Inner Alignment Richard Watson 2024-03-12 | "An ability to respond begins with inner alignment: How phase synchronisation effects transitions to higher levels of agency"Tazzio Tissot, Mike Levin, Chris Buckley and Richard Watson.R.A.Watson@soton.ac.ukAbstractHow do multiple active components at one level of organisation create agential wholes at higher levels of organisation? For example, in organismic development, how does the multi-scale autonomy of the organism arise from the interactions of the molecules, cells and tissues that an organism contains? And, in the major evolutionary transitions, how does a multicellular organism, for example, arise as an evolutionary unit from the selective interests of its unicellular ancestors? We utilise computational models as a way to think about this general question. We take a deliberately minimalistic notion of an agent: a competency to take one of two possible actions to minimise stress. Helping ourselves to this behaviour at the microscale, we focus on conditions where this same type of agency appears spontaneously at a higher level of organisation. We find that a simple process of positive feedback on the timing of individual responses, loosely analogous to the natural phase synchronisation of weakly coupled oscillators, causes such a transition in behaviour. The emergent collectives that arise become, quite suddenly, able to respond to their external stresses in the same (minimal) sense as the original microscale units. This effects a dramatic rescaling of the system behaviour, and a quantifiable increase in problem-solving competency, serving as a model of how higher-level agency emerges from a pool of lower-level agents or active matter. We discuss how this dynamical ‘waking-up’ of higher-level collectives, through the alignment of their internal dynamics, might relate to reproductive/cell-cycle synchronisation in evolutionary transitions and development.
Songs of Life and Mind: Part 1b,c Richard Watson 2023-11-30 | Part 1b: Learning is reverse engineering Part 1c: Desiderata for a new theory
Songs of Life and Mind: Parts 3b,c Richard Watson 2023-11-30 | aka Taking the Music of Life metaphor seriously
Songs of Life and Mind: Part 2 Richard Watson 2023-11-30 | The Music of Life: Organisms are Songs2a: Songs / phenotypes2B: Songs / genotypes
Songs of Life and Mind: Part 1a Richard Watson 2023-11-30 | aka Taking the Music of Life metaphor seriouslyPart 1a: Introduction - whats the problem
The Reductionist Crisis of Meaning and a Buddhist reframing (Boston, Aug 2023) Richard Watson 2023-11-30 | Some thoughts on how reductionist science creates a Crisis of Meaning, and how a Buddhist reframing might point the way out of the pit of despair. Richard Watson (University of Southampton) presenting thoughts developed with the Centre for the Study of Apparent Selves (Katmandu)
Whats Love Got To Do With It? From survival of the fittest to compassionate connection. Richard Watson 2022-05-01 | A new explanatory framework for creative adaptation in biological systems is emerging which turns the ‘survival of the fittest’ worldview on its head and offers an antidote to the short-term self-interest that fuels our biggest global challenges.Online course starts May 17th 2022. Open to the public.More information: richardawatson.com/coursesRegistration: earthliteracies.org/Richard-Watson-Whats-love-got-to-do-with-it
Whats Love Got To Do With It? From survival of the fittest to compassionate connection. Richard Watson 2022-04-30 | A new explanatory framework for creative adaptation in biological systems is emerging which turns the ‘survival of the fittest’ worldview on its head and offers an antidote to the short-term self-interest that fuels our biggest global challenges.Online course starts May 17th 2022. Open to the public.More information: richardawatson.com/coursesRegistration: earthliteracies.org/Richard-Watson-Whats-love-got-to-do-with-it
