As we have all been very busy during the summer months with
conferences, travel and other activities, we did not find the time to
prepare a Newsletter in July. The present Newsletter should therefore
be seen as an extra long, "double issue", covering both the May-June
and July-August periods.
In July, Francis Heylighen and Jan Bernheim have presented their
research on progress (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PROGRESS.html) and the
measurement of happiness at the International Society for Quality of
Life Studies (ISQOLS) Conference in Girona, Spain. The reactions
were quite positive, and our general feeling was that the QOL
community has reached a level were simple empirical measurements of
things like life satisfaction and positive/negative feelings can be
used to build robust scientific models of the values and forces that
drive individual action and social development. The only things
lacking is an evolutionary-cybernetic mechanism to understand these
developments, and that is where our PCP approach comes in.
A rather spectacular example of the power of such models is the
prediction by Michael Hagerty, who was present at the conference,
that Gore would win the US presidential elections with 52% of the
votes. This prediction is based on a statistical analysis of the
correlation between increases in QOL in a region and voting for the
incumbent party, see
http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/~mrhagert/Pres2000.html We're curious to
see how close to the mark this prediction will be. Together with our
Dutch colleague, Ruut Veenhoven, Hagerty has also shown that average
happiness has increased over the last two decades:
http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/~mrhagert/Papers/easterlinreply8.pdf
Francis Heylighen then participated in the Humanity 3000 Symposium of
the Foundation for the Future
(http://www.futurefoundation.org/humanity3000/index.html), but was
somewhat disappointed since the discussions basically reiterated the
ones at the Humanity 3000 workshop last year, except that the group
was larger, so that there was less time for participants to express
their ideas. On the other hand, he used the occasion to get
acquainted with some leading thinkers working on themes close to PCP,
such as the memeticist Susan Blackmore, Gregory Stock, author of
"Metaman", and Christian de Duve, Nobel Prize winner and author of
"Vital Dust", on the origin and evolution of life.
THE PCP-DISCUSS MAILING LIST
For years the mailing list PRNCYB-L@BINGVMB.CC.BINGHAMTON.EDU was the
discussion list for the Principia Cybernetica Project. Unfortunately,
the mailing list server operating at Binghamton University (where
list administrator Cliff Joslyn originally started the list) was shut
down last year without warning. It took us a while, but in May we
finally restarted the list, this time at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, the American office of PCP where Cliff now works.
To make things more intuitive, and to clarify the relation with the
PCP-news list through which this newsletter is distributed, we
renamed the list from PRNCYB-L to PCP-discuss. The address is
pcp-discuss@lanl.gov, but note that this is a closed list that you
can only receive by submitting a request to the list adminstrator. We
encourage anyone interested to explore and join our discussions on
all aspects of evolutionary cybernetics. Please see
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MAIL.html for details on how to join.
The list was restarted in May with the same people that had
subscribed to the original PRNCYB-L. Since then some ten new members
have joined. The mailing list has as yet not been as active as PRNCYB
during its heyday, but that is not surprising given the summer
period, and a general phenomenon of "email tiredness" that many
people submerged in mail presently experience. As before, this
newsletter will include a list of topics discussed in the list during
the past period.
THE GLOBAL BRAIN IN THE MEDIA
Both Francis Heylighen and Cliff Joslyn were recently invited as
guest lecturers at the Summer Cyberforum series on Virtual Worlds and
the Global Brain, organized by Michael Heim of the ArtCenter College
of Design in Pasadena, California. The meeting took place in a 3D
virtual reality environment, accessible over the net. This was a hard
experience to describe, requiring a client-side VR browser in which
we assumed avatar appearances that allowed us to fly and move in the
virtual space, but what was otherwise basically a chatroom in which
the different participants present could talk about the subject of
the Global Brain. You can participate in these virtual meetings
yourself by installing the free 3D browser, see
http://www.mheim.com/cyberforum/ The transcript of our sessions can
be found at http://www.mheim.com/cyberforum/html/archive.html
A feature article on our work with the "Global Brain" has appeared in
New Scientist magazine, 24 June 2000, p. 22. It is based on
extensive interviews with PCP board members Heylighen, Bollen, and
Joslyn, and our colleagues in the global brain mailing list, Norman
Johnson and Ben Goertzel. Although this paper has created a lot of
publicity for our work, the journalist, Michael Brooks, has made it
rather sensationalist, in addition to including a few factual errors.
It emphasizes the scary, "Big Brother"-like possibilities, while
minimizing the in-built protections against such abuse. For a
somewhat more balanced view, read the accompanying New Scientist
editorial.
The article is available at:
http://www.newscientist.com/features/features_224417.html
and the editorial at:
http://www.newscientist.com/editorial/editorial.jsp?id=ns224444
As we anticipated in the previous newsletter, the publication of this
article seems to have suddenly aroused a flurry of interest in our
work, resulting in lots of email reactions and in further interviews
with journalists in Belgium, Holland, Chile and Canada. Having to
answer the same questions again and again (and then see the same
misunderstandings crop up once more) has stimulated us to finally
prepare a "Global Brain FAQ". The as yet unfinished text is available
at: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html Comments about questions
and answers are appreciated.
Francis Heylighen has written a long paper reviewing the concept of
the "Global Superorganism", an extension of the Global Brain concept
to model the evolution of society as a whole, and especially to
understand its future development. The paper will be submitted to the
Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems. Comments are invited to
the draft text, available at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Superorganism.pdf
PCP CONTRIBUTORS
On May 8, 2000, Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko, a long-time contributor
to the Principia Cybernetica Project, unexpectedly died. A memorial
page for Sasha has been set-up on the web at
http://www.piclab.com/sasha , where the people who have known him can
post personal remembrances.
Joel de Rosnay, an associate of the Principia Cybernetica Project,
has authored several wide-ranging and well-written books touching on
the concepts of systems theory, evolution of complexity and the
Global Brain. His most recent book, "The Symbiotic Man: A New
Understanding of the Organization of Life and a Vision of the
Future", has now been updated and translated into English. We would
recommend it to anybody interested in understanding complex systems
and the future evolution of society.
More info on the Amazon page:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071357440/o/qid%3D952857721/sr%3D8-1/002-5815124-3101855
John E. Stewart, an Australian theorist, has written a book,
"Evolution's Arrow: The direction of evolution and the future of
humanity" (Chapman Press, Australia, 2000), in which he develops a
view of evolution very close to the one of PCP. Its main argument is
that evolution progresses in the direction of cooperative
organisations of greater scale and evolvability, up to global
society. It is available at http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/
We are now discussing with John about the differences between his
approach and our theory of metasystem transitions, in the hope of
coming to a better understanding of both. The chief novelty of John's
approach is his suggestion that MST's may take place because of an
agent taking control over a group for purely selfish purposes, but
then being turned by selective presssures into an efficient "manager"
that promotes synergy and cooperation between the members of the
group. This mechanism can be applied from the level of DNA taking
control over an autocatalytic cycle, up to human society with its
kings and emperors. A review by F. Heylighen of John's book together
with some related books on evolutionary transitions will appear in
the journal "Complexity". The paper is available at:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Review_Complexity.pdf
On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean we have had extensive discussions
with Bryan Thompson, a researcher from Cognitive Technologies Inc.
Bryan had previously been the driving force behind two research
proposals (to DARPA and NSF) about collaborative cognition in which
we participated. His way of thinking is very close to ours, and it is
likely we will collaborate more intensively in the future. Bryan is
exploring the creation of an interest group within the WWW
consortium, to discuss standards for a "cognitive web", and
suggested to get some kind of legal protection for our "global brain"
label (although several others have been using this label, for
various activities and technologies, Bryan suggested that we should
register a "global brain initiative").
ASSOCIATIVE NETWORKS MODELS OF PCP WEB
Johan Bollen has now finished a draft of his PhD thesis on
"Application of Associative Network Models to Web Linking and
Retrieval". Because of various other duties, the PhD defense has had
to be postponed and will normally take place in a few months. The
thesis includes a detailed analysis of the associative structure of
Principia Cybernetica Web, derived from the log of user requests to
our server. This is illustrated by a number of impressive graphs
showing the semantic connections between the most important nodes of
our web, and a number of experimental tests evaluating how easy it is
to retrieve particular nodes given particular requests or starting
points.
You can try out Johan's "enhanced" search engine for PCP web at
http://bighorn.lanl.gov:8077/jserv-bin/SpreadAct_PCP_loop It is based
on "spreading activation": the engine first retrieves the PCP pages
that have the keywords you entered in its title, and then uses a
matrix of associations to retrieve additional pages that are
associatively related to the ones found first. The association matrix
is still based on our old learning rules applied to the web log, and
is therefore likely to be less efficient than a planned one based on
our new algorithms that take into account duration of user visits.
At present, Johan is measuring the quality of the recommendations
(precision and recall) by comparing the recommendations of the system
with expert estimates of the relevance of the recommendations for a
number of typical queries. (The experts, of course, are us, members
and associates of the PCP board.) This will allow him to fine-tune
the parameters of the system.
WORK ON ONTOLOGIES AT LANL
Getting a decent link-type semantics and an ontology for PCP has been
an important goal for a while. Like most everything we proposed over
ten years ago, the community is moving quickly in our direction. In
particular, the need for ontology markup and exchange standards,
coupled with loosely hierarchical representations of semantic
relations, is understood now more than ever. Cliff Joslyn's
Distributed Knowledge Systems and Modelling Team
(http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/KS_Team/) in Los Alamos is starting
to pursue this kind of activity. The goal is to develop a generic
knowledge environment which will allow communities to self-elicit and
represent their ontological knowledge structures.
Some of this has been prompted by some very recent advances in
computational linguistics. In particular, we're tracking the work
begun by Steven Pinker, and much more fully developed now within the
linguistics community, towards the identification of a small,
canonical, generative set of semantic relations related to each other
in a loosely hierarchical multiple inheritance type lattice. While
these are proposed to represent the semantics of natural language
texts, we've hypothesized that they should also inform a sufficient
set of link types for ontological networks.
Among the other things we're examining are Sowa's conceptual graphs
and Visual Basic extensions to use Visio as a GUI platform. The other
essential ingredient is a sufficient, presumably XML-based, ontology
exchange markup language for full read-write compatibility. We're
tracking the standards community moving in this direction (e.g. The
WWW Consortium, DOM, XSchema, RDF, etc.).
Cliff was recently invited to SRI International in Menlo Park, CA, to
address a loose consortium of Silicon Valley researchers and
developers trying to develop a Dynamic Knowledge Repository (DKR)
within an Open Hypertext Standard (OHS). This group is led by Doug
Engelbart of SRI fame, and whose early work (invention of the mouse
and other essential elements of the present computer interface) we
know as being so important for us and everyone, and who is now with
the Bootstrap Institute http://www.bootstrap.org along with SRI.
Cliff found Engelbart to be a charming and insightful man, who is
very appreciative of everything PCP is trying to do.
Cliff's talk spanned a number of issues, including PCP (technology
and form and content,), Lab activities, and the ideas described
above. You can look at the overheads at
http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/KS_Team/sri.pdf.
WHAT'S NEW IN PCP WEB
The following nodes in Principia Cybernetica Web have undergone substantive
editing, or have been newly added during the last four months.
All documents are available via http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/RECENT.html
* Aug 29, 2000: F. Heylighen: Biographical Sketch (updated)
* Aug 22, 2000: Increasing intelligence: the Flynn effect (new!)
* Aug 9, 2000: The Global Brain FAQ (new!)
* Aug 2, 2000: References on the Global Brain / Superorganism (added
Bloom's "Global Brain")
* Jun 26, 2000: Links on Complexity, Self-organization and
ArtificialLife (links added)
* Jun 26, 2000: References on the Global Brain / Superorganism
(NewScientist feature added)
* May 31, 2000: Societal Progress (updated)
* May 31, 2000: Web Connectivity Analysis (links added)
* May 17, 2000: References to Principia Cybernetica in different
servers ("Disinformation" ref added)
* May 17, 2000: Metasystem Transitions in Biology (references added)
* May 15, 2000: Cybernetics and Systems Journals (Systems Research
&Behavioral Science updated)
* May 15, 2000: Principia Cybernetica Mailing Lists (PCP-discuss
nowreplaces PRNCYB-L)
* May 15, 2000: PCP-discuss usage instructions (updated for Majordomolists)
* May 15, 2000: Basic References on the Global Brain / Superorganism
(added "Symbiotic Man" & "Evolution's Arrow")
TOPICS ON PCP-DISCUSS
The following topics were announced or discussed on the PCP-discuss mailing
list (see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MAIL.html) during the months of
May to August. There was an especially intense discussion about the
"intelligent design" view of evolution, which developed into a
discussion of informational dualism and semiotics. The full text of
all original messages and replies is available via the new
PCP-discuss archive:
http://bruce.edmonds.name/pcp-discuss/2000/thread.html
* The Missing Elephant - Norman K. McPhail
* Fwd: Ackoff Center Press Release - Cliff Joslyn
* Fwd: 100th anniversary of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Birthday - Cliff Joslyn
* Fwd: Systems Approach to Scenario Planning Workshop - Francis Heylighen
* Fwd: The Miski Project: Poster-Centric Message Subscription
Protocol - Cliff Joslyn
* [Fwd: Announcement: Web Guide to Complex Systems] - Cliff Joslyn
* science and limits - henry cohen
* sequential emergence - John J. Kineman
* Informational dualism - John J. Kineman
* Semiotics and biology/evolution - Cliff Joslyn
* GNU SEARCH NEW MODELS (fwd) - Sascha Ignjatovic
* "Intelligent Design" - Alexei Sharov
* "Intelligent Design" lobby Congress against Darwinism - Luis Rocha
* Parsimony et al. - Cliff Joslyn
* Fwd: Quiver: another tack on finding "authoritative" websites - Cliff Joslyn
* Why the Future Doesn't Need Us - Norman K. McPhail
* Discussion paper - Gerhard Werner
* Last CFP: Special issue FOS on "Context in Context" - Bruce Edmonds
* Papers from "Starting from Society" symp. on-line & new CFP - Bruce Edmonds
USER ANNOTATIONS
User comments to PCP web continue to pour in at a high rate, though
not all of them are that interesting ... Here is a selection of
topics for the last four months.
All annotations are available via http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/USANNOT.html
* Jul 27, 2000: why, Correction (to GODEXIST) by aleander zee
* Jul 7, 2000: don't do this to Occam, Comment (to ATHEISM) by E. Wieringa
* Jul 6, 2000: How can the universe ultimately be deterministic?,
Comment (to FREEDOM) by Mark Walter
* Jun 29, 2000: ethics is resolution of private moral conflict, not
ideology, Refutation (to ETHICS) by Craig Hubley
* Jun 26, 2000: Pantheism., Comment (to PANTHEISM) by Kow Chai
* Jun 26, 2000: No God?, Comment (to ATHEISM) by Kow Chai
* Jun 25, 2000: Norbert Viener - autor of cybernetics as a
philosophical aproach, Comment (to ^PCPBIBLIO) by uri eitan
* Jun 22, 2000: The Creator & General Systems Theory, Comment by
Michael Greenstein
* Jun 19, 2000: a fascist ideology is implicit in the "brain"
metaphor, Refutation (to TOTALFRE) by Craig Hubley
* Jun 18, 2000: Non-volition: a test, Refutation (to FREEDOM) by Cameron Reilly
* Jun 17, 2000: Autopoiesis, and human-machine intelligence: a
comparative book review., Comment (to EVOLUT) by Ashley Holmes
* Jun 16, 2000: Do I need to do something I am not?, Comment by
Timothy J Monicken
* Jun 11, 2000: Evolution still speed-up, Comment (to DEFAULT) by
Mike Soukharev
* Jun 8, 2000: Variation and Natural Selection Must Have the Same
Cause, Comment (to WFISSUE) by Robert Hamilton
* Jun 5, 2000: look to tensegrity as pivotal concept...all about AMI,
Comment by Timothy Monicken
* May 30, 2000: Viable System Model, Comment (to cybsysth) by Patrick
Hoverstadt
* May 30, 2000: Definition of integration, Comment (to INTDIF) by Jurek Kolasa
* May 26, 2000: Then what is our name for what we are growing
toward?, Comment (to GODEXIST) by Ernst Renaud
* May 24, 2000: Wikiforum a system in MetaSystemTransition ...
update, Comment (to TURCHIN) by Fridemar Pache
* May 22, 2000: Meme's and the survival of the imagined self.,
Comment (to MEMIN) by John Cafe
* May 21, 2000: Few errors in the book (Russian edition), Correction
(to POSBOOK) by Alex Kouznetsov
* May 21, 2000: The problem of free will, Refutation (to MANIFESTO)
by Neil Fitzgerald
* May 12, 2000: Nice theory we have..., Comment (to ETERQUES) by Derekon
UNSUBSCRIBING
If you wish to stop receiving messages from this mailing list, use the form at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPNSUBS.html or send the following one line
message to the address Majordomo@listserv.vub.ac.be
unsubscribe pcp-news
_________________________________________________________________________
Francis Heylighen <fheyligh@vub.ac.be> -- Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels, Krijgskundestr. 33, 1160 Brussels, Belgium
tel +32-2-6442677; fax +32-2-6440744; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
========================================
Posting to pcp-discuss@lanl.gov from Francis Heylighen <fheyligh@vub.ac.be>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Sep 25 2000 - 19:00:23 BST