A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain.

Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain.

Emergent properties are broadly defined as features of a complex system that are not present in the parts of a system when they are considered in isolation but may emerge as a system feature of those parts and their interactions. Tracing a journey of billions of years of evolution from life to the basic sensing capabilities of single-celled organisms up to the sentience of animals with advanced nervous systems, including all vertebrates (for instance, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals), arthropods (insects and crabs), and cephalopods (such as the octopus), Feinberg argues that sentience gradually but eventually emerged along diverse evolutionary lines with the evolution of sufficiently neurobiologically complex brains during the Cambrian period over 520 million years ago.

Ultimately, Feinberg argues that viewing sentience as an emergent process can explain both its neurobiological basis as well its perplexing personal nature, thus solving the historical philosophical problem of the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and experience.

More at: mitpress.mit.edu

Either/or thinking is a major stumbling block to human development and understanding. In this book Kelso & Engstrøm offer a whole new way of looking at the world, awakening a “sixth sense” that people didn’t realize they had. It draws on the profound relationship between nature’s many complementary contraries and the paradigm shifting science of coordination called Coordination Dynamics. The human brain~mind, through the multi- and metastable modes of its coordination dynamics, gives rise to a sentient faculty called the squiggle sense. Nature’s contraries are perceived not only as opposing polar states, but as coexisting complementary tendencies, symbolized by the squiggle (~). Use this book to nudge your brain~mind into its metastable mode again and again, to better perceive the complementary dances of contraries, and to transcend the detrimental narrow-mindedness of polarized, either/or thinking. As a “Metastabilian” you can wield your squiggle sense to enhance and advance your life!

Read the full article at: link.springer.com

Humans are the ultimate complex systems. In this monograph intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes, Han L. J. van der Maas argues that we can only succeed in exploring the psychological system by understanding its complexity. By applying the tools of complexity science to psychology, researchers and practitioners can achieve desperately needed breakthroughs in the social sciences.

The book has three primary objectives: to provide a comprehensive overview of complex-systems research, with a particular emphasis on its applications in psychology and the social sciences; to provide skills for complex-systems research; and to foster critical thinking regarding the potential applications of complex systems in psychology. Readers should have a basic understanding of mathematics and knowledge of the programming language R.

Complex-Systems Research in Psychology explores a range of topics, including chaos, bifurcation, and self-organization in psychological processes, psychological network analysis, as well as agent-based modeling of social processes. It offers applications in various areas of psychology, such as perception, depression, addiction, cognitive development, and polarization.

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Once there was a thing called Twitter, where people exchanged short messages called ‘tweets’. While it had its flaws, I came to like it and eventually decided to teach a short course on entropy in the form of tweets. This little book is a slightly expanded version of that course.
It’s easy to wax poetic about entropy, but what is it? I claim it’s the amount of information we don’t know about a situation, which in principle we could learn. But how can we make this idea precise and quantitative? To focus the discussion I decided to tackle a specific puzzle: why does hydrogen gas at room temperature and pressure have an entropy corresponding to about 23 unknown bits of information per molecule? This gave me an excuse to explain these subjects:
• information
• Shannon entropy and Gibbs entropy
• the principle of maximum entropy
• the Boltzmann distribution
• temperature and coolness
• the relation between entropy, expected energy and temperature • the equipartition theorem
• the partition function
• the relation between entropy, free energy and expected energy • the entropy of a classical harmonic oscillator
• the entropy of a classical particle in a box
• the entropy of a classical ideal gas.

Read the full book at: math.ucr.edu

The Complex World, originally published in Volume 1 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science, presents an entirely new framing of nature, of the human role in the natural and technological worlds, and what it means to prosper on a living planet.

We live in a complex world—meaning one that is increasingly connected, evolving, technological, volatile, and potentially poised for catastrophe. And yet we continue to treat the world as if it were simple: linear, unchanging, disconnected, and infinitely exploitable.

Complexity science is an approach to understanding and surviving in a complex world. In this concise and comprehensive introduction, Santa Fe Institute President David C. Krakauer traces the roots of complexity science back to the nineteenth-century science of machines—evolved and engineered—into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.

By combining insights from evolution, computation, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical physics, complexity science provides the first scientific framework for understanding the purposeful universe.

More at: www.sfipress.org