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Displaying entries 61 through 75 of 81 found.

Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

Strogatz, Stephen and Iain Cousin. How Is Flocking Like Computing? Quanta. March 29, 2024. A transcript from an interview in The Joy of Why series between the Cornell University complexity theorist and a Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior senior researcher (search each). The subject was the state of ongoing studies about evolutionary and environmental groups which seem to assemble and persist in similar kind from active particles all the way through every creaturely form onto our own neural and social selves. Once again into the 2020s, a nested, recurrent consistency of one same pattern and process is being defined, filled in and confirmed. As the quotes cite, the constant phenomenon is lately realized to imply and arise from an independent mathematical, program-like code-script source.

Well, that’s one of the most amazing things about studying collective behavior. It’s central to a widest range of organisms from the simplest placozoa animal, a swarm of cells, moving like a bird flock or a fish school — up through the invertebrates, like ants, that form swarms, to vertebrates, such as schooling fish, flocking birds, herding ungulates, and primates, including ourselves — humans.

And so, this is one of the things I find most remarkable about collective behavior, is that even though the system properties, whether you’re a cell or whether you’re a bird, are very different, when you look at the whole phenomena, the mathematics that underlie this actually turn out to be very similar. And so we can find these, sort of, what are called universal properties that connect these different, apparently disparate systems.

But we’re beginning to understand is that the common feature they share is computation. It’s that these entities gather together to compute about their environment in ways that they can’t compute on their own. And so, there’s these deep questions that we’re beginning to address about computation and the emergence of complex life which relates to what we’ve learned from physical systems close to a phase transition. (Iain Couzin)

Enquist, Brian, et al. Scaling approaches and macroecology provide a foundation for assessing ecological resilience in the Anthropocene. Philosophical Transactions B. April, 2024. Senior environmental theorists BE, University of Arizona, Doug Erwin, National Museum of Natural History and Van Savage and Pablo Marquet, Santa Fe Institute make a case for wider perspectives as a better way to study, analyze and manage flora and fauna biotas because of their multiple complexities.

In the Anthropocene, intensifying ecological disturbances challenge our predictive capabilities for ecosystem responses. A macroecology of emergent statistical patterns in ecological systems can find consistent regularities in biodiversity and ecosystems by way of abundance, body size, geographical range, species interaction networks, or the flux of matter and energy. We suggest a conceptual and theoretical basis for ecological resilience that integrates macroecology with a stochastic diffusion approximation constrained by principles of biological symmetry. We show how our framework can quantify major disturbances and their extensive ecological ramifications. (Excerpt)

Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

Reber, Arthur, et al. The CBC theory and its entailments: Why current models of the origin of consciousness fail.. EMBO Reports. 25/1, 2023. AR, University of British Columbia, William B. Miller, physician philosopher, Predrag Slijepcevic, University of Brunel, London and František Baluška, University of Bonn post their latest version of the CBC (Cellular Basis of Consciousness) which contends that sentient awareness is necessarily so pervasive and essential that its presence is evident at this basic metabolic level. See also All biology is cognitive information processing by WBM, et al in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. (182, September 2023) and The Sentient Cell: The Cellular Foundations of Consciousness by Arthur Reber, et al ( Oxford Press, 2023).

Accumulating scientific discoveries support the need for a revised Central Dogma to revise evolutionary biology's fixation on a Neodarwinian canon. Our reformulated version is that all biology is cognitive information processing based on the recognition that life is the self-referential state instantiated within the cellular form. Self-referential cells act to sustain themselves and to do so must be in harmony with their environment. Consequently, effective cellular problem-solving is information processing and management. As the internal measurement by cells of information is self-referential by definition, self-reference is biological self-organization, underpinning 21st century Cognition-Based Biology. (Excerpt)

Edens, Brittany, et al.. Neural crest origin of sympathetic neurons at the dawn of vertebrates. Nature. 629/121, 2024. Cal Tech bioengineers including Marianne Bronner describe how they discerned and quantified an earlier invertebrate occasion of this vital attribute. The work merited a review, The sympathetic nervous system arose in the earliest vertebrates, in the same issue: The sympathetic nervous system, which enables the fight-or-flight response, was thought to be present only in jawed vertebrates. Analysis of a jawless vertebrate suggests that this system might be a feature of all animals with a spine. As laboratory instrumentation and computational, machine analysis advance into the 2020s, life’s sentient systems are being traced back to deeper, intrinsic origins. Altogether by now a second cerebral, sensory, quickening orthogenesis becomes distinctly filled in.

The neural crest is an embryonic stem cell population unique to vertebrates whose expansion has promoted their evolution by enabling emergence of new cell types and structures such as jaws and peripheral ganglia. Although jawless vertebrates have sensory ganglia, convention has it that trunk sympathetic chain ganglia arose only in jawed vertebrates. Here, by contrast, we report the presence of trunk sympathetic neurons in the sea lamprey, Petromyzon marinus, an extant jawless vertebrate. Our findings challenge the prevailing dogma that posits that sympathetic ganglia are a gnathostome innovation, instead suggesting that a late-developing rudimentary sympathetic nervous system may have been characteristic of the earliest vertebrates. (Excerpt)

Quin-Conroy, Josephine, et al.. Patterns of language and visuospatial functional lateralization and cognitive ability. Laterality. September, 2023. University of Western Australia linguists contribute a latest quantified affirmation of nature’s archetypal hemispheric preferences. Once again we wonder however these verse and vision complements could be known well enough such that they might apply to political parties.

For most individuals, language is predominately localized to the left hemisphere of the brain and visuospatial processing to the right. Evolutionary theories of lateralization suggest that this typical pattern is most common as it delivers a cognitive advantage. In contrast, deviations from the typical pattern may lead to poorer cognitive abilities. The aim of this systematic review was to assess the evidence for an association between patterns of language and visuospatial lateralization and measures of cognitive ability. (Excerpt).

University of Western Australia Just 10 minutes from Perth city, UWA is located on the banks of the Swan River on the land of the Whadjuk Nation. We have the privilege of being on sacred soil where Western Australian kaartdijin, or knowledge, began. It has been a place to gather and learn for tens of thousands of years by the world’s oldest continuous culture.

Falk, Dan. Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare. Quanta. April 19, 2024. A science journalist reports that A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness. We post from the entry and the statement itself.

The four-paragraph New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was unveiled today, April 19, at a one-day conference called “The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” being held at New York University. Spearheaded by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Kristin Andrews of York University in Ontario, the philosopher and environmental scientist Jeff Sebo of New York University, and the philosopher Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the declaration has so far been signed by 39 researchers, including the psychologists Nicola Clayton and Irene Pepperberg, the neuroscientists Anil Seth and Christof Koch, the zoologist Lars Chittka, and the philosophers David Chalmers and Peter Godfrey-Smith. (Dan Falk)

The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration. Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged. First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds. Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects). Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

Youngblood, Mason. Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. April, 2024. As his bio below says, by way of the latest computational abilities, it is now possible to find generic similarities between avian twittering and the social network Twitter. The same mathematical formats thus seem to repeat themselves in kind across each and every conversational mode.

Communication needs to be complex enough to be functional while minimizing learning and production costs. Recent work suggests that the vocalizations and gestures of some songbirds, cetaceans and great apes may conform to linguistic laws that reflect this trade-off between efficiency and complexity. In these studies, clustering signals into types cannot be done a priori, and an analysis may affect statistical signals in the data. Here we assess the language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song across three levels of granularity in syllable clustering. The results show strong evidence for Zipf's rank–frequency law, Zipf's law of abbreviation and Menzerath's law. These statistical patterns are robust and exhibit a degree of scale invariance. (Excerpt)

My name is Mason Youngblood, and I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. In my research, I apply methods from cognitive science, computational social science, and cultural evolution to questions about human and non-human animal behavior. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding how cognitive biases and population structure shape the cultural evolution of behaviors and beliefs (e.g. music, extremist ideology, birdsong, conspiracy theories).

Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. www.pyoudeyer.com.. . The French computational psychologist (search) is the director of the Flowers project-team at the Inria Center of University of Bordeaux. Current (March 2024) projects are now much involved with chatty AI features guided by insights gained from studies with children. A recent talk is Developmental AI: machines that learn like children and help children learn better. As the quotes say, another senior scholar finds evidence that both youngsters and large language modes use trail/error iterate methods in similar ways. See also Open-ended learning and development in machines and humans on the flowers.inria.fr. site.

Together with a great team, I study lifelong autonomous learning, and the self-organization of behavioural, cognitive and language structures at the frontiers of artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. I use machines as tools to understand better how children learn and develop, and I study how one can build machines that learn autonomously like children, as well as integrate within human cultures, within the new field of developmental artificial intelligence. (P-Y O)

The Flowers project-team, at the University of Bordeaux and at Ensta ParisTech, studies versions of hoistic individual development. These models can help us better understand how children learn, as well as to build machines that gain knowledge as children do, aka developmental artificial intelligence, with applications in educational technologies, automated discovery, robotics and human-computer interaction.

Ahissar, Ehud, et al. Mapping the Mind-Brain Duality to a Digital-Analog Perceptual Duality. arXiv:2404.05732. Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem neuro-researchers including Daniel Polani proceed to identify another cerebral complementarity akin to byte-like and relational mode computations. By one more view, this common particle/wave, me/We reciprocity composes our own bicameral coherence.

Could the abstract ideas of our minds originate from neuronal interactions within our brains? To address this question, we examine interactions within 'brain-world' (BW) and 'brain-brain' (BB) domains, which represent the brain's physical interactions with its environment and the mental interactions between brains. BW interactions are seen as analog - dynamic and continuous, whereas BB modes are digital - non-dynamic and discrete. This distinction allows BB phases to facilitate effective, albeit information-limited, communication. We review existing data showing that cascades of neural circuits can convert between analog and digital signals, thereby linking physical and mental processes. We argue that these circuits cannot reduce one to the other, so that the mind-brain duality can be mapped to the BB-BW duality. Such mapping suggests that the mind's foundation is inherently social, which can explain how the physical-mental gap coexists along with the physical body and the non-physical mind. (Abstract)

Zhou, Shou, et al. Group-specific discriminant analysis reveals statistically validated sex differences in lateralization of brain functional network.. arXiv:2404.05781. University of Sheffield, UK and Beijing Normal University researchers provide a latest extensive technological neuroimage and graphic analysis of the real presence of complementary gender distinctions.

Lateralization is a fundamental feature of the human brain, whereof sex differences have been observed. Here, we study sex differences in the lateralization of functional networks as a dual-classification problem, consisting of first-order classification for left vs. right and second-order for male vs. female modes. For sex-specific patterns, we develop the Group-Specific Discriminant Analysis (GSDA) for first-order classifications. The evaluation of neuroimaging datasets shows the efficacy of GSDA in learning sex-specific models to achieve a significant improvement in group specificity over baseline methods. The major sex differences are in the strength of lateralization and the interactions within and between lobes. (Abstract)

Nichols, Ryan. Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges. Evolutionary Human Sciences. Volume 6, February, 2024. In this Cambridge Press journal edited by Oxford anthropologist Ruth Mace, eleven sociality scientists with postings in the USA, Morocco, Denmark, Germany, France and Spain including Mathieu Charbonneau, Miriam Haidle and Jose Segovia-Martin address a real concern that this academic field which should follow from biological sources remains ill defined, parcellated, debated to an extent that inhibits clarity and integrity. After a broad review of these issues, several pathways toward consiience are laid out.

Perez, Jermey, et al. Perez, Jeremy, et al. Cultural evolution in populations of Large Language Models. arXiv:2403.08882. Flowers Team, INRIA, Bordeaux, France scholars including Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (search) advance insightful approaches to provide better, more humane, realistic editorial guidance for these vicarious textual corpora. By March 2024, as the Earthificial section above reports, it has been noticed that these spontaneous cognitive venues actually seem to train themselves akin to how children persistently learn to speak and discover.