The Atlas of Social Complexity. Content Theme 2: The Complex Dynamics of Human Psychology

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. This first theme includes six chapters, which I have so far blogged on. Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness. Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness. Chapter 10 explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. Chapter 11 is about human-machine intelligence.

 

The second content theme concerns the dynamics of human psychology. Here is a quick summary of the theme.

 

COMPLEX PSYCHOLOGY

There is no defined field of study called complex psychology. There are only somewhat different areas of research that could be connected – although, there is the whisper of a theoretical framework, namely dynamical systems theory. This lack of explicit awareness and synthesis puts the study of psychological complexity at a disadvantage because most psychologists and complexity scientists draw on only parts of the field. Our tour seeks to remedy this problem by taking readers on a journey through this research and synthesising them into a working complex psychology.

 

This theme is comprised of four chapters:

• Human psychology as dynamical system (Ch 13)
• Psychopathology of mental disorders (Ch 14)
• Healing and the therapeutic process (Ch 15)
• Mindfulness, imagination and creativity (Ch 16)

 

These chapters follow, in order, four key questions these scholars ask in their work. Chapter 13 begins with the most fundamental: How best should we view the human condition?  Chapter 14 asks: What is a mental disorder and how best should we measure and assess it? Chapter 15 asks: What does complexity have to say about the healing and therapeutic process? And, finally, Chapter 16 asks: What can the study of social complexity say about the positive aspects of our human psychology, and the power and healing potential of mindfulness, imagination, and creativity?

 

CLICK HERE to purchase the book, or to request it for your library.

 

 

KEY WORDS: dynamical psychology, symptom networks, dynamics of therapy, psychopathology, mindfulness, creativity.

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 11: Human-Machine

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness.

• Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis.
• Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness.
• Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness.
• Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness.
• Chapter 10 explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. 
• Chapter 11, the final one for this section and the focus of the current post, is about human-machine intelligence.

CLICK HERE to purchase the book, or to request it for your library.

 

HUMAN-MACHINE, A quick summary

AI is everywhere today. And it happened quickly. What does it all mean for human consciousness?

As we navigate the Digital Anthropocene, AI and technology provoke critical questions about how our cognition, emotions, and awareness are evolving alongside these new technologies. In particular, they raise quesdtions about the current development and future evolution (as a species) of our cognition, emotion and consciousness in relation to technological systems. Chapter 11 of the Atlas explores these questions. Our guide for this journey is the American literary critic and posthumanist scholar, Katherine Hayles, and her theory of human-technical cognitive assemblages, as outlined in her book, Unthought.

To put Hayles’ framing to work, we do three things in this chapter.

• We define what she means by human-technical cognitive assemblages.
• We rework her definition of machine cognition to better align it with the study of social complexity.
• We set the stage for Chapter 22, in which we spend considerable time exploring our current complex system of systems of digital machines and our posthuman condition.

Here is a glimps at some of our conclusions from this chapter.

The inability of machine cognition to explain itself is why scholars refer to machine learning as a ‘black box’. We know how to programme machine cognition using artificial neural nets, genetic algorithms or computational models; but we often have little insight into how machine cognition arrives at its conclusions because these machine are ignorant of what they do, beyond the output they provide and the data upon which they are trained. Case in point is Cliff Kuang’s New York Times article, Can A.I. be taught to explain itself?[1] In the article, Kuang explains that “as machine learning becomes more powerful, the field’s researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know – or how they know it”. 

This gets to a core problem of nonconscious cognition: while it extends our cognitive and emotional life and our consciousness to a near global level, it still requires a significant degree of attendant human intelligence, involvement, management, guidance, or control. This core problem also points to a wider and as yet unaddressed problem in our travels: complexity. Machine cognition is very good at ‘difficult’ and ‘complicated’, processing information and large amounts of data, in brute force, at speeds that are humanly impossible; but human cognition is still better at complexity. Winning at chess is one thing, but winning in diplomacy is another. Human consciousness needs to retain is executive function. The Self evolved and emerged for a reason: complex living systems, even when their embodiment is extended to the mechanical and digital, require guidance, even when that executive function is limited by its own consciousness.

Or at least for now.

What we will become, as posthuman cyborgs, over the course of the several hundred years, given our increasing integration into and cognitive dependency upon a global network of human-machine cognitive assemblages, is difficult to determine. One thing, however, is for sure: any exhaustive study of human cognition, emotion and consciousness needs to contend, at some point, with this newly emerging form of human evolution, as we move through the early stages of the Digital Anthropocene.

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/magazine/can-ai-be-taught-to-explain-itself.html

KEY WORDS: Machine cognition, actor network theory, new materialism, posthumanism, transhumanism, human-technical cognitive assemblages.

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 10: The Self

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness.

 

Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis.

Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness.

Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness.

Chapter 9 explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness.

Chapter 10 – the current post – explores the complex multilevel dynamics of the Self. 

THE SELF, A quick summary

The Self is a milestone in the evolution of consciousness. One can think of The Self, be it at any level, as some form of executive function consciousness through which an organism recognises itself and its environment. For some social animals, The Self has evolved from a very primitive, primordial form into more complex dynamics, based on the evolutionary power of social life, and with the human self being the most complex.

 

As shown in Figure 1, Chapter 10 reviews the literature on the human self and its multiple forms and levels, including

• primordial-self, 
• reflexive-self
• autobiographical-self
• social-self
• public-self

 

 

Chapter 10 also explores how The Self exists as much for the body as it does for the agency of our self-reflecting mind, the emotional core out of which The Self emerges; and, finally, how The Self exists for others in our complex social worlds, including our outward facing public-self. Authors include Damasio, Temple Grandin and Jaak Panksepp on the primordial self and the role of emotions and feeling in mind self and consciousness; Merleau-Ponty and Evan Thompson on the self, cognition, and embodiment; Freud and symbolic interactionism on the reflexive self; and Satre and Mead on the social and public self.

 

 

KEY WORDS: The self, primordial-self, reflexive-self, autobiographical-self, social-self, public-self.

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 9: Brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. Chapter 6 addresses autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness. Chapter 9 -- the focus of the current post -- explores a complexity framing of brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness.

 

Brain-based cognition, emotion and consciousness

 

Over the last two decades, the cognitive, neurological and psychological sciences have made major progress in our understanding of mind/brain and its links with our embodied existence.

If ever a topic screamed for a complexity theory, then brain-based cognition would be at the top of the list!

 

But first some hard theoretical and empirical work needs to be done. In this chapter we use a social complexity framework to sort our position vis-à-vis six major debates within the field:

• cognition and life
• the mind/brain dualism
• the unconscious
• modularity
• emotions
• brain-based consciousness
  

With these issues sorted, we then outline the contours of a new complex systems theory of consciousness, which serves as a framework for the rest of our tour. 

 

KEY WORKDS: brain-based cognition, emotions, the emotional self, embodied mind, cognitive unconscious, consciousness, modularity, paleomammalian emotions.

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 8: Immune System Cognition

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. Chapter 6 addresses Autopoiesis. Chapter 7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 (Immune System Cognition), which is our focus here, explores how the immune system, just like bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider brain-based consciousness.

 

THE IMMUNE SYSTEM SELF

Figure 1: Macrophages attacking cancer cell (the large, spiky mass). Upon fusing with the cancer cell, the macrophages (smaller white cells) inject toxins that kill the tumour cell. Immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer is an active area of medical research. By Raowf Guirguis and Susan Arnold.[1]

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[1] National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, Visuals Online. https://visualsonline.cancer.gov/details.cfm?imageid=2370 accessed 5 March 2023.

 

As everyone who has taken a biology class learns, the founding principal of immunology is the concept of ‘identity’ and the capacity of immune systems to distinguish between self and non-self. While the immune system functions at a different level of consciousness than our brain-based self, it is nonetheless continually engaged in a complex set of cognitive processes that are in constant communication with our body’s various cognitive systems and agents, including the microbiota-gut-brain axis. (For further reading, see Klenerman, Paul. The Immune System: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017)

In this chapter, after a brief introduction to the immune system, we explore the leading-edge view of immunity that not only resonates with the research elsewhere in Theme 2 but is also fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the immune system’s complex relationship with its environment and how this relationship can be harnessed to treat disease and infection more effectively. This approach is called ecoimmunology.

 

That is not to say the field of ecoimmunology is without controversy or internal debate, because it is. In response, we end Chapter 8 recommending what readers take away from the debates within immunology around issues of cognition, identity, memory and the self; and what research direction we think most useful for the theoretical weave we seek to construct. 

Here is a short summary of our recommendations:

• First, we strongly recommend embracing eco-immunology.
• Second, to address the ‘immune self and cognition’ debate, we recommend not taking a side. Instead, we advocate for combining approaches. It is of significant irony that the mainstream representational approach – being current scientific convention – embraces a complex systems view of the immune self; while complex systems scholars such as Maturana, Varela, Jerne and Tauber disagree with it.
• A useful example of combining approaches is the two-tier schema developed by António Coutinho, the Portuguese immunologist, and Francisco Varela, in combination with their colleagues at the Paris school they helped to create.[1]
• Third, we recommend integrating the representational immune self with eco-immunology, while dropping the Jerne and Varela self/nonsense distinction.
• Fourth, we recommend embracing Tauber’s argument that the immune system self, like most complex systems, lacks a centralised command centre and therefore a centralised identity.
• Fifth, the immune system is not without hierarchy.
• Finally, we recommend the representational view that immune systems do, in varying degrees, represent things, see things, learn things, hold memory, and remember things. We see no compelling evidence to think otherwise. If the mind is in every cell of the body, then it only makes sense it resides in the immune system as well.

 

KEY WORDS: Immune system cognition, eco-immune system, ecoimmunology, representational immune self, cellular cognition, bacterial cognition.

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[1] Coutinho, A. Biological research. 2003: 36(1), 17-26.

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 7: Bacteria and the Brain

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. Chapter 6 addresses Autopoiesis. Chapter 7 (Bacteria and the Brain) turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness.

 

Our rationale for surveying this topic:

The arguments in favour of autopoiesis and cellular cognition are heavily theoretical and in need for evidence. Chapter 7 provides the empirical support. We review the literature on bacteria and our brains, specifically brain-gut-microbiota communication and bacterial intelligence within the human body. Research on bacterial cognition and social behaviours demonstrates cellular cognition to be empirically viable.

 

The outcome is remarkable.

 

Not only does this research provide direct evidence for cellular cognition, but it also leads to new ways of thinking about what constitutes a brain, as well as how lower levels of cognition self-organise, from an evolutionary perspective, to form lager and more complex cognitive systems. The mind is in every cell of the body!

 

Such insights into embodied cognition at levels previously thought non-existent is transforming not only our science but also our medicine, leading to new ways of thinking about therapeutically communicating with our body’s microbiota: from probiotic therapies and the gut-mental health link to our human microbiota and the study of bacterial quorum sensing.

 

FOR MORE SEE THESE IDEAS, SEE THESE LINKS OR JUST TYPE THE BELOW KEY WORDS INTO YOUR SEARCH ENGINE:

 

Social behaviour of bacteria

 

Bacterial intelligence

 

Bacterial quorum sensing -- Brilliant Ted Talk by Bonnie Bassler

 

Gut microbiome

 

Brain-gut-microbiota communication

 

READ ABOUT the pioneering work of Eshel Ben-Jacob and team in this area

 

 

CLICK HERE TO READ THE BOOK

 

 

KEY WORDS: bacterial intelligence, bacterial social behaviours, gut microbiome, Brain-gut-microbiota communication, bacterial quorum sensing, swarm behaviour.

Controversis, Pitfalls and Promises of AI in Health Care in South Africa -- Public Lecture Nelson Mandela University

I want to thank Andrea Hurst and Harsheila Riga for hosting me at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa to run a series of workshops, seminars and public lecture.

This post is in regard to the Public Lecture I did on The Controversies, Pitfalls and Promises of AI in Health Care and Public Health in South Africa.

HERE IS A QUICK OVERVIEW OF MY PRESENTATION

TITLE:

The Digital Transformation of Public Health, including Artificial Intelligence – Controversies, Pitfalls and Promises

 

ABSTRACT:

Everywhere we see today the promise of AI and digital infrastructures to improve the quality, engagement and efficiency of healthcare and public health. But, we also see warnings and calls for pause by various stakeholders, including some of those creating this technology. What is the reality of this promise? Should we embrace it, or should we be worried and resist it? Drawing on a series of case studies and current research, this lecture will explore some of the key controversies, pitfalls and promises of these new technologies in our healthcare and public health.

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CLICK HERE for a link to my PowerPoint.

CLICK HERE for a link to DigitalHealth Africa 2024.

CLICK HERE for a link to the work of Tshilidzi Marwala, AI expert and Rector of the United Nations University; Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations

Why is it so hard to think about the impact of climate change and environmental exposure on brain health?

I want to thank Andrea Hurst and Harsheila Riga for hosting me at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa to run a series of workshops, seminars and public lecture.

This post is in regard to the Seminar I ran for their series, What Were We Thinking?

CLICK HERE for a link to watch YouTube videos of the seminars in the series.

 

HERE IS A DESCRIPTION OF THE SEMINAR SERIES

“What were we THINKING???” asks a subtly different question depending on the emphasis; but it is always accompanied by bemusement, perplexity, self-ridicule or a host of similar responses over our past naivete, stupidity or madness. To ask the question is already to have made the shift in perspective needed to reflect on past perspectives with new eyes. 

In this seminar series we invite you to help us consider the planetary crisis we face right now, with its sheaf of human-created environmental calamities and its existential threat to humanity itself, in light of the question: What were we THINKING???

We invite you to consider: “What has been so problematic in our thinking that we now face environmental and social catastrophe? Is such thinking really a thing of the past? Despite the clear evidence of global decline, the very real possibility of an existential threat to humanity itself, and increasing global efforts to mitigate and adapt to the change through agreements such as the Paris Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals, the world largely continues unabated on its current path. Some change is taking place, but nothing close to what is needed to undo the damage. Is there THINKING going on at all? We are assuming that human activity is an outcome of human thought. It follows that if we change the way we think, we can change our actions and thereby the world. But what is it that makes us seemingly unable to take the necessary action to avert the clearly impending environmental and social catastrophe? If thinking can change our path, does our inability to change our path suggest that we are not yet thinking?

And so what now? We also invite you to help us consider how to begin thinking or how to change our thinking in face of the threat to the world posed by humankind.

HERE IS A DESCRIPTION OF MY PRESENTATION

Why is it so hard to think about the impact of climate change and environmental
exposure on mental health and brain health? 

Research shows that climate change and environmental exposures such as air pollution impact our brain health, from early-life cognitive development to mid-life mental wellbeing to later-life dementia and cognitive frailty. Extreme weather events, like hurricanes and floods, can cause psychological distress and trauma. Rising temperatures can lead to increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Air pollution can lead to long-term neurodegenerative impacts. Despite some degree of public policy changes, most countries (from governments to citizens) around the world continue to ignore this massive impact. In terms of how we think about the environment and climate change - both individually and collectively - how can we change thinking in this area?

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CLICK HERE for a link to my PowerPoint.

CLICK HERE to read the policy agenda we outlined for addressing the impact of air pollution on brain health, including dementia. 

CLICK HERE for a link to InSPIRE, a policy and research consortium for mitigating the impact of air pollution and the exposome on brain health and mental health, of which I am the director, along with colleagues across the UK and Europe. Our website has articles, policy briefs, lesson plans and links to help people learn more about the impact of air pollution on brain health. 

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Exposome.

COMPLEX-IT workshop, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa

I want to thank Andrea Hurst and Harsheila Riga for hosting me at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa to run a series of workshops, seminars and public lecture.

This post is in regard to the Workshop I ran on our computational software platform, COMPLEX-IT. It was a six hour intensive, so thanks to all of those who attended for your brilliant questions and also for staying engaged over such a long period of time. I must say I got back to my hotel totally exhausted! LOL!

A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE WORKSHOP

COMPLEX-IT: A computational, multi-methods platform for non-experts to explore complex social science and health data

ABSTRACT

While the complexity sciences offer a new approach to thinking about social and health data, making use of their computational methods can be considerably challenging for non-experts – particularly postgraduate students, applied researchers, policy evaluators and civil servants. There is a solution! This workshop will introduce COMPLEX-IT, a free online R-platform designed for non-experts to employ the latest developments in machine learning, data visualisation, participatory systems mapping, network analysis, simulation, data forecasting, and cluster analysis. For our workshop, we will explore a real-world data set to walk through the steps of using COMPLEX-IT and the concepts of complexity science to show how these tools can help attendees gain new insights into social and health data. The goal is for participants to leave with a new methods platform they can use in their own work.

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For those who attended or simply might be interested, here are some links to the material from the day.

CLICK HERE for a link to the PowerPoint from the Workshop.

CLICK HERE for a link to COMPLEX-IT.

CLICK HERE for a link to the dataset we explored. NOTE: The dataset is a CSV (comma separated) file, created in EXCEL. It is just a sample to function as an example. It contains several public health indicators (e.g., access to health services, fuel poverty, crime, teen pregnancies, etc) for 100 authority districts in England, UK.

 

 

 

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 6: Autopoiesis and cellular cognition

As I stated in my previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. Given this theme, there is no better place to start with two of the most fundamental questions of existence:

 

1.        What is Life?

2.        What is cognition?

 

For Maturana and Varela, the scholars who hold our focus in Chapter 6, the answer to each comes from the other: life is being aware, and being aware is to be alive. When first introduced in the 1970s, autopoiesis was dismissed as theoretical biology. Some might wonder, then, why our tour of the present future would look back so far?

 

The answer is simple enough. Over fifty years later, as a minimal definition, it has become a hallmark of disruptive complexity science, and one that has led to important insights into how life, including human life works, radically upending eons of philosophy that restricted cognition to the brain. The idea that cognition is not synonymous with the brain or brain dependent remains a radical idea that has yet to be fully embraced.

 

Still, there have been some key advances in Maturana and Varela’s initial definition, which Luisa Damiano and Pier Luisi offered in their article, Toward an autopoietic redefinition of life – notice the slightly different spelling of autopoiesis. They state:

 

“An autopoietic system is organized as a network of production processes which produces the components which, through their interactions and transformations, permanently regenerate the network of processes constituting the system itself as a concrete topological unit, separated from its medium by a boundary and related to it through cognitive or adaptive coupling. Or, in the simpler version: A living system is a system capable of self-production and self-maintenance through a regenerative network of processes which takes place within a boundary of its own making and regenerates itself through cognitive or adaptive interactions with the medium”.[1]

 

Chapters 6 – 11 use this definition to then explore how, from bacteria and simple cells to insects and humans, cognition is everywhere in every cell of life on planet earth, extending, even further, potentially, to machine intelligence, as we will see.

 

 

KEY WORDS: autopoiesis, cellular cognition, minimal definition of life, Maturana and Varela, theoretical biology, biological complexity.

 

CLICK HERE TO ORDER BOOK OR READ MORE

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[1] Luisa Damiano and Pier Luigi Luisi, ‘Towards an Autopoietic Redefinition of Life’, Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 40, no. 2 (2010). p. 149.