted at arXiv:1706.01764. And one cannot help notice the contrast of such learned wisdom amid a land so beset by tragic violence.

On this, the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the "Ising Lectures" in Lviv (Ukraine), we give some personal reflections about the famous model that was suggested by Wilhelm Lenz for ferromagnetism in 1920 and solved in one dimension by his PhD student, Ernst Ising, in 1924. That work of Lenz and Ising marked the start of a scientific direction that, over nearly 100 years, delivered extraordinary successes in explaining collective behaviour in a vast variety of systems, both within and beyond the natural sciences. The broadness of the appeal of the Ising model is reflected in the variety of talks presented at the Ising lectures over the past two decades but requires that we restrict this report to a small selection of topics. The paper starts with some personal memoirs of Thomas Ising (Ernst's son). We then discuss the history of the model, exact solutions, experimental realisations, and its extension to other fields.

ISIS Summit Vienna 2015. http://summit.is4is.org/about. . A biannual conference by the International Society for Information Studies to be held in June at Vienna University. Its title is The Information Society at the Crossroads: Response and Responsibility of the Sciences of Information. Within its compass of science, philosophy, ethics, and sustainable societies, a pantheon of theorists and activists such as Soren Brier, Rafael Capurro, John Collier, Terrence Deacon, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Luciano Floridi, Francis Heylighen, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Pedro Marijuan, Katharine Sarikakis, Gunther Witzany (talk abstract below), and others will convene and contribute over four days.

The aim of the International Society for Information Studies (ISIS) summit is to bring together different communities that research into information (which shall be understood just as a generic term for cognition, communication, co-operation; data, knowledge, wisdom; intelligence; and the whole diversity of related terms), develop or implement applications of their findings (be they technological or social) or use those applications. That is, not only representatives of different disciplines meet but also the latter meet with different stakeholders. The summit shall help discuss the betterment of society. Thus it is an endeavour in transdisciplinarity.

Mainstream in molecular biology derives from physical chemical assumptions about the genetic code that are basically more than 40 years old. Recent empirical data on genetic code compositions and (re)arrangements by mobile genetic elements and noncoding RNAs, together with results of virus research and their role in evolution, does not really fit into these assumptions. If we look atthe abundance of regulatory RNAs and persistent viruses in host genomes, we will find evidence that the key players that edit the genetic codes of host genomes are consortia of RNA agents and viruses that drive evolutionary novelty and regulation of cellular processes in all steps of development. This is coherent to empirical knowledge about natural languages or codes: No natural language or code speaks or codes itself. In all known cases there are populations, groups, consortia of competent agents that generate, represent and use such languages or codes. This agent-based approach may lead to a qualitative RNA sociology that investigates and identifies relevant behavioral motifs of cooperative RNA consortia. (Gunther Witzany)

Life in the Universe 2019: Big History, SETI and the Future of Humankind. bighistory.org/2019-life-in-the-universe-conference-information. This mid July conference in Milan, Italy by the International Big History Association has become a resident venue for visionary cosmists. Its preliminary program includes The Singularity in Big History by Andrey Korotayev (search), A History of Cosmic Habitability by Amedeo Balbi, Breakthrough Listen by Andrew Siemion, Energy Rate Density as a Technosignature by Clement Vidal and Evo-SETI: A Methematical Big History by Claudio Maccone.

Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods. Almost a century ago, scientists gave us a new history of the cosmos by showing that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, was but one of an extraordinary number. In recent decades, scientists have located thousands of potentially habitable planets in just our own galaxy. Scientists at SETI are looking for evidence that there is (intelligent) life beyond Earth. What does it mean to the big history account when the lines from the Big Bang go not only to the Milky Way, Earth, life on Earth, and humanity, but in many other directions as well?

Major Transitions in Human Evolution. royalsociety.org/events/2015/10/major-transitions. At this Royal Society and British Academy meeting in London in October 2015, a central feature will be discussions by Richard Leakey about how Sapiens came to be. It is worth noting in talk titles that the Major Transitions model is often availed as the main evolutionary sequence. Its sessions are: Transition 1: Origins of Home – Technology, Behaviour, and Adaption; Transition 2: Evolution of the Early Human Phenotype; and Transition 3: Tempo and Mode of Modern Humans. Speakers include Richard and Meave Leakey, Sonia Harmand, Chris Stringer, Marta Lahr, and Robert Foley.

The rich human palaeoanthropological record shows an unexpectedly complex pattern in the tempo and mode of human evolution. Evidence for many of the key phases is found in East Africa, and has been shaped by critical discoveries by teams led by Richard Leakey, or work inspired by his finds. The meeting focuses on key evolutionary transitions to understand the interaction of biology, behaviour, culture and environment.

Origins: From the Protosun to the First Steps of Life. astronomy2018.univie.ac.at/symposia/symposium345. An International Astronomical Union symposium (IAU 345) held in August 2018 in Vienna. We cite this long URL because it is where Abstracts can be found. An array of global scholars gave talks such as Cosmic Pathways to Life: From Interstellar Molecules to the first Traces of Life by Manuel Gudel, The Early Evolution of Terrestrial Planets by Helmut Lammer, Early Life on Earth by Addy Pross, The Properties of Earth-like Planets by Daniel Apai, and Unveiling the Whole from its Parts by Eduardo Pacheco, Water Inventory from the Jupiter Orbit to the Terrestrial Planets by Marov, Mikhail, and Bio-habitability and Life on Planets of M- to G-type Stars by Amri Wandel. Abstracts for M. Gudel, E. Pacheo, and A. Wandel are next.

This symposium explores the chain of events that could have been involved in the formation of the Sun in the pre-solar galactic environment, planet Earth and the earliest lifeforms on it. On one hand we see the history of consecutive events, on the other hand parallel processes of various scales have been interacting since pre-solar times till today. An abridged topical list is: Galactic environments of the Earth and Sun, Formation of solar–type steps, Evolution of protostellar disks, Physical and chemical conditions in proto–solar nebula, Planetary systems around solar–type stars, Toward building Earth–analogs, and Steps toward habitability & early forms of life. (IAU345 summary)

Life on a planet like Earth has its roots in processes starting with the formation of interstellar clouds and first complex molecules. What follows is a sequence of events for the successful life formation: the collapse of clouds to protostars in a cluster environment, the onset of "chemical factories" inside protostellar disks, the formation of a dynamically stable planetary system, the transport of sufficient amounts of water to a habitable planet, a solid surface and viable atmosphere, the favorable formation of biomolecules, and the metabolism and reproduction of initial life forms. Many of these steps are still poorly understood, but recent research in this widely interdisciplinary field has provided surprising insights into the complex conditions for life. (Gudel excerpts)

If DNA molecules were present in the interstellar medium, their observed spectral signatures would be rather complicated. Even the molecular array of a unique dinucleotide will generate a tangled signature. We selected 5 key transitions of parts of purines and pyrimidines that have been observed in the ISM as isolated molecules and propose to look for them in molecular clouds. If the ensemble of the 5 transitions are observed together in the same target, it may be that we are detecting the whole from its part. (Pacheco)

The recent detection of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, Trappist-1, and many other nearby M-type stars led to speculations whether liquid water and life exist on these planets. Defining the bio-habitable zone, where liquid water and complex organic molecules can survive of the planetary surface, we suggest that planets orbiting M-type stars may have life-supporting conditions for a wide range of atmospheric properties (Wandel 2018, ApJ). We extend this analyses to locked planets of K- and G-type stars and discuss the implications for the evolution and sustaining of life, in particular, oxygenic photosynthesis, in analogy to early Earth, as well as to present Earth extreme environments. (Wandel)

SETI Decoding Alien Intelligence Workshop. https://daiworkshop.seti.org/guest-papers. A unique meeting with a stellar cast to wonder all about extraterrestrial neighbors, relative life forms, (linguistic) communications, and much more, held at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA in March 2018. The event was a response to Nathalie Cabrol’s 2016 paper Alien Mindscapes (search) which entered an initial litany of topics and concerns. On the above site, abstracts and papers are posted such as Astrobiology: Thy Name is Synergy by Penelope Boston, Evolving SETI for the 21st Century by Steven Dick, Bio-Friendly Exoplanets by Seth Shostak, The Spiritual Quest in the SETI Research by Jose Funes, SJ, and Cognitive Planetary Transformations by David Grinspoon. Some other speakers were Jill Tarter, Lori Marino, Annamarie Berea, Terence Deacon, and Erik Zackrisson. A tacit assumption, it ought to be noted, was to treat exoworld civilizations, if they exist, as a whole, thinking planet, a noosphere entity (but this Earth has not yet been appreciated that way).

Perhaps what SETI is searching for is not merely the appearance of a certain kind of civilization on a planet, but a transition in planetary evolution to what we might call the Sapiezoic Eon, in which cognitive processes become integrated into the functioning of a planet. Now we see the advent of a radically new type of global change: Self-aware cognitive/geological processes. If the “Anthropocene” marks the beginning of the Sapiezoic Eon - then it requires that cognitive processes can become a long-term stable part of a planet. Global technological influence contains both perils which threaten to make this a short-lived stage and the possibility that this phenomenon could become a very long-lived and even permanent part of the Earth system. I will discuss the possible observable properties of planets that have gone through a Sapiezoic transition. (Grinspoon)

The “wave-particle” theory of communication: communication as both means and meaning of information exchange. Shannon explored only the “wave” theory of communication as a means of exchanging information, devoid of meaning. On another hand, semiotics and cryptography explore the “particle” theory of communication – the meaning of communication devoid of the means of communicating. Therefore mapping communication from cells to societies in distinct terms of means and meaning of communication would help understand where the two aspects of the phenomenon of communication converge and where they diverge. (Berea, 1-2)

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence research assumes that we live in a bio-friendly universe. But do we live in a spiritual-friendly universe? We propose to include the spiritual quest in a new multidisciplinary approach to SETI. We consider different types of alien civilizations by including a Spiritual factor according to the characteristics of those civilizations as described in this paper. We propose to simulate the number of planets where there is a Communicating Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) in our Galaxy. To validate our thought experiment, we propose to apply this model to the different ages of human history trying to describe different alien civilizations according to the Spiritual factor. (Funes)

The Computer, the Brain, and the Internet. http://santafe.edu/events/abstract/1496. A posting for a Santa Fe Institute Public Lecture on May 27, 2009 by the neuroscience luminaries Marvin Minsky and Gerald Edelman. What is at once notable, as its Abstract conveys, is an advance from standalone PC computers to their worldwide network connectivity seen as the best current metaphor for a brain (again via the latest technology). By just turning this around, can it not imply that the global Internet can indeed be known as a cerebral Noosphere?

In an effort to explain the brain, scientists have turned historically to computers, both as a tool for studying the brain and mind, and as a model for how the brain might work. We now live in the age of distributed data and computers, and the internet has emerged as a giant cobweb of communication among computers and their users. Some now suggest that the internet is our best current model for the brain, and thought is nothing but a form of search in the space of ideas. As we move towards more advanced technology, the brain, the computer, and the internet are progressively merging, and our identities and insights are assuming a radically new form.

University of Massachusetts Amherst Science Seminars and Colloquia. http://www.physics.umass.edu/seminars. We cite this web page as a starter for a broad array of scientific presentations held over a two week period in early autumn at this near by campus. They were Sheldon Glashow, 1979 Nobel physics, on The Value of Fundamental Research; Inflation and BICEP2 Results by Lorenzo Sorbo, U Mass physics; Condensed Matter Seminar: Statistical Mechanics of Swarming Insects, Nicholas Ouellette, Yale; Astronomy Colloquia: 100 Earths Project, Debra Fischer, Yale; Chemistry Lecture: Reinterpreting the Genetic Code: From Polymers to Proteomics by David Tirrell, CalTech; and Organismic & Evolutionary Biology: Environmental Uncertainty and the Evolution of Complex Sociality, Dustin Rubenstein, Columbia. Type in the other departments for calendars and abstracts. The Ouellette and Tirrell talks were concurrent, six floors apart in the research tower. By what imagination could these separate contributions be gathered altogether within a single intellectual pursuit, which then might converge upon a grand discovery?

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