During the 2010-2011 course I have been a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex to work on systemic models of consciousness. I was a research associate of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.

Apparently, the lesson conveyed by Graham's analysis is that any political-technological system that centralizes control, prevents and fights criticism, and decides about industry ignoring human conditions will lead to failure. Apparently the neglect of humanist stances on industrialisation lead to industrial catastrophe. The analysis of Havel concerning the fall of the Soviet regime point to the idea that science only is a no-go strategy for technology.

In my perspective, the failure described in Graham's book came fully from the opposite side: industrial decisions were taken ignoring the engineering assessments when they did not fulfill the subjective, arbitrary and narrow visions of politicians.

My personal conclusion is that it is necessary to better educate the politicians in science and technology to limit their ignorance. Political norms will not change nature norms. Nature is quit stubborn concerning its own laws.

However, it is also necessary to stress the education of engineers in the sense that all that we do -I'm an engineer- shall be directed to improving the living conditions of humans. Palchinsky seemed to know this. Soviets didn't understand that the best way to serve humans is not dogmatic politics but rigorous, systematic and complete -putting human experiences into the equations- science and engineering.

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer:

Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union

Harvard University Press
128 pages
1993
ISBN 0674354370

Value for time: 7

Main value: Get informed about the history of Soviet industrial policy.

The book is indeed an epistemic manual: how to create mental models about systems based on general considerations about systemhood and our knowledge. This may prove very useful in avoiding traps in system modeling.

An Introduction to General Systems Theory

Silver Anniversary Edition

Dorset House
279 pages
1975-2001
ISBN 0932633498

Value for time: 7

Main value: Get insights on how to think about specifici systems from a general perspective.

Radical Constructivism

A Way of Knowing and Learning

Routledge-Falmer
213 pages
2005
ISBN 0750705728

Radical constructivism is an epistemological theory offering an apparently new and radical alternative approach to questions about mind and reality in the context of human learning. It focus on the role that the thinker has in construing-up concepts. Glasersfeld offers a diverse and disperse theoretical account of radical constructivism -it is, basically a collection of re-edited essays that do not offer a uniform and coherent analysis of its concepts. Originally raised in the context of mathematics education it pretends to be a universal approach to human understanding of reality.

Value for time: 7

Main value: Awareness of the core idea

A Missing Link in Cybernetics

Logic and Continuity

Springer
352 pages
2009
ISBN 978-0-387-75163-4

Value for time: 7

Main value: Get informed about the history of AI and cybernetics.

The Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2011 Conference took place at Washington, USA on 4-6 November 2011.

The challenge of creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind calls for our joint efforts to better understand at a computational level how natural intelligent systems develop their cognitive and learning functions. BICA conference grew up from a AAAI Fall symposium, focusing on the emergent hot topics in computer, brain and cognitive sciences unified by the challenge of replicating the human mind in a computer.

In this event we presented a general model of emotion based on the interpretation of emotional processes as control reorganisations driven by values.

Concurrent control patterns deployed over neural components.

Adaptive systems use feedback as a key strategy to cope with uncertainty and change in their environments. The information fed back from the sensorimotor loop into the control architecture can be used to change different elements of the controller at four different levels: parameters of the control model, the control model itself, the functional organization of the agent and the functional components of the agent. The complexity of such a space of potential configurations is daunting. The only viable alternative for the agent –in practical, economical, evolutionary terms– is the reduction of the dimensionality of the configuration space.

This reduction is achieved both by functionalisation –or, to be more precise, by interface minimization– and by patterning, i.e. the selection among a predefined set of organisational configurations. This last analysis let us state the central problem of how autonomy emerges from the integration of the cognitive, emotional and autonomic systems in strict functional terms: autonomy is achieved by the closure of functional dependency.

This talk shows a general model of how the emotional biological systems operate following this theoretical analysis and how this model is also of applicability to a wide spectrum of artificial systems.

Get the slides of the talk.