Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki - User contributions [en]

Emergence of Consciousness Page

2014-06-26T20:00:22Z

Lusczeke: /* Beth and Sarah */

I created this page to share and discuss our models for the emergence of consciousness from matter. Please share your models and add discussion so we can all see and think about it. We will use this page in the end to write up a summary and hopefully compare and contrast the models and discuss what properties of consciousness can be explained by what model.

Thanks,
Alireza

=Working Ideas=

== (1) Consciousness as Hyper Attractors of Brain (Alireza)==
In this schema states of our mind/consciousness as attractors of the dynamics that arise from our brain. We receive sensory information that act as perturbations pushing the trajectory out of a basin of attractor and into a new basin.

[[File:photo.png | 500px|center]]

== (2) Reference! Tegmark - The fourth state of matter =
This can be an interesting starting point... at least one perspective on the topic http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf Sarah

=Perspective Summaries=
 
==Consciousness Table==
I thought that it might be useful to attempt to organize our understandings of consciousness in a table—perhaps to make clear where and whether a consensus emerges on the nature of the phenomena that we are investigating.

I offer here an idiosyncratic table that I find useful to organize my thoughts on this topic. Feel free to add/reorganize categories and qualify entries in the notes below.
Or better yet...can we come up with a simpler table that captures the typical properties that consciousness is thought to have or not have.
 --john balwit

<table>

<tr><td> </td><td>Property</td> <td>Yes </td><td>No</td> <td>NA </td></tr>
<tr><td>1.</td> <td>Requires matter</td> <td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td> </td></tr>
<tr><td>2.</td> <td>Exclusive property of biological systems</td> <td> x ?</td> <td> </td> <td> </td></tr>
<tr><td>3.</td> <td> Has parts <td> x ?</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>4.</td> <td>Admits of gradations or degree (continuous or discrete)
<td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>5.</td> <td>Likely to be artificial created in the AI lab <td> x</td> <td> x </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>6.</td> <td>Intrinsically paradoxical research area.
(involves strange loopy-ness Gödel, Turing) <td> ? ?</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>7.</td> <td>Requires interaction with external environment (perception?) <td> x x </td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>8.</td> <td>Requires interaction with internal environment (reflection?) <td> </td> <td> x x </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>9.</td> <td>Necessarily Embodied (result of sensor interactions, hormonal environment etc.) <td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>10.</td> <td>Necessarily Embedded (result of large scale system interactions) <td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>11.</td> <td>Deterministic system with stochastic inputs. <td> x ? </td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>12.</td> <td>Relies on quantum things that I do/do not understand <td> ? </td> <td> </td> <td>?</td></tr>
<tr><td>13.</td><td> Defined by its ineffability, will always recede from scientific apprehension. <td> ? ? </td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>14.</td><td> Encodes history (requires memory, genes) <td> x ?</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
</table>

 Notes: 
 I've added some ticks.. 

==Sean Hayes==

[http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html The Hard Problem of Consciousness]
:This paper makes the important distinction between the 'easy' and 'hard' problems of consciousness in relative terms. I think it would be useful to use this framework to focus the precise problems we're investigating around consciousness. 
My definition for consciousness at it's simplest form is just having subjective experience. While some of the discussion this afternoon touched on integrative brain problems (which falls under 'easy' problems of consciousness in the above, as a way to describe issues of cognition), my question is whether this property of consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. While this is difficult to address objectively, I think it can be approached from our perspectives by comparing consciousness with other emergent phenomena. 

The big question that I've been trying to resolve myself along this line of thinking is related to the 'binding problem' ([http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/images/8/8d/Revonsuo_and_Newman_1999_-_Binding_and_Consciousness.pdf 1],[http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/images/3/37/Revonsuo_1999_-_Binding_and_the_Phenomenal_Unity_of_Consciousness.pdf 2]). I'm probably bastardizing the definition a bit, but essentially the issue is conscious experience is not a distributed phenomenon but rather that experience is inherently singular - to me this is entirely distinct from emergence, which is inherently a distributed feature of a complex system. Moreover, our conscious experience not only receives input from the complex, distributed network of our brain, but itself can cause changes in brain behavior and function. Is this actually an emergent phenomenon, or the concentration of information into a centralized control (our subjective experience)? Are there characteristics of subjective experience which do act the way we expect emergent phenomena to behave?

==Cole Mathis==
I think that consciousness is an Emergent property of the electro-chemical interactions occurring in my brain. The difficulty in understanding the dynamics and/or the origin of consciousness is (in my opinion) the hard problem in emergence: how can macroscopic features of the system have causal control of the microscopic degrees of freedom? One of the canonical examples of emergent phenomena is the emergence of thermodynamics from statistical mechanics. Here the behavior of a system with many degrees of freedom (an ideal gas) can be effectively represented using bulk (emergent) variables (temperature, pressure, volume, etc.) This example is great but it says nothing about the flow of information in the system or the casual direction. For example consider a box of an ideal gas, if I hold the volume constant and heat this box, the pressure will go up. An increase in pressure on the macro scale corresponds to an increase in the average speed of the particles on the microscopic scale, however we do not say that the increased pressure caused the increase in the average speed (although we might say that the increase of the average translational kinetic energy caused the increase in pressure). In this system the causal arrow points only from the micro-scale to the macro-scale. With consciousness we have exactly the opposite situation. If the state of my neurons are the microscopic state variables and my conscious thoughts are the macroscopic variables, then when I think about typing, the macroscopic variables configure the microscopic variables in just the right way to send signals down to fingers, my fingers didn’t start typing and then cause my brain to think about typing (I hope.) So here the causal direction is reversed. How did this reversal/ asymmetry arise and how can we generalize this notion?
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/12/1314922110.full.pdf Quantifying Casual Emergence shows macro can beat micro]

==Claire Lagesse==

Here are some ideas about my personal experiment of what consciousness could be...
There is no reference but just some thinking from what I learned. I don't deal with consciousness in my every day work but as a conscious human being I experiment it every day ! :)
I'm really sorry for my french-english !

What is consciousness ? Where does it starts ? Where does it ends ? Are we conscious of the sun on our skin, of the wind, of our breathe, of our position, of the temperature, of all the elements surrounding us ? Does the consciousness start with a 'me' ? A dissociation of the external world from our body ? Then, what are the limits of our body ? Is the hair just fallen a part of 'me' ? What about my legs ? They are a part of my body, but if one is cut of it won't be 'me' any more. So maybe we could define our 'me' as the living part of our body. So, for people with a Locked Inside Syndrome their 'me' can be the minimal part of their body alive : their brain. That's maybe why the analogy is often made between the brain and consciousness : it is considered as the minimal part of our body which has to be alive for a 'me' still existing. Even our heart can be replace by a machine.

If we define consciousness with a 'me' apart from the surrounding world, it could be problematic for some persons with mental disease. What about autism ? In some cases, persons with a major autistic trouble cannot make the difference between their own body and the world surrounding them. Can we say they are not conscious ? That sounds a little extreme.

Could we extend consciousness to each living organism ? Is a plant conscious ? Plants are moving all day long, but at a different time scale than ours. They are moving with the sun, with the wind... Does it means they are conscious of them or could we just see it as a action / reaction mechanism ? It goes the same way for some animals. Is the jellyfish conscious of its moves with waves ? Is the shell conscious ? Is the frog conscious ? Each animal is responding to its physiological needs : feed, security and reproduction. Feed goes with a body, security goes with a surrounding (potentially dangerous) and reproduction goes with finding and interacting with another animal of my own specie.

Could we consider those behaviors as conscious ? What are the limits of this hypothesis ? It is possible to program a robot to find food, make itself secure and make sure to reproduce the sooner it can. But it won't be conscious those behaviors are for its own survival and its specie one. But can we say that animals are conscious of it ?

Thinking about artificial intelligence, one could say that consciousness begin with feelings, and a computer is not able to feel anything. Happiness, sadness, love, hate, if we look closely they all have a chemical reaction as an origin. The mystery could be what produce this chemical reaction.

Ants or bees have great collective behavior. They form a fascinating system with some extremely complex emerging properties. But it is not sure that each ant, each bee, is conscious it is taking part in a complex system. It is more about a robust collective intelligence than about consciousness. However, in an anthill 20% of ants are not doing anything. What is this 'useless' time for ? Are the ants conscious of this free time ? Is this demonstrating something about a system we are judging as hyper efficient ?

A third idea could be the knowledge that our consciousness is limited in the time. As human beings, we are conscious that we will die some day. So we develop some cults and funeral rite. Could it be a 'proof' of consciousness ? This way of thinking may exclude a lot of animals of consciousness.

One could ask the difference between consciousness and intelligence. Can an artificial intelligence be conscious ? Is consciousness recognizable by feelings, non efficient time or the simple fact to name it ? Could we say that consciousness is the amount of things linked to our body that we are not able to scientifically explain ? Does the consciousness define the 'me' out of my body limits ? And so what about all the unconscious things I do every day ? Breathe, blink, dream... Is it about the will of doing something more than in the fact of doing it ? Are we defined by our body, our will or our acts ? Is the consciousness the fact to ask ourselves about consciousness ?

==John Balwit ==
One comic = 1000 words. [http://xkcd.com/1037/ UMWELT]

Definitions matter. Definitions create boundaries around elements of a system that we attempt to model and understand. Definitions also create a background of implicit assumptions that are necessarily less well examined. Definitions of consciousness are perhaps inherent circular, the definitions “import” themselves into their own definition. For example, let’s start to build a definition of consciousness It makes sense to reflect for a moment on the ever present phenomena of consciousness and begin with “I feel the warm sun on my cheek. … etc. “ Already we have made assumptions which may prove to be missteps. There is clearly some connection between consciousness and the personal pronouns that we use to label our identity—the locus of our perception. This may be one of the key things that we hope to understand as we attempt to understand consciousness. In this respect, It appears that even Descartes choose a starting point that was well down the road—got ahead of himself. “I think therefore I am” is no philosophical atom. * A second problem in the “reflective” exercise above is the implicit assumption that “pausing to reflect” give clearer access to the phenomena of consciousness. It might be the case (and I happen to believe that it is the case) that this particular kind of introspection obscures a more general apprehension of the phenomena that we are interested in understanding.

Disciplines matter too. Our understandings are necessarily informed by our experience. Our disciplines provide us with tools and models of various systems that build our intuitions in different ways. I study evolutionary biology, systems, models and have affinities for the philosophical position in cognitive science called Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The ECC theoretical position is critical of the classical cognitivist approach which relies on a mechanistic “internal representation”.

My definition of consciousness is something like this:

Some (perhaps all) evolved systems perceive and respond to an environment. This is a property of matter, energy, and the properties of the systems as they are arranged in space. Slowly driven systems far from equilibrium (biological systems, perhaps others) have an opportunity to create “perceptual, modeling subsystems” that generate models of the world that may “run faster” than the physical system in which they are embedded and therefore serve adaptive, predictive functions. The chemical systems of plants have these property, language systems used by humans also have this property. My discipline suggests that the models that these subsystems generate are instances of consciousness.

Now consider the parts of these models? These models are not strictly localized within the modeling subsystem, rather they involve relationships between the environment and the modeling subsystem and can be thought to “hover” immaterially between the subsystem. Practitioners of various meditation practices frequently observe this “untethered” property of consciousness. In the philosophical literature there are colorful “brain in a vat” and “philosophical zombie” thought experiments which make a compelling case that consciousness is property of not just the matter in our modeling subsystems but of all matter that participates in those relationships. This “embedded” aspect of consciousness holds that the interplay between the world and the modeling system introduce important constraints that influence the content or character of consciousness-i.e. there is no general consciousness.

The “embodied” aspect of consciousness refers to the observation that modeling subsystems have an “internal milieu” which deeply “colors” the behavior or characteristics of consciousness

My discipline (and my temperament) value precision and rigor. There are established ways to bring rigor to various domains of study. However, it is not immediately clear to me how to make falsifiable claims; to generate testable hypotheses in the area of consciousness. I would like to be able to do this. Using AI and a generative science is an interesting but not, I would say, promising approach. As we create ever more sensitive, and responsive technology we will almost certainly encounter more cases that we are likely to consider as “marginal cases” of consciousness In the event that we do create the “paradigm case” of consciousness – an AI like to one in the movie “Her”-- it is still not clear that we will gain understanding into the nature of consciousness from this system. Our success will ironically be revealed in the inaccessibility of the states that the AI will claim to have.

Finally, a few words on mystery and the ineffable: Part of the motivation for research in the area of consciousness lies in the surprising observation that electro-chemical systems like ourselves give rise to the beautiful, vivid, textured, emotionally-tinged, riddled-with-longing, plagued-with-ambition, haunted-by-death and, oh yes, “is that sunshine on my cheek” kind of experiences that characterize one’s own experience.
There is a striking incongruity between the processes that we imagine are taking place at the “lowest levels”. My intuitive reaction to this is that we just don’t understand physics and chemical reactions very well. Our theories and our mathematics are cartoon sketches. We are justifiably impressed with ourselves for the progress made but the notion that “all is known” stands now, as always, as the principle barrier to greater understanding. For most of human history animism has been taken for granted. The Greeks, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the western scientific world view that these modes of thought gave rise to (and in which we happily participate) changed all that by creating zero order approximations that made certain things evident but obscured others. I am persuaded by some of Stuart Kaufmann’s work in this area and feel that as our understanding of the properties that are inherent in matter, energy and the long histories that are encoded in their arrangement in time and space –as our understanding of these things grow we will increasing come to feel “at home in the universe.”

*Cogito ergo sum seems to work for many folks, but, personally, I rarely think. I spend most of my time reacting and as much time as possible mountain biking. Furthermore, I also participate in many relationships with family, with my colleagues and with my larger community that make it unclear were my “locus of self” or “locus of control” resides. Maybe it is just “me”. I don’t think so.

==Matthew Ayres ==

Defining Consciousness

What is it to be conscious? The debate has been running for a long time and is fundamentally tied to our existence, search for order, search for self-understanding and the wider connection to the universe in which we find ourselves.

1. Questions to consider
• Are their differing types or forms of consciousness?
• Does consciousness evolve over time?
• Is consciousness actually definable?
• Can consciousness be deconstructed?
• Can consciousness be observed or measured?

I’m sure there are many more questions and by asking these questions, I’m developing a set of assumptions I’m making in order to offer some form of draft view of consciousness.

2. Assumptions
At this stage and by default, to define consciousness, one must believe it is definable and measurable. Ill start with this assumption. Secondly, I will assume there is a universal consciousness, that may be bespoke or have a series of elements in which it comes into being. The time dimension is rather hard so for this stage, ill remain neutral until the work is further developed.

3. What may be elements of consciousness?
• Awareness – the understanding of self as an entity
• Intelligence - the ability to make highly complex decisions
• Self-determination - the ability to make choices that may or many not be self-interested
• Thought – the conceptual development of framing that helps interpret life
• Feelings – the rich experiences that inform, influence and integrate with rational thought
• Emergence – the ability to learn and create new thought based on both experience as well as non-learned unique thought.
Clearly this list is too short!

4. What is consciousness ‘not’?
In asking this question, I’m attempting to reduce the overall size of the problem by restricting its scope. While this is best used at a collective group level, I’ll offer some initial thoughts:

Rocks; passive / unaware
Computer software; follows predefined instructions
Plants; limited / [no?] self determinism

5. Definition V1.0
Based on the initial thoughts above, a draft definition has been attempted.

“Consciousness is an adaptive self-awareness that self-determines thoughts and actions in an evolving environment.”

It already seems clumsy, however is thrown on the cutting room floor for discussion.

==Beth Lusczek ==

I've had some interesting discussions with folks in this group about what could be termed altered states of consciousness. This might be as simple as looking at the world through "baby eyes", as being in a meditative state, or having flashes of ego death. These experiences could be described as feeling more connected to the world, feeling able to access more information, to integrate thought and emotion, and to see connections instead of walls and divisions. Sometimes this involves altered senses of space and time. These "altered states" are fleeting and can be difficult to recreate in memory. Are these states some inherent property of consciousness? Do they serve a purpose or are they merely part of the human experience? What functional structures are engaged in these states? Are there different signaling patterns? fMRI studies on Buddhist monks can address these last questions.

==Stefan Pfenninger==

I have just three thoughts.

First, I'm interested in whether consciousness is uniquely human or not. To what extent is it linked to a sense of self? There is lots of evidence that a whole range of animals have a sense of self. We also know that some primates use tools. But there seems to be evidence that some primates come eerily close to "being human", for example in that they have some sort of understanding of mortality (e.g. see the book, The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal [1]). Also worth reading, Michael Pollan has a recent piece in the New Yorker that explores whether plants could be considered intelligent or even conscious [2].

Second, although it may not help arriving at a fundamental explanation of consciousness, examining how meditation alters consciousness is interesting to me because it is something we can investigate ourselves without needing a lab (although of course you can also try to peak into meditators brains using modern brain imaging).

Finally, I probably consider myself a materialist, but I wonder whether it will ever be possible to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter. Even assuming that this is possible in theory, my guess is that we are a very long way from understanding the physical universe well enough to actually do so. Hypotheses like this guy Penrose claiming that quantum vibrations inside neurons have something to do with consciousness [3] don't seem anywhere close to being testable at the moment, but I admit I have no idea what quantum vibrations in neurons mean in the first place (and would be very happy to let somebody explain this to me).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Bonobo-Atheist-Humanism-Primates/dp/0393347796/

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan?currentPage=all

[3] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002

== Fahad Khalid ==

"It is not worth asking how to define consciousness, how to explain it, how it evolved, what its function is, etc., because there's not one thing for which all the answers would be the same. Instead, we have many sub-capabilities, for which the answers are different: e.g., different kinds of perception, learning, knowledge, attention, control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc." --Aaron Sloman (1994)[http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/#whoiam] 

I'd like to look at this project through the lens of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, i.e., how would one imbue an artificial agent (software agent, robot, etc.) with consciousness? My primary source of information is Marvin Minsky's book "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind." [http://www.amazon.com/The-Emotion-Machine-Commonsense-Intelligence/dp/0743276647]. In reference to consciousness, the most important message in this book is that we should realize that consciousness is not just one thing (as is the message in Sloman's quote above). It is a "suitcase word" (as Minsky calls it) that is used to describe several different things. The breakup of consciousness into many parts is available here [http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/E4/eb4.html].

The most important aspects of conscious experience to me are Emotions (especially Compassion, Empathy, etc), Self-Awareness, Reflection and Self-Reflection (possibly a few more). I find these phenomena particularly interesting because unlike learning and planning (which we know how to program), how to design the previously mentioned phenomena for artificial agents is not commonly known outside the field of AI. The idea is to think of each of these phenomena as emerging from interactions between micro-agents (e.g., Neurons, Glia, etc.) through various layers of hierarchy. The hierarchical system structure is a fairly common design for intelligent software agents (e.g., simulated ice hockey players) and robots. Such a hierarchical framework, I believe, simplifies design and simplifies our perspective on these complex phenomena.

Think about how a robot would know where it is, i.e., imagine a robot asking itself, "where am I?". This is the problem of "Mobile Robot Localization". We don't even think about having that problem. But for a robot, it is indeed quite a challenging problem. Nevertheless, we now have algorithms that make it possible for mobile robots to navigate rough terrains. But now imagine the robot asking, "who am I"? "why do I exist?" ... those are the questions, in my opinion, the answers to which require the phenomena we aggregate under the wide umbrella of consciousness. Oh, by the way, don't forget how important a role language and expression plays in our conscious experiences as humans.

To summarize, I'd like to look into the following question: "How does one program a software agent that wonders about its identity, and why it exists? ...". It would be interesting to see what small modules/tasks (analogous to Neurons/Glia) need to be integrated together to make that happen. Perhaps that will provide us with some insight into the emergence of consciousness?

== Renske Vroomans ==
Disclaimer: I have no background in philosophy or anything like it. My take on consciousness is probably imprecise at best, incoherent at worst. I decided to restrict myself to my biologically biased view, also without reading the other statements beforehand, so apologies for any redundancy. Here goes...

Consciousness is a multi-layered phenomenon, or maybe a sliding scale. The first level is awareness of the environment, being able to take inputs (also from internal stimuli, e.g. neurons reporting injury). At this point, I don't think the system even needs to be able to react to them; it is the awareness that counts. Simple computer programs are already able to do so. The second level is awareness of the fact that you are aware. This layer observes the reception of the stimuli and makes complex calculations as to the correct reaction, taking into account internal state variables and external ones. The next level is the ability of the “brain” to create stimuli/fire without external inputs from peripheral nerves. This self- maintaining system (which may need to be a chaotic attractor?) might be considered consciousness, or perhaps it is just a requirement for consciousness: The ability to maintain a flow of information without having to receive a push from outside of the machine/brain/software.

Some questions: When you put people in a room where they receive no external stimuli, they go crazy within the hour. What happens to consciousness at this point? Does this imply that the system requires continuous recalibration to maintain consciousness? And brains on drugs (the ones that make the waves go periodic), can they still generate consciousness?

I am not sure I even answered what consciousness is at this point.

== Sarah Laborde ==

I added a couple of tentative crosses to John's table - thanks john!

When I think of consciousness I think of several levels (and I see those levels reflected in other people's paragraphs, although I hope we can settle on one), the first one being subjective experience. To me consciousness in this sense is directly connected to physical sensations, or their memory. These sensations represent information, emerging not from the body or the brain in isolation but from the engagement and 'navigation' of the individual through its environment.. so some kind of individual (not distinguishing here between body and brain - sorry for my coarseness dear biologists and AI researchers, but I think there is some valus in considering them together) / environment nexus as the origin of information and therefore consciousness.. in that regard I join - I think! - Chalmers' argument on the connection information / consciousness. Thanks Sean for posting a link to the article).
A couple of extra thoughts: I think the notion of temporality is important too, and - drawing on a laundry conversation with Diego on the topic - how it relates to death. Could consciousness, if contingent to life, be related to the notion of the organism's future death being somehow embodied ("consciously" or not), and leading to for example the process of reproduction?

I apologize for my probably obvious lack of knowledge in biology, and I frankly don't properly understand the physicists' discussions of consciousness (be it Tegmark or Penrose.. Cole..help..? :) ). I am more grounded in cognitive anthropology and to some extent philosophy, although I don't claim any breadth of philosophical knowledge on the topic. My thoughts about consciousness come from a research interest in the production of knowledge: how and where it emerges in various contexts, and discussions of embodied and reflexive knowledge.

A couple of scholars/books that I find inspiring on the topic (themselves drawing on long traditions on which I will pass) are below:

Tim Ingold (Perception of the Environment, 2000), and his discussion for example of Von Uexkull's notion of the "Umwelt"

Francisco Varela (any of you biologists want to discuss his work?)

==Ana María Gómez López==

The two main perspectives I would like to add to our discussion of consciousness are:

'''1. Consciousness is life-contingent.''' 
As I mentioned in our last disccusion, I consider that an understanding of consciousness can only be approached through understanding life. By stating this, I am not limiting my understanding of life to a strictly bio-centric view, but also comprising AI and forms of non-cellular life. Under this broad understanding, I posit the question to the group: can consciousness be separate from life?

I respond strongly to Max Tegmark's paper on the physical origin of consciousness [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf] when I pair it with Jeremy England's article on the origin of life from matter [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/]. Both pave the question of origin, but the latter opens the possibility of life in inanimate matter subjected to physics, in the same way that Tegmark applies physics to understand consciousness.

'''2. Consciousness does not require self-awareness.''' 
In human neuroscientific assessments, a person is classified as having a minimally conscious state when he/she goes back and forth between wakeful awareness and non-responsive behavior. In individuals who manage to remain minimally conscious and avoid a persistent vegetative state, is consciousness only limited to moments of recognizable "meaningful behavior"? Or does consciousness exist somehow beyond the periods when these individuals are not aware of themselves?
If we recognize self-awareness as a "gold-standard" measure to understand consciousness, we have to recognize that existing methodologies to measure self-awareness are rather limited. Self-recognition tests used in human and some animals may be considered as markers of self-awareness; however, I find it difficult to exclude the possibility of consciousness on organisms and entities that do not share this capacity. Indeed, while humans understand themselves as conscious beings, we often perform daily activities without ever stopping to think that we are doing these "consciously".

An additional concept which I find useful for this conversation is that of consciousness as integrated information [http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.long]. Although I do not fully follow all of Tononi's paper (particularly his discussion of qualia), I borrow the idea of consciousness as integrated information in order to span biological and artificial contexts alike, an idea also facilitated by other sections of this article.

 

[[File:20140622_Consciousness.pdf]]

= Consciousness Workshop Summary 18th Jun 2014 =
This report outlines the key questions we wish to answer and some basic framing of how consciousness may be considered . . . . 

[[File:consciousness V1.0.pdf]]

= "Models" summaries in preparation of Thursday 26 June meeting =
==Sean==
I'm still working through what seems to be an increasing list of fascinating literature, but for the time being here's a list of the various problems with describing consciousness as a property emerging from some physical basis. If these problems cannot be overcome in a model of consciousness, then it stands that consciousness cannot be described as a collective function of the brain (or another set of interacting things) but rather is a property of something singular. 
Due to the challenges of uploading papers to this site and the large number of things I've been reading on the subject, I'll distribute references by request/upload them when a dropbox is available (*done, Sean - you should have received an invitation, as well as the others. Let me know if not. Sarah*). 
'''1. The Binding Problem, or the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness:''' Consciousness is a singular, integrated experience. We can point to a single observer/experiencer (ourselves) which in many ways forms the basis for our conception of our identities and the singularness of our self. An emergent property, however, is not singular, and cannot be meaningfully described except as a distributed property of some multitude of interacting agents. This can be described both as a mechanical (easy) problem inquiring how the brain integrates sensory information, and also as the hard problem of why, if consciousness emerges from the brain, we can experience the many distributed processes of our brain as a singular phenomenon. 
'''2. Free Will, Agency, or Volition:''' If consciousness is an emergent property, it cannot be said to have causal effect on the brain, either in whole or in part. An emergent property arises from the collective activity of a set of actors, and any activity therein is a reflection of preceding activity on the part of those actors. In other words, if consciousness is emergent we are not capable of affecting action from the level of our consciousness. Rather we experience consciousness only and any change therein is the result of changes in neurons. This contrasts sharply with the fundamental experience most people seem to share of having and acting upon desires which are only meaningful at the level of consciousness. It is difficult to conceive of what an individual neuron might want; love, hate, or other motivations arising from an individual identity at a level it does not possess seem nonsensical. Therefore it is challenging to explain the behavior of human beings if consciousness-level casual ability does not exist, let alone our own subjective experience. 
'''3. What is it like to be a Bat?:''' This is the title of a highly-cited historical paper in which the author contends that, no matter how well we study the brain of a bat, we will not be able to construct therefrom the subjective experience of a bat. Essentially, the subjective experience conscious beings have of sensations such as 'qualia' (for instance: the property of something having 'redness' or feeling 'happy') is of a different kind to things we can measure, describe, or explain objectively. Therefore, consciousness could not arise from a purely physical reality, as it is of a different 'kind.' 
'''3b. Multiple Realizability:''' Expanding on the idea of consciousness being a different kind of thing to physical things is the problem of multiple realizability. This is the observation that many subjective experiences (pain, for example) are shared across a tremendous range of physically different organisms. If such experiences arose only from the physical, changes in their physical structure/dynamics would be reflected by changes in the subjective experience. As they are not, subjective experiences must be realizable in a number of physically distinct ways and therefore be a different kind. Honestly I'm a lot more skeptical of this one than the others and I'm not sure how well it holds, but it was an interesting idea that was presented in this way. 
'''Disclaimer:''' These things have all been hotly debated in various literatures for quite a long time, and all of them are really more like hypotheses about the way it seems like consciousness and reality functions than anything else. I'm doing this because it's necessary to see how well these objections hold up next to various models of the emergence of consciousness.

==Beth and Sarah==

A preliminary "model" (eeek) from Beth and Sarah: [[File:Beth and Sarah - V1.pdf]]

Beth's cartoon of the model [[File:Cartoon.pdf]]

==Emília==
[[File:Emilia-notes.pdf]]

==Ana María==
[[File:20140624_AMGLConsciousnessDraft.pdf]]

==Fahad==

Luckily, I found a review paper that describes what the most prominent AI researchers think about consciousness. Here's the paper[http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/papers/conscioushb.pdf]. Summary: "The idea in a nutshell is that ''phenomenal consciousness'' is the property a computational system X has if X models itself as experiencing things." 

'''The "Mind -- Software" analogy:''' 
''Hypothesis:'' Mind emerges from the Brain, i.e., the interactions between neurons and glia. We know that a neural network is a universal computer, and the assumption here is that the computation is expressed as a neural network. So we look only at this level, and assume that the underlying molecular mechanisms provide the medium for computation.
''Explanation:'' Think of the brain as hardware made out of Neurons, Glia, and other stuff. Essentially, the brain is a ''network''. The network ''structure'' is how the components are interconnected. ''Dynamics'' on this network are defined as the interactions between the massive number of components. Mind (and as a result consciousness) is a ''function'' of this network. So the brain is a network that does computation.

In a computer, the hardware is the microprocessor, memory, etc. All the high-level software output that we see as, e.g., animated Minions, is an emergent phenomenon of the programmed interaction between hardware components.

Brain <--> Hardware :: Mind <--> Software

''Simulation of Consciousness:'' 
As mentioned in the earlier Wiki post, simulation of consciousness can be achieved by using Minsky's breakdown. Tentative plan: 
- Implement the various properties of consciousness in agents 
- Use a simplified model of language, which can be used by the agents to express their thoughts, ideas, etc. 
- It seems like there are lots of things about consciousness which we only perceive because we can either observe them expressed in language, or facial expression, etc. 
- If we really want to see whether the agents are thinking or not, and what emotions they have, we have to have multiple agents that learn different things and should therefore have different sorts of emotions; even for similar situations perhaps. 
- We can then compare the different situations and emotions to see if there is enough evidence for consciousness. 
- Try to come up with a model that is as simple as possible

''Potential Issues:'' 
- Natural language processing is a hard computational problem. It may not be possible to get as much out of a simulation as we'd like, simply because we run into issues of compute power.
- Gödel's incompleteness Theorems. There are truths that we cannot prove mathematically. Perhaps there is something about consciousness that is inherently quantum mechanical, and cannot be expressed using classical computation.

==Claire==

To be completed...

[[File:QuGraph_CL.pdf]]

File:Cartoon.pdf

2014-06-26T19:59:50Z

Lusczeke:

Emergence of Consciousness Page

2014-06-26T19:59:33Z

Lusczeke: /* Beth and Sarah */

I created this page to share and discuss our models for the emergence of consciousness from matter. Please share your models and add discussion so we can all see and think about it. We will use this page in the end to write up a summary and hopefully compare and contrast the models and discuss what properties of consciousness can be explained by what model.

Thanks,
Alireza

=Working Ideas=

== (1) Consciousness as Hyper Attractors of Brain (Alireza)==
In this schema states of our mind/consciousness as attractors of the dynamics that arise from our brain. We receive sensory information that act as perturbations pushing the trajectory out of a basin of attractor and into a new basin.

[[File:photo.png | 500px|center]]

== (2) Reference! Tegmark - The fourth state of matter =
This can be an interesting starting point... at least one perspective on the topic http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf Sarah

=Perspective Summaries=
 
==Consciousness Table==
I thought that it might be useful to attempt to organize our understandings of consciousness in a table—perhaps to make clear where and whether a consensus emerges on the nature of the phenomena that we are investigating.

I offer here an idiosyncratic table that I find useful to organize my thoughts on this topic. Feel free to add/reorganize categories and qualify entries in the notes below.
Or better yet...can we come up with a simpler table that captures the typical properties that consciousness is thought to have or not have.
 --john balwit

<table>

<tr><td> </td><td>Property</td> <td>Yes </td><td>No</td> <td>NA </td></tr>
<tr><td>1.</td> <td>Requires matter</td> <td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td> </td></tr>
<tr><td>2.</td> <td>Exclusive property of biological systems</td> <td> x ?</td> <td> </td> <td> </td></tr>
<tr><td>3.</td> <td> Has parts <td> x ?</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>4.</td> <td>Admits of gradations or degree (continuous or discrete)
<td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>5.</td> <td>Likely to be artificial created in the AI lab <td> x</td> <td> x </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>6.</td> <td>Intrinsically paradoxical research area.
(involves strange loopy-ness Gödel, Turing) <td> ? ?</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>7.</td> <td>Requires interaction with external environment (perception?) <td> x x </td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>8.</td> <td>Requires interaction with internal environment (reflection?) <td> </td> <td> x x </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>9.</td> <td>Necessarily Embodied (result of sensor interactions, hormonal environment etc.) <td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>10.</td> <td>Necessarily Embedded (result of large scale system interactions) <td> x x</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>11.</td> <td>Deterministic system with stochastic inputs. <td> x ? </td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>12.</td> <td>Relies on quantum things that I do/do not understand <td> ? </td> <td> </td> <td>?</td></tr>
<tr><td>13.</td><td> Defined by its ineffability, will always recede from scientific apprehension. <td> ? ? </td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
<tr><td>14.</td><td> Encodes history (requires memory, genes) <td> x ?</td> <td> </td> <td></td></tr>
</table>

 Notes: 
 I've added some ticks.. 

==Sean Hayes==

[http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html The Hard Problem of Consciousness]
:This paper makes the important distinction between the 'easy' and 'hard' problems of consciousness in relative terms. I think it would be useful to use this framework to focus the precise problems we're investigating around consciousness. 
My definition for consciousness at it's simplest form is just having subjective experience. While some of the discussion this afternoon touched on integrative brain problems (which falls under 'easy' problems of consciousness in the above, as a way to describe issues of cognition), my question is whether this property of consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. While this is difficult to address objectively, I think it can be approached from our perspectives by comparing consciousness with other emergent phenomena. 

The big question that I've been trying to resolve myself along this line of thinking is related to the 'binding problem' ([http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/images/8/8d/Revonsuo_and_Newman_1999_-_Binding_and_Consciousness.pdf 1],[http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/images/3/37/Revonsuo_1999_-_Binding_and_the_Phenomenal_Unity_of_Consciousness.pdf 2]). I'm probably bastardizing the definition a bit, but essentially the issue is conscious experience is not a distributed phenomenon but rather that experience is inherently singular - to me this is entirely distinct from emergence, which is inherently a distributed feature of a complex system. Moreover, our conscious experience not only receives input from the complex, distributed network of our brain, but itself can cause changes in brain behavior and function. Is this actually an emergent phenomenon, or the concentration of information into a centralized control (our subjective experience)? Are there characteristics of subjective experience which do act the way we expect emergent phenomena to behave?

==Cole Mathis==
I think that consciousness is an Emergent property of the electro-chemical interactions occurring in my brain. The difficulty in understanding the dynamics and/or the origin of consciousness is (in my opinion) the hard problem in emergence: how can macroscopic features of the system have causal control of the microscopic degrees of freedom? One of the canonical examples of emergent phenomena is the emergence of thermodynamics from statistical mechanics. Here the behavior of a system with many degrees of freedom (an ideal gas) can be effectively represented using bulk (emergent) variables (temperature, pressure, volume, etc.) This example is great but it says nothing about the flow of information in the system or the casual direction. For example consider a box of an ideal gas, if I hold the volume constant and heat this box, the pressure will go up. An increase in pressure on the macro scale corresponds to an increase in the average speed of the particles on the microscopic scale, however we do not say that the increased pressure caused the increase in the average speed (although we might say that the increase of the average translational kinetic energy caused the increase in pressure). In this system the causal arrow points only from the micro-scale to the macro-scale. With consciousness we have exactly the opposite situation. If the state of my neurons are the microscopic state variables and my conscious thoughts are the macroscopic variables, then when I think about typing, the macroscopic variables configure the microscopic variables in just the right way to send signals down to fingers, my fingers didn’t start typing and then cause my brain to think about typing (I hope.) So here the causal direction is reversed. How did this reversal/ asymmetry arise and how can we generalize this notion?
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/12/1314922110.full.pdf Quantifying Casual Emergence shows macro can beat micro]

==Claire Lagesse==

Here are some ideas about my personal experiment of what consciousness could be...
There is no reference but just some thinking from what I learned. I don't deal with consciousness in my every day work but as a conscious human being I experiment it every day ! :)
I'm really sorry for my french-english !

What is consciousness ? Where does it starts ? Where does it ends ? Are we conscious of the sun on our skin, of the wind, of our breathe, of our position, of the temperature, of all the elements surrounding us ? Does the consciousness start with a 'me' ? A dissociation of the external world from our body ? Then, what are the limits of our body ? Is the hair just fallen a part of 'me' ? What about my legs ? They are a part of my body, but if one is cut of it won't be 'me' any more. So maybe we could define our 'me' as the living part of our body. So, for people with a Locked Inside Syndrome their 'me' can be the minimal part of their body alive : their brain. That's maybe why the analogy is often made between the brain and consciousness : it is considered as the minimal part of our body which has to be alive for a 'me' still existing. Even our heart can be replace by a machine.

If we define consciousness with a 'me' apart from the surrounding world, it could be problematic for some persons with mental disease. What about autism ? In some cases, persons with a major autistic trouble cannot make the difference between their own body and the world surrounding them. Can we say they are not conscious ? That sounds a little extreme.

Could we extend consciousness to each living organism ? Is a plant conscious ? Plants are moving all day long, but at a different time scale than ours. They are moving with the sun, with the wind... Does it means they are conscious of them or could we just see it as a action / reaction mechanism ? It goes the same way for some animals. Is the jellyfish conscious of its moves with waves ? Is the shell conscious ? Is the frog conscious ? Each animal is responding to its physiological needs : feed, security and reproduction. Feed goes with a body, security goes with a surrounding (potentially dangerous) and reproduction goes with finding and interacting with another animal of my own specie.

Could we consider those behaviors as conscious ? What are the limits of this hypothesis ? It is possible to program a robot to find food, make itself secure and make sure to reproduce the sooner it can. But it won't be conscious those behaviors are for its own survival and its specie one. But can we say that animals are conscious of it ?

Thinking about artificial intelligence, one could say that consciousness begin with feelings, and a computer is not able to feel anything. Happiness, sadness, love, hate, if we look closely they all have a chemical reaction as an origin. The mystery could be what produce this chemical reaction.

Ants or bees have great collective behavior. They form a fascinating system with some extremely complex emerging properties. But it is not sure that each ant, each bee, is conscious it is taking part in a complex system. It is more about a robust collective intelligence than about consciousness. However, in an anthill 20% of ants are not doing anything. What is this 'useless' time for ? Are the ants conscious of this free time ? Is this demonstrating something about a system we are judging as hyper efficient ?

A third idea could be the knowledge that our consciousness is limited in the time. As human beings, we are conscious that we will die some day. So we develop some cults and funeral rite. Could it be a 'proof' of consciousness ? This way of thinking may exclude a lot of animals of consciousness.

One could ask the difference between consciousness and intelligence. Can an artificial intelligence be conscious ? Is consciousness recognizable by feelings, non efficient time or the simple fact to name it ? Could we say that consciousness is the amount of things linked to our body that we are not able to scientifically explain ? Does the consciousness define the 'me' out of my body limits ? And so what about all the unconscious things I do every day ? Breathe, blink, dream... Is it about the will of doing something more than in the fact of doing it ? Are we defined by our body, our will or our acts ? Is the consciousness the fact to ask ourselves about consciousness ?

==John Balwit ==
One comic = 1000 words. [http://xkcd.com/1037/ UMWELT]

Definitions matter. Definitions create boundaries around elements of a system that we attempt to model and understand. Definitions also create a background of implicit assumptions that are necessarily less well examined. Definitions of consciousness are perhaps inherent circular, the definitions “import” themselves into their own definition. For example, let’s start to build a definition of consciousness It makes sense to reflect for a moment on the ever present phenomena of consciousness and begin with “I feel the warm sun on my cheek. … etc. “ Already we have made assumptions which may prove to be missteps. There is clearly some connection between consciousness and the personal pronouns that we use to label our identity—the locus of our perception. This may be one of the key things that we hope to understand as we attempt to understand consciousness. In this respect, It appears that even Descartes choose a starting point that was well down the road—got ahead of himself. “I think therefore I am” is no philosophical atom. * A second problem in the “reflective” exercise above is the implicit assumption that “pausing to reflect” give clearer access to the phenomena of consciousness. It might be the case (and I happen to believe that it is the case) that this particular kind of introspection obscures a more general apprehension of the phenomena that we are interested in understanding.

Disciplines matter too. Our understandings are necessarily informed by our experience. Our disciplines provide us with tools and models of various systems that build our intuitions in different ways. I study evolutionary biology, systems, models and have affinities for the philosophical position in cognitive science called Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The ECC theoretical position is critical of the classical cognitivist approach which relies on a mechanistic “internal representation”.

My definition of consciousness is something like this:

Some (perhaps all) evolved systems perceive and respond to an environment. This is a property of matter, energy, and the properties of the systems as they are arranged in space. Slowly driven systems far from equilibrium (biological systems, perhaps others) have an opportunity to create “perceptual, modeling subsystems” that generate models of the world that may “run faster” than the physical system in which they are embedded and therefore serve adaptive, predictive functions. The chemical systems of plants have these property, language systems used by humans also have this property. My discipline suggests that the models that these subsystems generate are instances of consciousness.

Now consider the parts of these models? These models are not strictly localized within the modeling subsystem, rather they involve relationships between the environment and the modeling subsystem and can be thought to “hover” immaterially between the subsystem. Practitioners of various meditation practices frequently observe this “untethered” property of consciousness. In the philosophical literature there are colorful “brain in a vat” and “philosophical zombie” thought experiments which make a compelling case that consciousness is property of not just the matter in our modeling subsystems but of all matter that participates in those relationships. This “embedded” aspect of consciousness holds that the interplay between the world and the modeling system introduce important constraints that influence the content or character of consciousness-i.e. there is no general consciousness.

The “embodied” aspect of consciousness refers to the observation that modeling subsystems have an “internal milieu” which deeply “colors” the behavior or characteristics of consciousness

My discipline (and my temperament) value precision and rigor. There are established ways to bring rigor to various domains of study. However, it is not immediately clear to me how to make falsifiable claims; to generate testable hypotheses in the area of consciousness. I would like to be able to do this. Using AI and a generative science is an interesting but not, I would say, promising approach. As we create ever more sensitive, and responsive technology we will almost certainly encounter more cases that we are likely to consider as “marginal cases” of consciousness In the event that we do create the “paradigm case” of consciousness – an AI like to one in the movie “Her”-- it is still not clear that we will gain understanding into the nature of consciousness from this system. Our success will ironically be revealed in the inaccessibility of the states that the AI will claim to have.

Finally, a few words on mystery and the ineffable: Part of the motivation for research in the area of consciousness lies in the surprising observation that electro-chemical systems like ourselves give rise to the beautiful, vivid, textured, emotionally-tinged, riddled-with-longing, plagued-with-ambition, haunted-by-death and, oh yes, “is that sunshine on my cheek” kind of experiences that characterize one’s own experience.
There is a striking incongruity between the processes that we imagine are taking place at the “lowest levels”. My intuitive reaction to this is that we just don’t understand physics and chemical reactions very well. Our theories and our mathematics are cartoon sketches. We are justifiably impressed with ourselves for the progress made but the notion that “all is known” stands now, as always, as the principle barrier to greater understanding. For most of human history animism has been taken for granted. The Greeks, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the western scientific world view that these modes of thought gave rise to (and in which we happily participate) changed all that by creating zero order approximations that made certain things evident but obscured others. I am persuaded by some of Stuart Kaufmann’s work in this area and feel that as our understanding of the properties that are inherent in matter, energy and the long histories that are encoded in their arrangement in time and space –as our understanding of these things grow we will increasing come to feel “at home in the universe.”

*Cogito ergo sum seems to work for many folks, but, personally, I rarely think. I spend most of my time reacting and as much time as possible mountain biking. Furthermore, I also participate in many relationships with family, with my colleagues and with my larger community that make it unclear were my “locus of self” or “locus of control” resides. Maybe it is just “me”. I don’t think so.

==Matthew Ayres ==

Defining Consciousness

What is it to be conscious? The debate has been running for a long time and is fundamentally tied to our existence, search for order, search for self-understanding and the wider connection to the universe in which we find ourselves.

1. Questions to consider
• Are their differing types or forms of consciousness?
• Does consciousness evolve over time?
• Is consciousness actually definable?
• Can consciousness be deconstructed?
• Can consciousness be observed or measured?

I’m sure there are many more questions and by asking these questions, I’m developing a set of assumptions I’m making in order to offer some form of draft view of consciousness.

2. Assumptions
At this stage and by default, to define consciousness, one must believe it is definable and measurable. Ill start with this assumption. Secondly, I will assume there is a universal consciousness, that may be bespoke or have a series of elements in which it comes into being. The time dimension is rather hard so for this stage, ill remain neutral until the work is further developed.

3. What may be elements of consciousness?
• Awareness – the understanding of self as an entity
• Intelligence - the ability to make highly complex decisions
• Self-determination - the ability to make choices that may or many not be self-interested
• Thought – the conceptual development of framing that helps interpret life
• Feelings – the rich experiences that inform, influence and integrate with rational thought
• Emergence – the ability to learn and create new thought based on both experience as well as non-learned unique thought.
Clearly this list is too short!

4. What is consciousness ‘not’?
In asking this question, I’m attempting to reduce the overall size of the problem by restricting its scope. While this is best used at a collective group level, I’ll offer some initial thoughts:

Rocks; passive / unaware
Computer software; follows predefined instructions
Plants; limited / [no?] self determinism

5. Definition V1.0
Based on the initial thoughts above, a draft definition has been attempted.

“Consciousness is an adaptive self-awareness that self-determines thoughts and actions in an evolving environment.”

It already seems clumsy, however is thrown on the cutting room floor for discussion.

==Beth Lusczek ==

I've had some interesting discussions with folks in this group about what could be termed altered states of consciousness. This might be as simple as looking at the world through "baby eyes", as being in a meditative state, or having flashes of ego death. These experiences could be described as feeling more connected to the world, feeling able to access more information, to integrate thought and emotion, and to see connections instead of walls and divisions. Sometimes this involves altered senses of space and time. These "altered states" are fleeting and can be difficult to recreate in memory. Are these states some inherent property of consciousness? Do they serve a purpose or are they merely part of the human experience? What functional structures are engaged in these states? Are there different signaling patterns? fMRI studies on Buddhist monks can address these last questions.

==Stefan Pfenninger==

I have just three thoughts.

First, I'm interested in whether consciousness is uniquely human or not. To what extent is it linked to a sense of self? There is lots of evidence that a whole range of animals have a sense of self. We also know that some primates use tools. But there seems to be evidence that some primates come eerily close to "being human", for example in that they have some sort of understanding of mortality (e.g. see the book, The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal [1]). Also worth reading, Michael Pollan has a recent piece in the New Yorker that explores whether plants could be considered intelligent or even conscious [2].

Second, although it may not help arriving at a fundamental explanation of consciousness, examining how meditation alters consciousness is interesting to me because it is something we can investigate ourselves without needing a lab (although of course you can also try to peak into meditators brains using modern brain imaging).

Finally, I probably consider myself a materialist, but I wonder whether it will ever be possible to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter. Even assuming that this is possible in theory, my guess is that we are a very long way from understanding the physical universe well enough to actually do so. Hypotheses like this guy Penrose claiming that quantum vibrations inside neurons have something to do with consciousness [3] don't seem anywhere close to being testable at the moment, but I admit I have no idea what quantum vibrations in neurons mean in the first place (and would be very happy to let somebody explain this to me).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Bonobo-Atheist-Humanism-Primates/dp/0393347796/

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_pollan?currentPage=all

[3] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002

== Fahad Khalid ==

"It is not worth asking how to define consciousness, how to explain it, how it evolved, what its function is, etc., because there's not one thing for which all the answers would be the same. Instead, we have many sub-capabilities, for which the answers are different: e.g., different kinds of perception, learning, knowledge, attention, control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc." --Aaron Sloman (1994)[http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/#whoiam] 

I'd like to look at this project through the lens of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, i.e., how would one imbue an artificial agent (software agent, robot, etc.) with consciousness? My primary source of information is Marvin Minsky's book "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind." [http://www.amazon.com/The-Emotion-Machine-Commonsense-Intelligence/dp/0743276647]. In reference to consciousness, the most important message in this book is that we should realize that consciousness is not just one thing (as is the message in Sloman's quote above). It is a "suitcase word" (as Minsky calls it) that is used to describe several different things. The breakup of consciousness into many parts is available here [http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/E4/eb4.html].

The most important aspects of conscious experience to me are Emotions (especially Compassion, Empathy, etc), Self-Awareness, Reflection and Self-Reflection (possibly a few more). I find these phenomena particularly interesting because unlike learning and planning (which we know how to program), how to design the previously mentioned phenomena for artificial agents is not commonly known outside the field of AI. The idea is to think of each of these phenomena as emerging from interactions between micro-agents (e.g., Neurons, Glia, etc.) through various layers of hierarchy. The hierarchical system structure is a fairly common design for intelligent software agents (e.g., simulated ice hockey players) and robots. Such a hierarchical framework, I believe, simplifies design and simplifies our perspective on these complex phenomena.

Think about how a robot would know where it is, i.e., imagine a robot asking itself, "where am I?". This is the problem of "Mobile Robot Localization". We don't even think about having that problem. But for a robot, it is indeed quite a challenging problem. Nevertheless, we now have algorithms that make it possible for mobile robots to navigate rough terrains. But now imagine the robot asking, "who am I"? "why do I exist?" ... those are the questions, in my opinion, the answers to which require the phenomena we aggregate under the wide umbrella of consciousness. Oh, by the way, don't forget how important a role language and expression plays in our conscious experiences as humans.

To summarize, I'd like to look into the following question: "How does one program a software agent that wonders about its identity, and why it exists? ...". It would be interesting to see what small modules/tasks (analogous to Neurons/Glia) need to be integrated together to make that happen. Perhaps that will provide us with some insight into the emergence of consciousness?

== Renske Vroomans ==
Disclaimer: I have no background in philosophy or anything like it. My take on consciousness is probably imprecise at best, incoherent at worst. I decided to restrict myself to my biologically biased view, also without reading the other statements beforehand, so apologies for any redundancy. Here goes...

Consciousness is a multi-layered phenomenon, or maybe a sliding scale. The first level is awareness of the environment, being able to take inputs (also from internal stimuli, e.g. neurons reporting injury). At this point, I don't think the system even needs to be able to react to them; it is the awareness that counts. Simple computer programs are already able to do so. The second level is awareness of the fact that you are aware. This layer observes the reception of the stimuli and makes complex calculations as to the correct reaction, taking into account internal state variables and external ones. The next level is the ability of the “brain” to create stimuli/fire without external inputs from peripheral nerves. This self- maintaining system (which may need to be a chaotic attractor?) might be considered consciousness, or perhaps it is just a requirement for consciousness: The ability to maintain a flow of information without having to receive a push from outside of the machine/brain/software.

Some questions: When you put people in a room where they receive no external stimuli, they go crazy within the hour. What happens to consciousness at this point? Does this imply that the system requires continuous recalibration to maintain consciousness? And brains on drugs (the ones that make the waves go periodic), can they still generate consciousness?

I am not sure I even answered what consciousness is at this point.

== Sarah Laborde ==

I added a couple of tentative crosses to John's table - thanks john!

When I think of consciousness I think of several levels (and I see those levels reflected in other people's paragraphs, although I hope we can settle on one), the first one being subjective experience. To me consciousness in this sense is directly connected to physical sensations, or their memory. These sensations represent information, emerging not from the body or the brain in isolation but from the engagement and 'navigation' of the individual through its environment.. so some kind of individual (not distinguishing here between body and brain - sorry for my coarseness dear biologists and AI researchers, but I think there is some valus in considering them together) / environment nexus as the origin of information and therefore consciousness.. in that regard I join - I think! - Chalmers' argument on the connection information / consciousness. Thanks Sean for posting a link to the article).
A couple of extra thoughts: I think the notion of temporality is important too, and - drawing on a laundry conversation with Diego on the topic - how it relates to death. Could consciousness, if contingent to life, be related to the notion of the organism's future death being somehow embodied ("consciously" or not), and leading to for example the process of reproduction?

I apologize for my probably obvious lack of knowledge in biology, and I frankly don't properly understand the physicists' discussions of consciousness (be it Tegmark or Penrose.. Cole..help..? :) ). I am more grounded in cognitive anthropology and to some extent philosophy, although I don't claim any breadth of philosophical knowledge on the topic. My thoughts about consciousness come from a research interest in the production of knowledge: how and where it emerges in various contexts, and discussions of embodied and reflexive knowledge.

A couple of scholars/books that I find inspiring on the topic (themselves drawing on long traditions on which I will pass) are below:

Tim Ingold (Perception of the Environment, 2000), and his discussion for example of Von Uexkull's notion of the "Umwelt"

Francisco Varela (any of you biologists want to discuss his work?)

==Ana María Gómez López==

The two main perspectives I would like to add to our discussion of consciousness are:

'''1. Consciousness is life-contingent.''' 
As I mentioned in our last disccusion, I consider that an understanding of consciousness can only be approached through understanding life. By stating this, I am not limiting my understanding of life to a strictly bio-centric view, but also comprising AI and forms of non-cellular life. Under this broad understanding, I posit the question to the group: can consciousness be separate from life?

I respond strongly to Max Tegmark's paper on the physical origin of consciousness [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf] when I pair it with Jeremy England's article on the origin of life from matter [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/]. Both pave the question of origin, but the latter opens the possibility of life in inanimate matter subjected to physics, in the same way that Tegmark applies physics to understand consciousness.

'''2. Consciousness does not require self-awareness.''' 
In human neuroscientific assessments, a person is classified as having a minimally conscious state when he/she goes back and forth between wakeful awareness and non-responsive behavior. In individuals who manage to remain minimally conscious and avoid a persistent vegetative state, is consciousness only limited to moments of recognizable "meaningful behavior"? Or does consciousness exist somehow beyond the periods when these individuals are not aware of themselves?
If we recognize self-awareness as a "gold-standard" measure to understand consciousness, we have to recognize that existing methodologies to measure self-awareness are rather limited. Self-recognition tests used in human and some animals may be considered as markers of self-awareness; however, I find it difficult to exclude the possibility of consciousness on organisms and entities that do not share this capacity. Indeed, while humans understand themselves as conscious beings, we often perform daily activities without ever stopping to think that we are doing these "consciously".

An additional concept which I find useful for this conversation is that of consciousness as integrated information [http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.long]. Although I do not fully follow all of Tononi's paper (particularly his discussion of qualia), I borrow the idea of consciousness as integrated information in order to span biological and artificial contexts alike, an idea also facilitated by other sections of this article.

 

[[File:20140622_Consciousness.pdf]]

= Consciousness Workshop Summary 18th Jun 2014 =
This report outlines the key questions we wish to answer and some basic framing of how consciousness may be considered . . . . 

[[File:consciousness V1.0.pdf]]

= "Models" summaries in preparation of Thursday 26 June meeting =
==Sean==
I'm still working through what seems to be an increasing list of fascinating literature, but for the time being here's a list of the various problems with describing consciousness as a property emerging from some physical basis. If these problems cannot be overcome in a model of consciousness, then it stands that consciousness cannot be described as a collective function of the brain (or another set of interacting things) but rather is a property of something singular. 
Due to the challenges of uploading papers to this site and the large number of things I've been reading on the subject, I'll distribute references by request/upload them when a dropbox is available (*done, Sean - you should have received an invitation, as well as the others. Let me know if not. Sarah*). 
'''1. The Binding Problem, or the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness:''' Consciousness is a singular, integrated experience. We can point to a single observer/experiencer (ourselves) which in many ways forms the basis for our conception of our identities and the singularness of our self. An emergent property, however, is not singular, and cannot be meaningfully described except as a distributed property of some multitude of interacting agents. This can be described both as a mechanical (easy) problem inquiring how the brain integrates sensory information, and also as the hard problem of why, if consciousness emerges from the brain, we can experience the many distributed processes of our brain as a singular phenomenon. 
'''2. Free Will, Agency, or Volition:''' If consciousness is an emergent property, it cannot be said to have causal effect on the brain, either in whole or in part. An emergent property arises from the collective activity of a set of actors, and any activity therein is a reflection of preceding activity on the part of those actors. In other words, if consciousness is emergent we are not capable of affecting action from the level of our consciousness. Rather we experience consciousness only and any change therein is the result of changes in neurons. This contrasts sharply with the fundamental experience most people seem to share of having and acting upon desires which are only meaningful at the level of consciousness. It is difficult to conceive of what an individual neuron might want; love, hate, or other motivations arising from an individual identity at a level it does not possess seem nonsensical. Therefore it is challenging to explain the behavior of human beings if consciousness-level casual ability does not exist, let alone our own subjective experience. 
'''3. What is it like to be a Bat?:''' This is the title of a highly-cited historical paper in which the author contends that, no matter how well we study the brain of a bat, we will not be able to construct therefrom the subjective experience of a bat. Essentially, the subjective experience conscious beings have of sensations such as 'qualia' (for instance: the property of something having 'redness' or feeling 'happy') is of a different kind to things we can measure, describe, or explain objectively. Therefore, consciousness could not arise from a purely physical reality, as it is of a different 'kind.' 
'''3b. Multiple Realizability:''' Expanding on the idea of consciousness being a different kind of thing to physical things is the problem of multiple realizability. This is the observation that many subjective experiences (pain, for example) are shared across a tremendous range of physically different organisms. If such experiences arose only from the physical, changes in their physical structure/dynamics would be reflected by changes in the subjective experience. As they are not, subjective experiences must be realizable in a number of physically distinct ways and therefore be a different kind. Honestly I'm a lot more skeptical of this one than the others and I'm not sure how well it holds, but it was an interesting idea that was presented in this way. 
'''Disclaimer:''' These things have all been hotly debated in various literatures for quite a long time, and all of them are really more like hypotheses about the way it seems like consciousness and reality functions than anything else. I'm doing this because it's necessary to see how well these objections hold up next to various models of the emergence of consciousness.

==Beth and Sarah==

A preliminary "model" (eeek) from Beth and Sarah: [[File:Beth and Sarah - V1.pdf]]

Beth's cartoon of the model

==Emília==
[[File:Emilia-notes.pdf]]

==Ana María==
[[File:20140624_AMGLConsciousnessDraft.pdf]]

==Fahad==

Luckily, I found a review paper that describes what the most prominent AI researchers think about consciousness. Here's the paper[http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/papers/conscioushb.pdf]. Summary: "The idea in a nutshell is that ''phenomenal consciousness'' is the property a computational system X has if X models itself as experiencing things." 

'''The "Mind -- Software" analogy:''' 
''Hypothesis:'' Mind emerges from the Brain, i.e., the interactions between neurons and glia. We know that a neural network is a universal computer, and the assumption here is that the computation is expressed as a neural network. So we look only at this level, and assume that the underlying molecular mechanisms provide the medium for computation.
''Explanation:'' Think of the brain as hardware made out of Neurons, Glia, and other stuff. Essentially, the brain is a ''network''. The network ''structure'' is how the components are interconnected. ''Dynamics'' on this network are defined as the interactions between the massive number of components. Mind (and as a result consciousness) is a ''function'' of this network. So the brain is a network that does computation.

In a computer, the hardware is the microprocessor, memory, etc. All the high-level software output that we see as, e.g., animated Minions, is an emergent phenomenon of the programmed interaction between hardware components.

Brain <--> Hardware :: Mind <--> Software

''Simulation of Consciousness:'' 
As mentioned in the earlier Wiki post, simulation of consciousness can be achieved by using Minsky's breakdown. Tentative plan: 
- Implement the various properties of consciousness in agents 
- Use a simplified model of language, which can be used by the agents to express their thoughts, ideas, etc. 
- It seems like there are lots of things about consciousness which we only perceive because we can either observe them expressed in language, or facial expression, etc. 
- If we really want to see whether the agents are thinking or not, and what emotions they have, we have to have multiple agents that learn different things and should therefore have different sorts of emotions; even for similar situations perhaps. 
- We can then compare the different situations and emotions to see if there is enough evidence for consciousness. 
- Try to come up with a model that is as simple as possible

''Potential Issues:'' 
- Natural language processing is a hard computational problem. It may not be possible to get as much out of a simulation as we'd like, simply because we run into issues of compute power.
- Gödel's incompleteness Theorems. There are truths that we cannot prove mathematically. Perhaps there is something about consciousness that is inherently quantum mechanical, and cannot be expressed using classical computation.

==Claire==

To be completed...

[[File:QuGraph_CL.pdf]]

Complex Systems Summer School 2014-After Hours

2014-06-25T00:05:13Z

Lusczeke: /* JP's Adventures in Gastronomy */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2014}}

==JP's Adventures in Gastronomy==

St. John's College dining got you down? Realized that yesterday's baked potatoes are tomorrow's potatoes au gratin? Then you, my friend, need to get off campus.

On Wednesday, let's go off campus for drinks at Santa Fe Brewing Company after Geoffrey's evening lecture. Meet in the coffee shop at 8:00 to determine who wants to go. My car has limited seats, but maybe someone else can volunteer a car?

Thursday night, let's get out and go somewhere nice. I'm thinking either Epazote or Pink Adobe, but I reserve the right to go other places as decided. Add your name here and I'll set up some reservations. We'll leave at 6:30pm on Thursday.

 
'''Wednesday Santa Fe Brewing Company'''

JP's Car 
Sanja 
Luis 
Cole 
Leto 
Alberto (go DGT group!) 

JP's OTHER car 
1.Beth 
2.Massimo 
3.Francesca 
4.Emília 
5. Cecilia 

Still needs a ride 

'''Thursday dinner'''

JP's Car 
1.JP 
2.Anna 
3. 
4.Morgan 
5. Jose 

JP's OTHER car 
1.Jenn (driver) 
2.Catherine 
3. 
4. 
5. 
6. 

== Saturday June 28, 2014 9:00 am Santa Fe Botanical Garden ==

This month the feature is Origami in the Garden. The gardens are open 7 days a week 9-5. I plan to leave from the circle at 9 am. It's less than a mile walk to the gardens. Entrace fee is $7.

1. James 
2. Diana 
3. Anna 

==Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey==

I (Anna) have all of Cosmos (new version) downloaded on my iPad. If we get the right adapter and an HDMI cable (and find the right TV) would anyone be interested in watching with me? It looks like we still need an A/V->HDMI adapter for an iPad 2. 

Hi Anna. I (Bernardo) have an adapter (HDMI) if you want to give it a try. And there is a TV on the lower common room. Let me know. 
I'm a big fan of the Carl Sagan series so I'd be curious to see what they did with it. I'm in too! - ''Nicolas'' 
I'd be interested! - Diana

Unfortunately, it turns out that the format that Cosmos is in - in Amazon Instant Video - can't be viewed using HDMI. Does anyone else have any other ways of viewing it? -Anna

==Watch Orange is the New Black: Season Two, with Nix!==
One of my partners gave in and started watching it without me, so I need to catch up with her! After my lectures next week, of course. -Nix

Possibly Interested: 
1. Nix 
2. Cole 
==June 25, 5:30am - Sunrise hike to Atalaya mountain==

We'll meet at 5:30 am at the circle then hike as far as we can go to be back by 8:00 am.

Equipment:
- Walking sneakers or mountain boots
- Backpack
- Liquids: about 1.5 liters
- Different warm layers (it could be windy and chilly)

This is running every M, W, and F.

If you do not have something or you have any question just contact James Holdener

Participants:
1. James Holdener
2.

==June 26, 6:30am - Kung Fu Training==

For all of you who want to get seriously active before breakfast; we'll do an hour of kung fu training. Most of this will be general workout - running, pushups, etc. Then I will show you the most basic positions in kung fu, and their transitions in one of the basic forms. Disclaimer: I am not by any measure qualified to teach (only been doing it for 2 years). If you can take what I say with a grain of salt, if you know the limits of your own body and want to get active, feel free to join! If you cannot make it today, there will be opportunities next week too :). 

You'll need: 
- comfy clothes, layers you can throw off 
- flexible shoes (can also go barefoot, but the grass is wet and cold...) 
- water 

We'll meet at the parking circle closest to the dorms, and then walk down to the sports field. 

Participants: 
1. Renske 
2.

==June 27, 6:00-9:00pm Todd and the Fox==

See Juniper's brother's band [https://www.facebook.com/events/306176446198443/ Todd and the Fox] play on the Plaza at the Santa Fe Band Stand. For full line up of the Santa Fe Bandstand (June 23-August 28) visit [http://santafebandstand.org/ here]

1. Juniper

2. Matthew Ayres

3. Flavia Marquitti

4. Leto Peel

5. Morgan Edwards

6. Claire Lagesse

7. Leo

8. Ernest Yu Liu

9. Cecilia

10. Emília

11. Sanja

12. Renske

13. Nicolas Scholtes

14. José Aguilar-Rodríguez

15. Francesca

16. Marcus Levine

17. Diego

==World Cup==
All times are Santa Fe (MST)
 
Thursday, June 12 
1) Brazil vs. Croatia - 1400 (MST) 
 
Friday, June 13 
1) Mexico vs. Cameroon - 1000 (MST) 
2) Spain vs. Netherlands - 1300 (MST) 
3) Chile vs. Australia - 1600 (MST) 
 
Saturday, June 14 
1) Colombia vs. Greece - 1000 (MST) 
2) Uruguay vs. Costa Rica - 1300 (MST) 
3) England vs. Italy - 1600 (MST) 
4) Côte d'Ivoire vs. Japan - 1900 (MST) 
 
Sunday, June 15 
1) Switzerland vs. Ecuador - 1000 (MST) 
2) France vs. Honduras - 1300 (MST) 
3) Argentina vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina - 1900 (MST) 

'''Sports Bars in Santa Fe: ''' 
[http://junctionsantafe.com/ Junction] 
[http://www.yelp.com/biz/el-paseo-bar-and-grill-santa-fe El Paseo Bar] 
[http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/business/on-tap-craft-beers-from-around-state-at-downtown-s/article_de6b6182-fdcd-58ef-9f2e-6e9cc5bf5a85.html Santa Fe Tap Room] 
[http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/ Cowgirl Cafe] 
[http://www.riochamasteakhouse.com/ Rio Chama Steak House] 

'''On campus viewing opportunities:''' Lower Campus Common's Room has a TV that can air the games, and on some occasions we can project the games after-hours in the Great Hall

==Santa Fe Railyard Events==

There are a ton of really fun and cool events happening all summer at the Santa Fe Railyard, check the calendar out [http://www.railyardsantafe.com/ here]

 
 
== '''PREVIOUS EVENTS'''==

==June 20, 6:30am - Kung Fu training==

For all of you who want to sleep a bit longer, but then get seriously active before breakfast, we'll do some kung fu training. Most of this will be general workout - running, pushups, etc.
Then I will show you the most basic positions in kung fu, and their transitions in one of the basic forms. Disclaimer: I am not by any measure qualified to teach (only been doing it for 2 years).
If you can take what I say with a grain of salt, if you know the limits of your own body and want to get active, feel free to join! If you cannot make it today, there will be opportunities next week too :).

You'll need: 
- comfy clothes, layers you can throw off 
- flexible shoes (can also go barefoot, but the grass is wet and cold...) 
- water 

We'll meet at the parking circle closest to the dorms, and then walk down to the sports field. 

Participants: 
1. Renske 
2. Diana (Renske - I have some legit physical limitations, but I can handle them, and I'd like to try!) 
3. James 
4. Cecilia 

==Sunday June 22, 6:00-9:00pm Santa Fe Fuego Baseball Game==

Come heckle and drink beer while watching some minor league baseball - [http://www.santafe.com/calendar/event/santa-fe-fuego-vs.-trinidad-triggers1 Fuego v. Trinidad Triggers]

1. Juniper

2. Mathew Ayres

3. Lin Li

4. Flavia Marquitti

5. Leto Peel

6. Claire Lagesse

7. Ernest Yu Liu

8. Alberto Antonioni

9. Diego Barneche

10. Nicolas Scholtes

11. Massimo Stella

==June 22, El Rancho de las Golondrinas==

[[JP]] is going to the lavender festival at Golondrinas Museum (www.golondrinas.org) on Sunday. Let's meet up at 12:30 in the cafeteria and then head out?

JP's Car 

1.JP 
2.Catherine 
3.Hiroshi 
4.Lin Li 
5.Sanja 

Still wants to go 
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 

==June 22, 7:00am - Hike the mountain!==

Meet Diana in the parking lot near the dorms at 7am this Sunday to hike up to the top of the mountain before brunch!

==June 21, 10:00am - Bandelier Field Trip==

We're taking a trip to [http://www.nps.gov/band/index.htm Bandelier National Monument] on Saturday June 21th. Please visit the [[Bandelier 2014 | Bandelier Field Trip]] Page to sign up!

== The Game. ==
A few of us have talked about a game we would like to play during the summer school. Let me know via email (cole.mathis@asu.edu) by Wednesday (6/18) morning if you would like to play the game.

''The Rules:''

You will be randomly assigned the name of another player (your target) and an object (your weapon).

Your job is to get your target to accept your weapon from you.

If/when your target accepts your weapon from you, your target it out (you killed them), and you are now given his target and weapon.

You cannot tell anyone who your target is or what your weapon is.

For example, Suppose I (Cole) am assigned Leto as my target and a pen as my weapon. I need to somehow offer Leto a pen and he must accept it from me. When Leto accepts the weapon he is out, and I inherit his target and weapon, and the game continues.

To win the game you must be the last person left.

Once the game starts it will be constantly played, you can get killed at any time and you can kill at anytime until the game is over.

We will not publish a list of all participants.... Anyone may be playing. We will not publish a list of people who have been killed in the game although deaths may happen in public.

When you are out (killed) you should email me (cole.mathis@asu.edu) to let me know and forward your target and weapon to your murderer, please include the situation that led to your death (particularly if it was interesting, clever, or most importantly funny!

We think this would be a lot of fun and easy to play with this many people so please email me before wednesday if you are interested!

cole.mathis@asu.edu

DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR INTENT TO PLAY HERE!

==Jessica Birthday celebration! - June 16, some bar/restaurant downtown, leaving from Saint Johns at 7:30pm==

We are going to celebrate at Cowgirl (http://www.cowgirlsantafe.com/)

The map is here: http://goo.gl/maps/lEFxd

We can meet at the parking lot close to the dorms, 7:15pm. There are some people with their own cars. We can fit some people on these cars, and call taxis (or we can go walking, if you prefer).

 

==June 11, 6:30pm - Sunset hike to Atalaya mountain ('''pictures''')==

Pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/104772005161459586991/AtalayaSantaFeNM11062014

Track: http://es.wikiloc.com/wikiloc/view.do?id=7069532

==June 12, 10:00pm Full Moon Walk==

It's FULL MOON!!! And Friday 13th! I think this deserves a FULL moon walk with a few drinks on the top of that hill near the campus and a FULL appreciation of the FULL moon. Maybe also a good opportunity to bring the banjo and whatever fits!!

Stock up on drinks and leave at 10pm outside of the Peterson Student Center after the others return from Tomasitas...

Joining: 
1. Leo 
2. Nicolas 
3. Leto 
4. Brais (maybe) 
5. Pooya 
6. Ana María 

==June 12, 6:00pm Tomasita's==

Come experience some down home New Mexican cooking at Tomasita's. Margaritas and enchiladas! Yum!

JP's car

1.JP 
2.Nix 
3.Sanja 
4.Catherine 
5. 

==June 11, 7:00pm Santa Fe Bite==

Green chile cheeseburger time. Meet at the parking circle in front of the coffee shop.

JP's car

1.JP 
2.Nix 
3.Ana Maria 
4.Diana L-G 
5.Morgan Edwards 

Juni's car

1. Juni 
2. Sanja 
3. Nicolas 
4. 
5. 

==June <strike> 10</strike>11, 5:00pm - Supplies Run==

JP is going down to buy the stuff everyone needs. He'll take you if you would like.

JP's GTI (5 seats)

1.JP 
2.Anna Olson 
3.Bernardo Furtado 
4.Ali Kharrazi 
5.Ana Maria Gomez Lopez 

Common Supplies:

What kinds of supplies can we all split? Make a list here and JP will buy a big box or two for everyone.

1). Laundry Soap 
2). Bottles of water (for the hikes) ? Otherwise, please buy a big one (or multiple small ones) for Renske :) 
3) 3 Flashlights and batteries for James 
4) Earplugs. If nobody needs them, please buy a pack for Pooya. Thanks! 
5) Beer (I second this request - ''Nicolas'') 

Individual Supplies:

1) Olive oil-- 1 liter bottle---Vipin 
2) Downy Dryer Sheet -- a small box enough for ~6-8 loads--- Nhat Nguyen
3) Please buy converter for power plug (Europe- US) for Sanja
4) Another converter for power plug (Europe-US), toothpaste, sun protection, Brais.

==June 13, 5:30am - Sunrise hike to Atalaya mountain==

Update: I've modifed to be back a half hour earlier to an hour to frehen up and eat before taking the bus to SFI.

We'll meet at 5:30 am at the circle then hike as far as we can go to be back by 7:30 am.

Equipment: 
- Walking sneakers or mountain boots 
- Backpack 
- Liquids: at least 1.5 litres 
- Different warm layers (it could be windy and chilly) 

I have two flashlights but they weren't needed on Wednesday.

If you do not have something or you have any question just contact James Holdener

Participants: 
1. James Holdener 
2. 

==June 14, 10am- Farmer's Market==

We are going to walk down to Santa Fe to go to the Saturday morning farmers market, as well as explore Santa Fe. Meet at 10am in the circle by the dorms.

==June 15, 10am- Yoga class==

Yoga has been postponed, maybe later on today.

==June 15, 3pm - Playing soccer/futbol==

Meet at 3:00pm at the parking lot. If you're late, just come find us at the field. It's #48 on this map of St. John's campus: http://www.sjc.edu/files/3713/9568/3101/stjohns3D.pdf

==June 19 Rodeo de Santa Fe==

<strike>Wednesday</strike> Thursday, June 19!

Come on down for the 65th annual Rodeo de Santa Fe! Watch real-life cowboys get thrown off of various species of raging livestock for their competition and your entertainment. Starts at 7:00pm, we should leave SJC about 6:00. http://rodeodesantafe.org/

JP's GTI 
1. JP 
2. Alireza Goudarzi 
3.Matthew Ayres 
4.Nhat Nguyen 
5.Lin Li 

JP's 4runner 
1.Stefan Pfenninger 
2.Ali Kharrazi 
3.Leto Peel 
4.Morgan Edwards 
5.Claire Lagesse 

Juni's Car 
1.Alberto Antonioni 
2.Luis Martinez Vaquero 
3.Jennifer Hellmann 
4. Laurent 

Sander's Car 
1.José Aguilar-Rodríguez 
2.Ernest Yu Liu 
3.Pooya Rezaei 
4.Qiao Zhi (George) 

Jessica's Car 
1. Renske Vroomans 
2. Emília Garcia Casademont 
3. Degang Wu 
4. Sanja Selakovic 

 James G's Rental 
1. James G. 
2. Catherine 
3. Heath 
4. Massimo 
5. Nicolas K. Scholtes 

Josh Garland's Awesome Mobile 
1.Francesca Lipari 
2.Leo 
3.Nicolas Scholtes 
4.Cecilia 

Still Needs a Ride

Coupling of different types of networks

2014-06-17T16:56:58Z

Lusczeke: /* Files */

= Summary =

= Objective =

= Deliverables =

= Logistics =
== Members ==

Sanja Selakovic (sanjakojasanja@gmail.com) : 
Fahad Khalid (fahad.khalid@hpi.de) : 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com): 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) : 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) : 
Brian Thompson (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 

== Meetings ==

(1) [DONE] Monday, June 16, 2014
- Agenda:

= Files =

Resuscitation Algorithm [[File:SupplFigure1_ResusAlg.pdf]] 
Experimental Timeline [[File:Timeline.pdf‎]]

== Ideas ==
Look at coupling of metabolic networks in different physiologic compartments in a pig model of hemorrhagic shock.

Compartments are liver, muscle, urine, and serum. We have concentrations of approximately 50 metabolites in each compartment. There are about 10 metabolites that are common to all four compartments. We have profiled metabolites in each compartment at 5 different timepoints:
Baseline (after instrumentation of the animal for experimentation)
Shock (after 45 minutes of prolonged blood withdrawal, pulmonary contusion, and liver crush injury
FR2 (after two hours of full resuscitation)
FR8 (after eight hours of full resuscitation)
FR20 (after 20 hours of full resuscitation)

There is one hour of limited resuscitation and one hour of full resuscitation between the Shock and FR2 timepoints. Limited resuscitation involves only giving fluid to a systolic blood pressure of 80 mmHg. Full resuscitation is done by algorithm. Figures illustrating the experimental timeline and full resuscitation strategies are posted to the page.

Coupling of different types of networks

2014-06-17T16:56:46Z

Lusczeke: /* Files */

= Summary =

= Objective =

= Deliverables =

= Logistics =
== Members ==

Sanja Selakovic (sanjakojasanja@gmail.com) : 
Fahad Khalid (fahad.khalid@hpi.de) : 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com): 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) : 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) : 
Brian Thompson (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 

== Meetings ==

(1) [DONE] Monday, June 16, 2014
- Agenda:

= Files =

Resuscitation Algorithm [[File:SupplFigure1_ResusAlg.pdf]]
Experimental Timeline [[File:Timeline.pdf‎]]

== Ideas ==
Look at coupling of metabolic networks in different physiologic compartments in a pig model of hemorrhagic shock.

Compartments are liver, muscle, urine, and serum. We have concentrations of approximately 50 metabolites in each compartment. There are about 10 metabolites that are common to all four compartments. We have profiled metabolites in each compartment at 5 different timepoints:
Baseline (after instrumentation of the animal for experimentation)
Shock (after 45 minutes of prolonged blood withdrawal, pulmonary contusion, and liver crush injury
FR2 (after two hours of full resuscitation)
FR8 (after eight hours of full resuscitation)
FR20 (after 20 hours of full resuscitation)

There is one hour of limited resuscitation and one hour of full resuscitation between the Shock and FR2 timepoints. Limited resuscitation involves only giving fluid to a systolic blood pressure of 80 mmHg. Full resuscitation is done by algorithm. Figures illustrating the experimental timeline and full resuscitation strategies are posted to the page.

File:Timeline.pdf

2014-06-17T16:56:22Z

Lusczeke: Experimental timeline for metabolomics data obtained from porcine hemorrhagic shock experiments.

Experimental timeline for metabolomics data obtained from porcine hemorrhagic shock experiments.

Coupling of different types of networks

2014-06-17T16:42:03Z

Lusczeke: /* Files */

= Summary =

= Objective =

= Deliverables =

= Logistics =
== Members ==

Sanja Selakovic (sanjakojasanja@gmail.com) : 
Fahad Khalid (fahad.khalid@hpi.de) : 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com): 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) : 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) : 
Brian Thompson (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 

== Meetings ==

(1) [DONE] Monday, June 16, 2014
- Agenda:

= Files =

[[File:SupplFigure1_ResusAlg.pdf]]

== Ideas ==
Look at coupling of metabolic networks in different physiologic compartments in a pig model of hemorrhagic shock.

Compartments are liver, muscle, urine, and serum. We have concentrations of approximately 50 metabolites in each compartment. There are about 10 metabolites that are common to all four compartments. We have profiled metabolites in each compartment at 5 different timepoints:
Baseline (after instrumentation of the animal for experimentation)
Shock (after 45 minutes of prolonged blood withdrawal, pulmonary contusion, and liver crush injury
FR2 (after two hours of full resuscitation)
FR8 (after eight hours of full resuscitation)
FR20 (after 20 hours of full resuscitation)

There is one hour of limited resuscitation and one hour of full resuscitation between the Shock and FR2 timepoints. Limited resuscitation involves only giving fluid to a systolic blood pressure of 80 mmHg. Full resuscitation is done by algorithm. Figures illustrating the experimental timeline and full resuscitation strategies are posted to the page.

Coupling of different types of networks

2014-06-17T16:41:37Z

Lusczeke: /* Files */

= Summary =

= Objective =

= Deliverables =

= Logistics =
== Members ==

Sanja Selakovic (sanjakojasanja@gmail.com) : 
Fahad Khalid (fahad.khalid@hpi.de) : 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com): 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) : 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) : 
Brian Thompson (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 

== Meetings ==

(1) [DONE] Monday, June 16, 2014
- Agenda:

= Files =

[[SupplFigure1_ResusAlg.pdf]]

== Ideas ==
Look at coupling of metabolic networks in different physiologic compartments in a pig model of hemorrhagic shock.

Compartments are liver, muscle, urine, and serum. We have concentrations of approximately 50 metabolites in each compartment. There are about 10 metabolites that are common to all four compartments. We have profiled metabolites in each compartment at 5 different timepoints:
Baseline (after instrumentation of the animal for experimentation)
Shock (after 45 minutes of prolonged blood withdrawal, pulmonary contusion, and liver crush injury
FR2 (after two hours of full resuscitation)
FR8 (after eight hours of full resuscitation)
FR20 (after 20 hours of full resuscitation)

There is one hour of limited resuscitation and one hour of full resuscitation between the Shock and FR2 timepoints. Limited resuscitation involves only giving fluid to a systolic blood pressure of 80 mmHg. Full resuscitation is done by algorithm. Figures illustrating the experimental timeline and full resuscitation strategies are posted to the page.

File:SupplFigure1 ResusAlg.pdf

2014-06-17T16:38:44Z

Lusczeke:

Coupling of different types of networks

2014-06-17T16:34:33Z

Lusczeke: /* Ideas */

= Summary =

= Objective =

= Deliverables =

= Logistics =
== Members ==

Sanja Selakovic (sanjakojasanja@gmail.com) : 
Fahad Khalid (fahad.khalid@hpi.de) : 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com): 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) : 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) : 
Brian Thompson (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 

== Meetings ==

(1) [DONE] Monday, June 16, 2014
- Agenda:

= Files =
== Ideas ==
Look at coupling of metabolic networks in different physiologic compartments in a pig model of hemorrhagic shock.

Compartments are liver, muscle, urine, and serum. We have concentrations of approximately 50 metabolites in each compartment. There are about 10 metabolites that are common to all four compartments. We have profiled metabolites in each compartment at 5 different timepoints:
Baseline (after instrumentation of the animal for experimentation)
Shock (after 45 minutes of prolonged blood withdrawal, pulmonary contusion, and liver crush injury
FR2 (after two hours of full resuscitation)
FR8 (after eight hours of full resuscitation)
FR20 (after 20 hours of full resuscitation)

There is one hour of limited resuscitation and one hour of full resuscitation between the Shock and FR2 timepoints. Limited resuscitation involves only giving fluid to a systolic blood pressure of 80 mmHg. Full resuscitation is done by algorithm. Figures illustrating the experimental timeline and full resuscitation strategies are posted to the page.

Coupling of different types of networks

2014-06-17T16:29:26Z

Lusczeke: /* Members */

Emergence of Consciousness Page

2014-06-17T00:16:26Z

Lusczeke: /* Perspective Summaries */

Bandelier 2014

2014-06-13T16:06:39Z

Lusczeke: /* Rental Car 3 */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2014}}

Please sign up here so we know who's going. 
Also: If you have a car, please put it down. The more cars we have, the more people we can take. 

We'll meet Saturday at 10:00am in the parking circle.

Please remember to bring a hat, sunscreen, water, hiking shoes, and anything else you'll need for a day out in the field.

If you would like to rent a car please visit the [http://santafe.edu/about/contact/ground/ SFI website] for more info

We'll each need to bring our own lunches, so perhaps we can arrange a trip to town later this week to buy groceries. Alternatively, we could buy our sandwiches early Friday morning from the coffee shop. -Anna

==Cars:==

===JP's 4Runner (on loan) (5 seats)===
1. Alireza Goudarzi (I do have a NM driver's license and can follow directions or other two vehicles) 
2. Michael Kalyuzhny 
3. Stefan Pfenninger 
4. Blaz Krese 
5. Nicolas Scholtes 

===Juniper's Car (4 seats)===
1. Juni 
2. Bernardo Furtado 
3. Anna Olson 
4. Jennifer Hellmann 

===Laurent's Car (3 seats)===
1. Laurent 
2. 
3. 
4, 

===Jessica's Car (3 seats)===
1. Morgan Edwards 
2. Claire Lagesse 
3. Claudius Graebner 

===Rental Car 1===

1.Diego Barneche 
2.Alberto Antonioni 
3.Riley Burkart 
4.Matthew Ayres 
5.Flavia Marquitti 

===Rental Car 2===
1.<Driver Needed>< 
2.Lin Li 
3.Renske Vroomans 
4.Cecilia Andreazzi 
5.Hiroshi Ashikaga 

===Rental Car 3===
1.Beth Lusczek 
2.Leto Peel 
3.Sanja Selakovic 
4. OPEN SEAT 
5.José Aguilar-Rodríguez 

===Still needs a ride===

15. Sean Hayes 
16. James Holdener 
17. Qiao Zhi 
18. Ernest Yu Liu 
19. Pooya Rezaei 
20. Cole Mathis 
21. Degang Wu 
22. Francesca Lipari 
23. Vipin 
24. Brais 

I suggest we check out how many seats are still missing on wednesday and then try to rent the corresponding number of cars. JP mentioned that SFI has a collaboration with the local car rental service, so it should not be too much of an issue! (Claudius)

Complex Systems Summer School 2014-Projects & Working Groups

2014-06-12T16:24:40Z

Lusczeke: /* Consciousness as an emergent state of matter – what do you think? */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2014}}

==Bitcoin==

Bitcoin is an online peer-to-peer currency which has gained popularity in recent years. With increased general interest and now more and more companies accepting transactions in Bitcoin, so to has its value and is currently priced at $633 for 1 Bitcoin!

'''So what is Bitcoin?'''

The idea behind Bitcoin was to remove the need for a centralised banking system. The way this works is to have all transactions made public and then have the Bitcoin community validate transactions by donating computational power (and rewarded in Bitcoins). For further details see this blog:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/

'''So why is it interesting?'''

Usually companies and individuals keep all of their financial records private, but ALL transaction in Bitcoin are publicly available, so this provides a unique opportunity to study financial transactions. While the transactions are public, the owners of Bitcoin remain (relatively) anonymous, and so this has led to associations with criminal activities (e.g. on the silk road) from illegal drugs to hired hit-men. In addition to illegal activities using the currency, there have also been a number of illegal activities against the currency, such as high valued heists of the order of $100 million.

''Oh, and of course its a big temporally evolving network.''

If you're interested in working on this then add your name below. If there is interest, then we can have a "Bitcoin, beers and blackboard" session to throw some ideas around.

Interested:

Leto 
Shai 
Flavia 
Jessica Santana jsant@stanford.edu 
Stefan 
Ana María 

Meeting today (Jun 12) indicate your availability here:http://doodle.com/w5bys3zfmpeamf32

==MITRE Data Sets==

To access the data please contact Juniper she has it on a hard drive. Here is a PDF that explains the datasets and gives some sample challenge questions.
[[Media:mitredata.pdf |MITRE DATA PDF]] If you have any specific questions about the data you can contact Matt Koehler at mkoehler@mitre.org

==Death in physical, biological and social systems==

Firms, nation states, human beings and stars all die. Do the causes of "death" in physical, biological and social systems have something in common? If yes, what is it?

''Interested''

Ana María 

==Fractal-like structures in economic data==

In the 1960-70s Mandelbrot showed that some economic time series have fractal-like structures, i.e. they look the same at many time scales. The existence of these structures has been debated since. Do economic time series like S&P 500 index have fractal-like structures? If yes, how fractal-like are they?

''Interested'' 

Vipin (vipin.veetil at gmail dot com) 
Blaz 
Qiao Zhi 

==Microbial Community Data Sets==

The Earth Microbiome Project [http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/ EMP] is a massively multidisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise is to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples currently available from researchers across the globe. All data sets are processed in the same way (DNA extraction, PCR primers, sequencing, bioinformatics), making them inter-comparable. You can explore these data sets (including some time series, and a bunch of spatial samplings) at the following link [http://microbio.me/emp EMP Data] (no need to create a login ID, just scroll down to 'Download Public Data'). If you have questions, please contact Sean Gibbons (sgibbons at uchicago dot edu).

==Does Larger Memory Capacity Brings about Evolutionary Advantage?==

Evolutionary game theory modeling. Agents/players on lattice or networks. A player with n-step memory has responses to all 4^n past game outcomes. Intuitively, a player with longer memory can have more sophisticated strategy, which might be used to exploit player with smaller memory capacity. Yet according to the Prisoner's Dilemma tournament organized by Axelrod, Tit-for-Tat, which can be modeled using only one-step memory, fares better than a number of sophisticated strategies invented by experts in the field of game theory. From the game theory perspective, does smaller memory capacity actually have evolutionary benefits?
Please contact Degang Wu (dwuab@ust.hk).

''Interested:'' 
Blaz 
Brian 
Flavia 
Cole Mathis (cole.mathis@asu.edu) 
Claudius

==North American Breeding Birds Survey and tropical trees==

This dataset contains ~4500 sites where populations of birds (~600 species overall, ~60 species on average in every site) were sampled over the past 44 years. This gives numerous time series of both population sizes and the overall number of species. Some problems with this dataset include large observational errors. A dataset of tropical trees with the exact diameter, identity (from among 300 species) and location of ~250000 trees over 6 censuses is also available. Please contact Michael Kalyuzhny for these.

==Santa Fe tournament of time series analysis!==

Do fluctuations in timeseries arise from nonlinear dynamics or from stochasticity? Specifically, there are several examples of ecological time series where chaos/complex periodicity were found (and published in Science and other leading journals). But usually such analyses didn't examine alternative models of stochastic dynamics. I propose making some meta-analysis and trying to compare the predictive power of both kinds of models. This can also be done in other fields were such timeseries are available. If you want to talk about this - contact Michael Kalyuzhny

Interested:
Michael Kalyuzhny 
Degang Wu 

==The Multiplex Networks==

How does the structure of social networks affect the emergence and persistence of norms? Why are some norms (like fashion styles) less persistent than others (like religious beliefs)? Is this because different kinds of norms live on different social networks (with same individual participating in different networks)? If yes, how do these social networks interact?

And finally, what do the answers to the above questions tell us about policy interventions? Can certain critical properties of network structures be exploited to change norms, like going to the moon without much fuel? If two networks interact, say religious belief and fashion styles, can interventions in one be used to bring about changes in another?

''Interested''

Vipin 
Sarah L 
Alberto 
Francesca 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com) 
Sanja 
Massimo 
Leto 
Alireza (alireza.goudarzi at gmail.com) 
Claire (lagesse.claire at gmail.com) 
Cecilia 
Sean Hayes (shaye004@ucr.edu) 
Claudius 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 

==Network Tolerance of Failure==

How might a network endure non-catastrophic failure without isolating the failing components? Most network failure models consider resilience against failure as a result of isolating failing components. In contrast, is it possible for the network to be robust through "tolerance" of failure? Perhaps, for example, a symbiotic relationship sustains a weakened node until it has recovered its prior performance. Or perhaps a transmitting network retains a connection to an offline node to reduce an anticipated memory load of re-establishing the connection when it comes back online. What are some of the ways in which networks are able to maintain connection to a failing node without failing themselves in the process - how is the cascade halted without isolation? This is meant to be a broad question to generate more specific ideas. Importantly, this question refers to "tolerance of" failure in contrast to "resilience against" failure.
 Contact: Jessica Santana jsant@stanford.edu

Interested:

James Holdener 
Junjian Qi 
Ells Campbell 
Leto 
Alireza (alireza.goudarzi at gmail.com) 
Claire (lagesse.claire at gmail.com) 
Sean Hayes(shaye004@ucr.edu) 
Ali Kharrazi 

*For those interested in this project, we will be meeting at 1 pm in the cafeteria with a related project to determine how to split up the groups. Cheers, Jessica* 

==Influence of different types of parasites and pathogens in networks on dynamics and stability of food webs==

In nature there is a number of infectious agents which have different evolutionary approaches in way how they influence their hosts. We want to built artificial ecological network and to compare how these evolutionary solutions affect stability of food webs.
 Contact: sanjakojasanja@gmail.com

Interested:

Stojan 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com) 
Sanja 
Cecilia: Are we going to discuss today at 9? No probably, but tomorrow, today is a free day! Relax!:D

==Growth of Cities==

Do foraging animals and growing cities utilize resources in the same way? We're interested in building an agent-based model which generates a road network on a map of varying resources by following a set of simple, probabilistic rules. How do the properties of this network evolve through time? How much of city growth can be explained by resource constraints? Do simple rules of growth parallel simple rules of animal foraging behavior? This project will explore agent-based modeling, but will also present opportunities to examine the limits of modeling. Contacts: Diana LaScala-Gruenewald (dianalg11 at gmail.com) and Claire Lagesse (lagesse.claire at gmail.com).

Interested: 
Morgan Edwards 
Rohan Mehta 
Alberto Antonioni 
Ernest Liu 
Michael Kalyuzhny 
Hiroshi Ashikaga (hashika1@jhmi.edu) 
Bernardo Furtado bernardo.furtado at ipea.gov.br 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 

==Towards a Unified Theory of Biodiversity==

The idea is to build on the Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and create a realistic unified theory that incorporates important scaling phenomena following power laws, energetic constraints, and stochasticity that have been previously neglected. Basically, we want to modify the unrealistic assumptions that birth, death, speciation rates are stochastic uniform functions across all species within a given meta-community. In fact, these processes have recently been shown to scale with body size following power laws of the form Y= C * M^alpha, where C is a constant independent of body mass, M, and alpha is the scaling exponent. These constraints will also dictate how much energy is required at different trophic levels and body sizes, ultimately constraining abundance of organisms in natural systems. Stochasticity will still play a role, but it should be first bounded by energetic constraints. We also plan to incorporate environmental noise, that is to say, incorporate in the model the realistic assumption that the environment changes through time and therefore so will the fitness of different species in the meta-community.
The ultimate goal is to provide a Unified Theory that can make clear predictions about size-abundance-distributions in natural systems, and, perhaps, also make predictions about speciation-extinction dynamics. We currently hold data to test predictions on an 'ecological' time scale. At this point we are uncertain on whether we could obtain good fossil/contemporary data to calibrate/test models.

Interested: 
Diego Barneche Rosado 
Cornelia Metzig 
Michael Kalyuzhny 
Ana María 

==Coupling of different types of networks==

We want to develop a concept of how to work with networks of qualitatively different types of relationships or interactions that can influence each other (eg. natural and social). Sign up and come to brainstorm with us :) Contact: sanjakojasanja@gmail.com

For example, people's beliefs about the health benefits/risks of vaccination can be influenced by their social network, and may be studied using belief propagation models. Simultaneously, diseases may spread through a population, which can be studied using diffusion or other epidemiological models. Furthermore, people's beliefs about vaccination may affect their probability of getting infected by a disease, and in turn, getting infected may cause them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Another example could involve an ecological network expressing predation and competition among species coupled with an environmental network.

Interested: 
Sanja 
Fahad 
Brian 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com) 
Beth Lusczek 

==Co-evolution of Anti-vaccination Sentiment and Flu Infections==

People's beliefs about the health benefits/risks of vaccination can be influenced by their social network, and may be studied using belief propagation models. Simultaneously, diseases may spread through a population, which can be studied using diffusion or other epidemiological models. Furthermore, people's beliefs about vaccination may affect their probability of getting infected by a disease, and in turn, getting infected may cause them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Previous work has separately studied (1) how beliefs propagate and change over time, (2) how diseases spread through a population over time, and (3) the (static) correlation between beliefs about vaccination and infection rates; but possibly not all three simultaneously.

This project has some similarities to the project on "Coupling Different Types of Networks," and it may make sense for the two groups to be in communication with each other, or even to merge the two projects. This can be discussed later as the projects develop.

Interested: 
Ells 
Nhat 
Glen 
Andy 
Brian 

== Consciousness as an emergent state of matter – what do you think?==

You’re conscious right now, reading this. How does subjective experience emerge out of the bundles of particles that we all are? 

Scholars of many fields have been deconstructing the mind/body dualism for a while, but consciousness remains a big, hard question. I’m no expert and by proposing this as a topic I’m not expecting that any of us will solve it, but I would be very interested in exchanging on the issue with the smart individuals that you are, grounded in so many backgrounds and unafraid of complex problems. 

So... physicians and physicists, social scientists, biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists and others… what do you think? Don’t hold back – if beer is necessary for you to address this issue, it can be arranged. 

Contact Sarah L (laborde.7@osu.edu) 

Interested: 
Alireza (alireza.goudarzi at gmail.com)[totally agree with writing down something to figure out what are plausible ways to think about and study this] 
Fahad (fahad.khalid@hpi.uni-potsdam.de) [love the topic ... I'm glad someone brought it up ... I might have some ideas to contribute] 
Claire (lagesse.claire at gmail.com) [it sounds fascinating... :) ] 
Stefan (s.pfenninger12@imperial.ac.uk) 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) [Happy to contribute from a medical and personal point of view] 
Sean Hayes(shaye004@ucr.edu) 
Cole Mathis (cole.mathis@asu.edu) [The origin and consciousness and the origin of life (my main research interest) have a lot in common, I'm always down to talk about consciousness with some beers, if something novel emerges that's great.] 
Emília [happy to contribute from various points of view, but I advance that, to me, it has a lot to do with memory] 
Ana María (anamaria.gomezlopez@yale.edu) 
Brian (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 
Sean Gibbons (sgibbons at uchicago dot edu) [Definitely interested in joining the conversation] 
Matthew Ayres (matthew.ayres@growthandinnovation.com.au) 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) 

Note: this doesn’t have to become a formal project, although it could. Let me know if you’re interested in a chat, writing an interdisciplinary dialogue piece, or anything related to this question. 

==Tradeoffs between division of labor and stability in networks==

The Black Queen Hypothesis [http://mbio.asm.org/content/3/2/e00036-12.abstract BQH] describes the evolution of functional dependencies in microbial ecosystems. This process results in a subset of a community providing necessary services for the rest of the community (see link). Organisms that can outsource essential functions escape the cost performing these functions and have more resources for growth and reproduction. However, this process makes the ecosystem more delicate, as the destruction of key species can eliminate their crucial service(s) and lead to system collapse. Thus, there is a tradeoff between the stability of a network (in the face of perturbations), and the degree of cooperation (how many tasks can be outsourced). As a result of this tradeoff, we could expect different community types to arise in stable vs. variable environments. There is likely some critical range between these two modes (high vs. low environmental variability), where some mixed strategy is optimal. 

This process may have an analogue in the development of multicellular life (vs. free-living single-celled organisms), where each cell type expresses a subset of the genome and provide a specific set of services to the whole (division of labor). This might also be reflected in social or economic networks (higher stability = more cooperative?). A connection could potentially be made to life-history tradeoffs for individual organisms (r vs. k selection - oligotrophs vs. copiotrophs), or in dissipative chemical systems (e.g. [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jcp/139/12/10.1063/1.4818538 Stat-Mech of Self Replication]). 

Vipin: I believe that this mechanism may have much to do with why "business cycle" occur.

Definitely a work in progress, please add your thoughts if you are interested! Also, please include your contact info alongside your name.

Interested: 
Sean Gibbons (sgibbons at uchicago dot edu) 
Rohan Mehta 
Stojan 
Emília 
Ali Kharrazi 
Vipin (vipin.veetil at gmail dot com) 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 

==How can evolutionary game theory be applied to electricity trading==

The interest of this project is the following: how can evolutionary game theory be used to find optimal strategies for consumers and/or producers that bid in the electricity market. Also some real data can be considered. 
Contact Blaz 

Interested: 
Degang Wu 

== Information Theory of the Heart ==

The heart is a complex system with simple rules of operation and minimal central control. Under normal conditions, it orchestrates a self-organized, emergent behavior of 2 to 3 billion heart cells to perform sophisticated, well-timed pumping of the blood. Under abnormal conditions, it can lead to sudden cardiac death due to cardiac arrhythmias, which are also emergent, collective behaviors of a large number of heart cells, where each heart cell doesn't necessarily need to be abnormal. 

Each heart cell is a dynamic information processing system, which transmits digital information (0 – resting, 1 – excited) in the form of electrical wave. We aim to establish a theoretical basis to quantify information transmission within the heart using information theory and network theory. Our hypothesis is that arrhythmias following heart attack result from an adaptive mechanism to optimize information transmission in abnormal hearts. 

If you want to discuss more please contact Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu). 

''Interested:'' 
Hiroshi 
Flavia 
Brian 

== Cells and Software: Is Evolution a Software Engineer? ==

There appear to be striking similarities between how we design software, and how evolution designed cells. Some of the analogies are: 
- The concept of "Encapsulation". In object oriented programs, data inside an object is protected by an interface of functions. Similarly, processes within a cell (intra-cellular signaling cascades) are protected from the extra-cellular messaging activities through membrane-bound receptors acting as the interface. 
- Apoptosis (programmed cell death) is similar to proper memory deallocation in programs, while Necrosis is similar to dangling pointers and memory corruption. 
- Proteolysis (breaking down of proteins into constituent amino acids) is similar to automatic garbage collection. 

There are certain constraints (perhaps physical constraints) on the available solutions in biology. Solutions within this constrained solution space eventually result in the emergence of complex behavior. This emergent behavior has enabled humans to engineer solutions to everyday problems. These artificially engineered solutions are very similar in principal to the solutions that already exist in biological systems. 

Are our creative processes ultimately bound by the physical constraints that underlie molecular mechanisms? Or, do we just tend to interpret the phenomena at the molecular level according to our own understanding, which is limited by our senses and neurological processes? Is it all about optimization, and everything else is just a side effect?
Can/do “Patterns” transcend disciplines? 

Motifs (biological systems) – Patterns (software). Patterns/motifs transcending biological and software systems could perhaps, fill gaps in our knowledge of biological systems, and help us design better software systems. Deterministic patterns could perhaps indicate what is required for high level functions to emerge from molecular interactions. And perhaps these similarities occur at the interface between low level interaction and emergent phenomena.

So let's further explore biological and software systems, and try to find answers to these questions.

For more information, please contact Fahad (fahad.khalid@hpi.uni-potsdam.de). 

''Interested:'' 
Fahad 
Ernest 
Diana 
Degang 
Stojan 
Ana María 
Brian 

==Susceptibility of Fields of Research to Interdisciplinary Influences (network perspective) ==

Fields of Research are more often than not isolated from one another in terms of their community, jargon, perspective, research programme (in the sense of Lakatos) and their journals and lots more.

This isolation stands in the way of a fruitful merging and interaction of fields. One needs to understand the obstructions. Hence an analysis of the determining factors for 'community inbreeding' is sought after. Eventually also a quantitative measure for the susceptibility of a research field could be formulated.

A clear-cut project could be based on data together with a network type analysis of a precise question around the determining factors.
We could look at citation data or journal based data or maybe there is a chance to get hold of data from Jessica's collegues, who works on the diffusion of knowledge.

It would be great also to discuss and gather our ideas and experiences.

''Interested'' 
Leo (horstmey@mis.mpg.de ) 
Jennifer Hellmann 
Anna Olson 
Lin Li 
Stefan Pfenninger [other angles include: citation networks/academic generations and how they change through time (Diego's idea); citations between subfields to quantify interdisciplinarity and how it changes over time] 

==Simple case for studying about “from single-cell to multi-cell / species collaboration”==

QUESTION: how single-cell evolves to multi-cell, even they do not have so-called “intelligence”?

How to do:
Let’s imagine that there is a land where resources A, B, C are located, and a kind of creature which need all of these resources to survive (imagine many creatures live in this land). 
One surviving strategy is that every creature gathers A, B and C and eat them on its own. But maybe under some condition, specialization would automatically happen (e.g. one creature gather A and another gather B, and then they share). 
The goal is to find the necessary condition if possible (we could think out of many sufficient conditions, but finding necessary conditions seems not so easy).

Interested: 
Ernest Liu (yu.liu@math.uu.se) 

==An Analysis of the Hierarchies Present in Modern Economic Theory ==

The idea of this project is to provide a comprehensive survey of the hierarchical structure of economics (macro -> microeconomics) following the reductionist = constructionist + emergence framework of Anderson (N.B. This equation is my own interpretation of Anderson's paper and is open for discussion). Ideally, we would first investigate the microfoundations literature of macroeconomics and the possibility for ABM to rectify some of the redundancies therein after which we would reverse the direction and see how, given some 'fundamental' laws of economic behaviour, we could couple these with emergent phenomena (whatever they may be) to reconstruct the economy at the macro-level.

''Interested'' 
Nicolas ( nicolas dot scholtes at unamur dot be) 
Claudius

== The Topological Modeling of Infrastructure Networks ==

There is some disagreement on the topology of power networks in the literature. There are preferential attachment, small-world and random graph models proposed to explain the topology of power networks. There are caveats associated with each of these generative models. For instance, there is the cost of building new transmission lines that may question the validity of preferential models.

'''The broad question that we attempt to answer here is:''' 

-Can these previous network models create real-world power networks? 
-Can we come up with a better model that can replicate a power network or at least one with similar characteristics? 
-What about other infrastructure networks, e.g., natural gas network, water piping networks, etc? 

Interested:
Pooya Rezaei 
Tom McAndrew 

== Functional Networks and their evolution ==

We are interested in researching (possibly hierarchical) networks that have a function which can be quantified. We are interested in understanding how such networks evolve and may continue to deliver all or part of their function when they are damaged. As of now, we do not have a clear conceptualization of these ideas in formal network language, and our immediate task is to think of the formal network structure we wish to explore (e.g. b-partite, multileveled). Possible concrete cases to apply this formal characterization to are trees (i.e. plants), power grids, or financial networks.

Interested (please contact us to join the debate):

Alex Brummer (brummera@email.arizona.edu) 
Shai Gorsky (shai.gorsky@utah.edu) 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) 
Stefan Pfenninger (s.pfenninger12@imperial.ac.uk) 
Jessica Santana (jsant@stanford.edu) 

== Multi-scalar approaches to understand regime shifts in a socio-ecological system ==

Field-based research, be it qualitative or quantitative, often yields fragmentary and limited data sets when collected in settings with political instability, economic disparity, and rapidly changing environmental conditions. Using the Logone river floodplain in Cameroon as a case study, this project aims to carry out multi-scalar analysis of fragmentary data sets to understand larger social dynamics and ecological regime shifts in this region. Our goal is to address the challenges of network analysis, agent-based modeling, and game theory in this context by examining multiple units of analysis at different scales.
Some of the possible issues to study are: common pool resources problems, influence of (corrupt) institutions, inluence of the internal structure of this societies, etc.

Sarah L 
Ana María 
Claudius 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com)

Complex Systems Summer School 2014-Projects & Working Groups

2014-06-12T16:22:41Z

Lusczeke: /* Coupling of different types of networks */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2014}}

==Bitcoin==

Bitcoin is an online peer-to-peer currency which has gained popularity in recent years. With increased general interest and now more and more companies accepting transactions in Bitcoin, so to has its value and is currently priced at $633 for 1 Bitcoin!

'''So what is Bitcoin?'''

The idea behind Bitcoin was to remove the need for a centralised banking system. The way this works is to have all transactions made public and then have the Bitcoin community validate transactions by donating computational power (and rewarded in Bitcoins). For further details see this blog:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/

'''So why is it interesting?'''

Usually companies and individuals keep all of their financial records private, but ALL transaction in Bitcoin are publicly available, so this provides a unique opportunity to study financial transactions. While the transactions are public, the owners of Bitcoin remain (relatively) anonymous, and so this has led to associations with criminal activities (e.g. on the silk road) from illegal drugs to hired hit-men. In addition to illegal activities using the currency, there have also been a number of illegal activities against the currency, such as high valued heists of the order of $100 million.

''Oh, and of course its a big temporally evolving network.''

If you're interested in working on this then add your name below. If there is interest, then we can have a "Bitcoin, beers and blackboard" session to throw some ideas around.

Interested:

Leto 
Shai 
Flavia 
Jessica Santana jsant@stanford.edu 
Stefan 
Ana María 

Meeting today (Jun 12) indicate your availability here:http://doodle.com/w5bys3zfmpeamf32

==MITRE Data Sets==

To access the data please contact Juniper she has it on a hard drive. Here is a PDF that explains the datasets and gives some sample challenge questions.
[[Media:mitredata.pdf |MITRE DATA PDF]] If you have any specific questions about the data you can contact Matt Koehler at mkoehler@mitre.org

==Death in physical, biological and social systems==

Firms, nation states, human beings and stars all die. Do the causes of "death" in physical, biological and social systems have something in common? If yes, what is it?

''Interested''

Ana María 

==Fractal-like structures in economic data==

In the 1960-70s Mandelbrot showed that some economic time series have fractal-like structures, i.e. they look the same at many time scales. The existence of these structures has been debated since. Do economic time series like S&P 500 index have fractal-like structures? If yes, how fractal-like are they?

''Interested'' 

Vipin (vipin.veetil at gmail dot com) 
Blaz 
Qiao Zhi 

==Microbial Community Data Sets==

The Earth Microbiome Project [http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/ EMP] is a massively multidisciplinary effort to analyze microbial communities across the globe. The general premise is to characterize the Earth by environmental parameter space into different biomes and then explore these using samples currently available from researchers across the globe. All data sets are processed in the same way (DNA extraction, PCR primers, sequencing, bioinformatics), making them inter-comparable. You can explore these data sets (including some time series, and a bunch of spatial samplings) at the following link [http://microbio.me/emp EMP Data] (no need to create a login ID, just scroll down to 'Download Public Data'). If you have questions, please contact Sean Gibbons (sgibbons at uchicago dot edu).

==Does Larger Memory Capacity Brings about Evolutionary Advantage?==

Evolutionary game theory modeling. Agents/players on lattice or networks. A player with n-step memory has responses to all 4^n past game outcomes. Intuitively, a player with longer memory can have more sophisticated strategy, which might be used to exploit player with smaller memory capacity. Yet according to the Prisoner's Dilemma tournament organized by Axelrod, Tit-for-Tat, which can be modeled using only one-step memory, fares better than a number of sophisticated strategies invented by experts in the field of game theory. From the game theory perspective, does smaller memory capacity actually have evolutionary benefits?
Please contact Degang Wu (dwuab@ust.hk).

''Interested:'' 
Blaz 
Brian 
Flavia 
Cole Mathis (cole.mathis@asu.edu) 
Claudius

==North American Breeding Birds Survey and tropical trees==

This dataset contains ~4500 sites where populations of birds (~600 species overall, ~60 species on average in every site) were sampled over the past 44 years. This gives numerous time series of both population sizes and the overall number of species. Some problems with this dataset include large observational errors. A dataset of tropical trees with the exact diameter, identity (from among 300 species) and location of ~250000 trees over 6 censuses is also available. Please contact Michael Kalyuzhny for these.

==Santa Fe tournament of time series analysis!==

Do fluctuations in timeseries arise from nonlinear dynamics or from stochasticity? Specifically, there are several examples of ecological time series where chaos/complex periodicity were found (and published in Science and other leading journals). But usually such analyses didn't examine alternative models of stochastic dynamics. I propose making some meta-analysis and trying to compare the predictive power of both kinds of models. This can also be done in other fields were such timeseries are available. If you want to talk about this - contact Michael Kalyuzhny

Interested:
Michael Kalyuzhny 
Degang Wu 

==The Multiplex Networks==

How does the structure of social networks affect the emergence and persistence of norms? Why are some norms (like fashion styles) less persistent than others (like religious beliefs)? Is this because different kinds of norms live on different social networks (with same individual participating in different networks)? If yes, how do these social networks interact?

And finally, what do the answers to the above questions tell us about policy interventions? Can certain critical properties of network structures be exploited to change norms, like going to the moon without much fuel? If two networks interact, say religious belief and fashion styles, can interventions in one be used to bring about changes in another?

''Interested''

Vipin 
Sarah L 
Alberto 
Francesca 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com) 
Sanja 
Massimo 
Leto 
Alireza (alireza.goudarzi at gmail.com) 
Claire (lagesse.claire at gmail.com) 
Cecilia 
Sean Hayes (shaye004@ucr.edu) 
Claudius 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 

==Network Tolerance of Failure==

How might a network endure non-catastrophic failure without isolating the failing components? Most network failure models consider resilience against failure as a result of isolating failing components. In contrast, is it possible for the network to be robust through "tolerance" of failure? Perhaps, for example, a symbiotic relationship sustains a weakened node until it has recovered its prior performance. Or perhaps a transmitting network retains a connection to an offline node to reduce an anticipated memory load of re-establishing the connection when it comes back online. What are some of the ways in which networks are able to maintain connection to a failing node without failing themselves in the process - how is the cascade halted without isolation? This is meant to be a broad question to generate more specific ideas. Importantly, this question refers to "tolerance of" failure in contrast to "resilience against" failure.
 Contact: Jessica Santana jsant@stanford.edu

Interested:

James Holdener 
Junjian Qi 
Ells Campbell 
Leto 
Alireza (alireza.goudarzi at gmail.com) 
Claire (lagesse.claire at gmail.com) 
Sean Hayes(shaye004@ucr.edu) 
Ali Kharrazi 

*For those interested in this project, we will be meeting at 1 pm in the cafeteria with a related project to determine how to split up the groups. Cheers, Jessica* 

==Influence of different types of parasites and pathogens in networks on dynamics and stability of food webs==

In nature there is a number of infectious agents which have different evolutionary approaches in way how they influence their hosts. We want to built artificial ecological network and to compare how these evolutionary solutions affect stability of food webs.
 Contact: sanjakojasanja@gmail.com

Interested:

Stojan 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com) 
Sanja 
Cecilia: Are we going to discuss today at 9? No probably, but tomorrow, today is a free day! Relax!:D

==Growth of Cities==

Do foraging animals and growing cities utilize resources in the same way? We're interested in building an agent-based model which generates a road network on a map of varying resources by following a set of simple, probabilistic rules. How do the properties of this network evolve through time? How much of city growth can be explained by resource constraints? Do simple rules of growth parallel simple rules of animal foraging behavior? This project will explore agent-based modeling, but will also present opportunities to examine the limits of modeling. Contacts: Diana LaScala-Gruenewald (dianalg11 at gmail.com) and Claire Lagesse (lagesse.claire at gmail.com).

Interested: 
Morgan Edwards 
Rohan Mehta 
Alberto Antonioni 
Ernest Liu 
Michael Kalyuzhny 
Hiroshi Ashikaga (hashika1@jhmi.edu) 
Bernardo Furtado bernardo.furtado at ipea.gov.br 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 

==Towards a Unified Theory of Biodiversity==

The idea is to build on the Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and create a realistic unified theory that incorporates important scaling phenomena following power laws, energetic constraints, and stochasticity that have been previously neglected. Basically, we want to modify the unrealistic assumptions that birth, death, speciation rates are stochastic uniform functions across all species within a given meta-community. In fact, these processes have recently been shown to scale with body size following power laws of the form Y= C * M^alpha, where C is a constant independent of body mass, M, and alpha is the scaling exponent. These constraints will also dictate how much energy is required at different trophic levels and body sizes, ultimately constraining abundance of organisms in natural systems. Stochasticity will still play a role, but it should be first bounded by energetic constraints. We also plan to incorporate environmental noise, that is to say, incorporate in the model the realistic assumption that the environment changes through time and therefore so will the fitness of different species in the meta-community.
The ultimate goal is to provide a Unified Theory that can make clear predictions about size-abundance-distributions in natural systems, and, perhaps, also make predictions about speciation-extinction dynamics. We currently hold data to test predictions on an 'ecological' time scale. At this point we are uncertain on whether we could obtain good fossil/contemporary data to calibrate/test models.

Interested: 
Diego Barneche Rosado 
Cornelia Metzig 
Michael Kalyuzhny 
Ana María 

==Coupling of different types of networks==

We want to develop a concept of how to work with networks of qualitatively different types of relationships or interactions that can influence each other (eg. natural and social). Sign up and come to brainstorm with us :) Contact: sanjakojasanja@gmail.com

For example, people's beliefs about the health benefits/risks of vaccination can be influenced by their social network, and may be studied using belief propagation models. Simultaneously, diseases may spread through a population, which can be studied using diffusion or other epidemiological models. Furthermore, people's beliefs about vaccination may affect their probability of getting infected by a disease, and in turn, getting infected may cause them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Another example could involve an ecological network expressing predation and competition among species coupled with an environmental network.

Interested: 
Sanja 
Fahad 
Brian 
Nhat (nhattdnguyen@gmail.com) 
Beth Lusczek 

==Co-evolution of Anti-vaccination Sentiment and Flu Infections==

People's beliefs about the health benefits/risks of vaccination can be influenced by their social network, and may be studied using belief propagation models. Simultaneously, diseases may spread through a population, which can be studied using diffusion or other epidemiological models. Furthermore, people's beliefs about vaccination may affect their probability of getting infected by a disease, and in turn, getting infected may cause them to re-evaluate their beliefs.

Previous work has separately studied (1) how beliefs propagate and change over time, (2) how diseases spread through a population over time, and (3) the (static) correlation between beliefs about vaccination and infection rates; but possibly not all three simultaneously.

This project has some similarities to the project on "Coupling Different Types of Networks," and it may make sense for the two groups to be in communication with each other, or even to merge the two projects. This can be discussed later as the projects develop.

Interested: 
Ells 
Nhat 
Glen 
Andy 
Brian 

== Consciousness as an emergent state of matter – what do you think?==

You’re conscious right now, reading this. How does subjective experience emerge out of the bundles of particles that we all are? 

Scholars of many fields have been deconstructing the mind/body dualism for a while, but consciousness remains a big, hard question. I’m no expert and by proposing this as a topic I’m not expecting that any of us will solve it, but I would be very interested in exchanging on the issue with the smart individuals that you are, grounded in so many backgrounds and unafraid of complex problems. 

So... physicians and physicists, social scientists, biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists and others… what do you think? Don’t hold back – if beer is necessary for you to address this issue, it can be arranged. 

Contact Sarah L (laborde.7@osu.edu) 

Interested: 
Alireza (alireza.goudarzi at gmail.com)[totally agree with writing down something to figure out what are plausible ways to think about and study this] 
Fahad (fahad.khalid@hpi.uni-potsdam.de) [love the topic ... I'm glad someone brought it up ... I might have some ideas to contribute] 
Claire (lagesse.claire at gmail.com) [it sounds fascinating... :) ] 
Stefan (s.pfenninger12@imperial.ac.uk) 
Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu) [Happy to contribute from a medical and personal point of view] 
Sean Hayes(shaye004@ucr.edu) 
Cole Mathis (cole.mathis@asu.edu) [The origin and consciousness and the origin of life (my main research interest) have a lot in common, I'm always down to talk about consciousness with some beers, if something novel emerges that's great.] 
Emília [happy to contribute from various points of view, but I advance that, to me, it has a lot to do with memory] 
Ana María (anamaria.gomezlopez@yale.edu) 
Brian (bthompso8784@gmail.com) 
Sean Gibbons (sgibbons at uchicago dot edu) [Definitely interested in joining the conversation] 
Matthew Ayres (matthew.ayres@growthandinnovation.com.au) 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com)

Note: this doesn’t have to become a formal project, although it could. Let me know if you’re interested in a chat, writing an interdisciplinary dialogue piece, or anything related to this question. 

==Tradeoffs between division of labor and stability in networks==

The Black Queen Hypothesis [http://mbio.asm.org/content/3/2/e00036-12.abstract BQH] describes the evolution of functional dependencies in microbial ecosystems. This process results in a subset of a community providing necessary services for the rest of the community (see link). Organisms that can outsource essential functions escape the cost performing these functions and have more resources for growth and reproduction. However, this process makes the ecosystem more delicate, as the destruction of key species can eliminate their crucial service(s) and lead to system collapse. Thus, there is a tradeoff between the stability of a network (in the face of perturbations), and the degree of cooperation (how many tasks can be outsourced). As a result of this tradeoff, we could expect different community types to arise in stable vs. variable environments. There is likely some critical range between these two modes (high vs. low environmental variability), where some mixed strategy is optimal. 

This process may have an analogue in the development of multicellular life (vs. free-living single-celled organisms), where each cell type expresses a subset of the genome and provide a specific set of services to the whole (division of labor). This might also be reflected in social or economic networks (higher stability = more cooperative?). A connection could potentially be made to life-history tradeoffs for individual organisms (r vs. k selection - oligotrophs vs. copiotrophs), or in dissipative chemical systems (e.g. [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jcp/139/12/10.1063/1.4818538 Stat-Mech of Self Replication]). 

Vipin: I believe that this mechanism may have much to do with why "business cycle" occur.

Definitely a work in progress, please add your thoughts if you are interested! Also, please include your contact info alongside your name.

Interested: 
Sean Gibbons (sgibbons at uchicago dot edu) 
Rohan Mehta 
Stojan 
Emília 
Ali Kharrazi 
Vipin (vipin.veetil at gmail dot com) 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com) 

==How can evolutionary game theory be applied to electricity trading==

The interest of this project is the following: how can evolutionary game theory be used to find optimal strategies for consumers and/or producers that bid in the electricity market. Also some real data can be considered. 
Contact Blaz 

Interested: 
Degang Wu 

== Information Theory of the Heart ==

The heart is a complex system with simple rules of operation and minimal central control. Under normal conditions, it orchestrates a self-organized, emergent behavior of 2 to 3 billion heart cells to perform sophisticated, well-timed pumping of the blood. Under abnormal conditions, it can lead to sudden cardiac death due to cardiac arrhythmias, which are also emergent, collective behaviors of a large number of heart cells, where each heart cell doesn't necessarily need to be abnormal. 

Each heart cell is a dynamic information processing system, which transmits digital information (0 – resting, 1 – excited) in the form of electrical wave. We aim to establish a theoretical basis to quantify information transmission within the heart using information theory and network theory. Our hypothesis is that arrhythmias following heart attack result from an adaptive mechanism to optimize information transmission in abnormal hearts. 

If you want to discuss more please contact Hiroshi (hashika1@jhmi.edu). 

''Interested:'' 
Hiroshi 
Flavia 
Brian 

== Cells and Software: Is Evolution a Software Engineer? ==

There appear to be striking similarities between how we design software, and how evolution designed cells. Some of the analogies are: 
- The concept of "Encapsulation". In object oriented programs, data inside an object is protected by an interface of functions. Similarly, processes within a cell (intra-cellular signaling cascades) are protected from the extra-cellular messaging activities through membrane-bound receptors acting as the interface. 
- Apoptosis (programmed cell death) is similar to proper memory deallocation in programs, while Necrosis is similar to dangling pointers and memory corruption. 
- Proteolysis (breaking down of proteins into constituent amino acids) is similar to automatic garbage collection. 

There are certain constraints (perhaps physical constraints) on the available solutions in biology. Solutions within this constrained solution space eventually result in the emergence of complex behavior. This emergent behavior has enabled humans to engineer solutions to everyday problems. These artificially engineered solutions are very similar in principal to the solutions that already exist in biological systems. 

Are our creative processes ultimately bound by the physical constraints that underlie molecular mechanisms? Or, do we just tend to interpret the phenomena at the molecular level according to our own understanding, which is limited by our senses and neurological processes? Is it all about optimization, and everything else is just a side effect?
Can/do “Patterns” transcend disciplines? 

Motifs (biological systems) – Patterns (software). Patterns/motifs transcending biological and software systems could perhaps, fill gaps in our knowledge of biological systems, and help us design better software systems. Deterministic patterns could perhaps indicate what is required for high level functions to emerge from molecular interactions. And perhaps these similarities occur at the interface between low level interaction and emergent phenomena.

So let's further explore biological and software systems, and try to find answers to these questions.

For more information, please contact Fahad (fahad.khalid@hpi.uni-potsdam.de). 

''Interested:'' 
Fahad 
Ernest 
Diana 
Degang 
Stojan 
Ana María 
Brian 

==Susceptibility of Fields of Research to Interdisciplinary Influences (network perspective) ==

Fields of Research are more often than not isolated from one another in terms of their community, jargon, perspective, research programme (in the sense of Lakatos) and their journals and lots more.

This isolation stands in the way of a fruitful merging and interaction of fields. One needs to understand the obstructions. Hence an analysis of the determining factors for 'community inbreeding' is sought after. Eventually also a quantitative measure for the susceptibility of a research field could be formulated.

A clear-cut project could be based on data together with a network type analysis of a precise question around the determining factors.
We could look at citation data or journal based data or maybe there is a chance to get hold of data from Jessica's collegues, who works on the diffusion of knowledge.

It would be great also to discuss and gather our ideas and experiences.

''Interested'' 
Leo (horstmey@mis.mpg.de ) 
Jennifer Hellmann 
Anna Olson 
Lin Li 
Stefan Pfenninger [other angles include: citation networks/academic generations and how they change through time (Diego's idea); citations between subfields to quantify interdisciplinarity and how it changes over time] 

==Simple case for studying about “from single-cell to multi-cell / species collaboration”==

QUESTION: how single-cell evolves to multi-cell, even they do not have so-called “intelligence”?

How to do:
Let’s imagine that there is a land where resources A, B, C are located, and a kind of creature which need all of these resources to survive (imagine many creatures live in this land). 
One surviving strategy is that every creature gathers A, B and C and eat them on its own. But maybe under some condition, specialization would automatically happen (e.g. one creature gather A and another gather B, and then they share). 
The goal is to find the necessary condition if possible (we could think out of many sufficient conditions, but finding necessary conditions seems not so easy).

Interested: 
Ernest Liu (yu.liu@math.uu.se) 

==An Analysis of the Hierarchies Present in Modern Economic Theory ==

The idea of this project is to provide a comprehensive survey of the hierarchical structure of economics (macro -> microeconomics) following the reductionist = constructionist + emergence framework of Anderson (N.B. This equation is my own interpretation of Anderson's paper and is open for discussion). Ideally, we would first investigate the microfoundations literature of macroeconomics and the possibility for ABM to rectify some of the redundancies therein after which we would reverse the direction and see how, given some 'fundamental' laws of economic behaviour, we could couple these with emergent phenomena (whatever they may be) to reconstruct the economy at the macro-level.

''Interested'' 
Nicolas ( nicolas dot scholtes at unamur dot be) 
Claudius

== The Topological Modeling of Infrastructure Networks ==

There is some disagreement on the topology of power networks in the literature. There are preferential attachment, small-world and random graph models proposed to explain the topology of power networks. There are caveats associated with each of these generative models. For instance, there is the cost of building new transmission lines that may question the validity of preferential models.

'''The broad question that we attempt to answer here is:''' 

-Can these previous network models create real-world power networks? 
-Can we come up with a better model that can replicate a power network or at least one with similar characteristics? 
-What about other infrastructure networks, e.g., natural gas network, water piping networks, etc? 

Interested:
Pooya Rezaei 
Tom McAndrew 

== Functional Networks and their evolution ==

We are interested in researching (possibly hierarchical) networks that have a function which can be quantified. We are interested in understanding how such networks evolve and may continue to deliver all or part of their function when they are damaged. As of now, we do not have a clear conceptualization of these ideas in formal network language, and our immediate task is to think of the formal network structure we wish to explore (e.g. b-partite, multileveled). Possible concrete cases to apply this formal characterization to are trees (i.e. plants), power grids, or financial networks.

Interested (please contact us to join the debate):

Alex Brummer (brummera@email.arizona.edu) 
Shai Gorsky (shai.gorsky@utah.edu) 
Beth Lusczek (lusc0006@umn.edu) 
Stefan Pfenninger (s.pfenninger12@imperial.ac.uk) 
Jessica Santana (jsant@stanford.edu) 

== Multi-scalar approaches to understand regime shifts in a socio-ecological system ==

Field-based research, be it qualitative or quantitative, often yields fragmentary and limited data sets when collected in settings with political instability, economic disparity, and rapidly changing environmental conditions. Using the Logone river floodplain in Cameroon as a case study, this project aims to carry out multi-scalar analysis of fragmentary data sets to understand larger social dynamics and ecological regime shifts in this region. Our goal is to address the challenges of network analysis, agent-based modeling, and game theory in this context by examining multiple units of analysis at different scales.
Some of the possible issues to study are: common pool resources problems, influence of (corrupt) institutions, inluence of the internal structure of this societies, etc.

Sarah L 
Ana María 
Claudius 
Luis Martínez (fnxabraxas@gmail.com)

Complex Systems Summer School 2014-Participants

2014-06-11T19:33:05Z

Lusczeke: /* 1-Minute Summaries */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2014}}

To post a photo, bio, and answer the questions below please email them to juniper@santafe.edu:

* What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!
* What sort of expertise can you bring to the group?
* What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?
* Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS?

Visit the [http://www.facebook.com/pages/SFI-Complex-Systems-Summer-School/195552467134324?sk=wall&filter=2 Facebook Complex Systems Summer School Page] to get to know each other informally.

To access a '''CSSS mobile app''' of the schedule, logistics, and faculty list please use your mobile device to visit: http://my.yapp.us/ESQ5T2

==Participants==

[[Alberto Antonioni]], University of Lausanne, Switzerland, & University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain 
[[Alex Brummer]], University of Arizona 
[[Ali Kharrazi]], University of Tokyo 
[[Alireza Goudarz]]i, University of New Mexico 
[[Ana Maria Gomez Lopez]], Yale University 
[[Andy Maloney]], The University of Texas at Austin 
[[Anna Olson]], University of Chicago 
[[Bernardo Alves Furtado]], Institute for Applied Economic Research 
[[Blaz Krese]], University of Ljubljana 
[[Brais Alvarez-Pereira]], European University Institute 
[[Brian Thompson]] 
[[Catherine Bale]], University of Leeds 
[[Cecilia Siliansky de Andreazzi]], Universidade de São Paulo, Instituto de Biociências 
[[Claire Lagesse]], MSC Laboratory (Complex Matter and Systems) 
[[Claudius Graebner]], University of Bremen 
[[Cornelia Metzig]], University of Grenoble 
[[Degang Wu]], Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 
[[Diana LaScala-Gruenewald]], Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University 
[[Diego Barneche Rosado]], Macquarie University 
[[Elizabeth Lusczek]], University of Minnesota 
[[Ellsworth Campbell]], Pennsylvania State University 
[[Emília Garcia Casademont]], IBE (UPF-CSIC) 
[[Yu Ernest Liu]], Uppsala University 
[[Fahad Khalid]], Hasso-Plattner-Institute for Software Systems Engineering, University of Potsdam 
[[Flavia Maria Darcie Marquitti]], Universidade de Sao Paulo 
[[Francesca Lipari]], University of Tor Vergata 
[[Glen Otero]], Virginia Bioinformatics Institute 
[[Heath Henderson]], Inter-American Development Bank 
[[Hiroshi Ashikaga]], Johns Hopkins University 
[[James Gentile]], MITRE 
[[James Holdener]], MITRE 
[[Jennifer Hellmann]], The Ohio State University 
[[Jessica Santana]], Stanford University 
[[John Balwit]], Portland State University 
[[José Aguilar-Rodríguez]], University of Zurich & Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics 
[[Junjian Qi]], University of Tennessee 
[[Leonhard Horstmeyer]], Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences 
[[Leto Peel]], University of Colorado at Boulder 
[[Lin Li]], US Army Research Laboratory 
[[Luis Alberto Martínez Vaquero]] Vrije Universiteit Brussel 
[[Massimo Stella]], Institute for Complex Systems Simulation 
[[Matthew Ayres]], Growth and Innovation Asia Pacific 
[[Michael Kalyuzhny]], The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 
[[Morgan Edwards]], Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
[[Nhat Nguyen]], Oxford University Clinical Research Unit 
[[Nicholas Mathis]], Arizona State University 
[[Nicolas-Kirti Scholtes]], University of Namur, Catholic University of Louvain 
[[Pooya Rezaei]], University of Vermont 
[[Qiao Zhi]], National University of Singapore 
[[Renske Vroomans]], Utrecht University 
[[Rohan Mehta]], Stanford University 
[[Sanja Selakovic]], Utrecht University 
[[Sarah Laborde]], Ohio State University 
[[Sarah Marzen]], UC Berkeley 
[[Sean Hayes]], University of California Riverside 
[[Sean M. Gibbons]], The University of Chicago 
[[Shai Gorsky]], University of Utah 
[[Stefan Pfenninger]], Imperial College London 
[[Stojan Davidovic]], Max Planck Institute for Human Development 
[[Thomas McAndrew]], University of Vermont 
[[Vipin P. Veetil]], George Mason University 

==1-Minute Summaries==

* Michael: hiking, history, birds; ecology, population dynamics, stoachastic processes; interest in networks, time series data of birds etc
* Claudius: social science, econ, agent-based models of economy, levels of investigation, evolutionary game theory
* Blaz: nonlinear time series analysis, modeling electricity market; interest in networks, game theory
* Matt: cross-industry etc, diffusion/emergence of ideas, ML
* Hiroshi: cardio-electric physician, predicting death, cells in heart as complex system; history, politics
* Renske: insect development of segmentation, model that explains observed behavior, interest in networks and lots of things; music, hiking, beauty
* Fahad: AI, parallel computing; similarities between design principles in biology and software; something with quantum computing? more scalable architectures
* Ali: resilience in networks, world resource trade networks e.g. energy; hiking, futbol
* Diana: marine bio, how simple orgs navigate complex environments, scaling of behavior; interest in networks; hiking, soccer
* Morgan: eng systems, env science - energy, env impacts of decisions; interest in biological systems or network theory
* Sarah L: water as physical and cultural factor/force, Cameroon flooding patterns, interactions with ecosystem and social dynamics
* Junjian: power systems, failure propagation in systems, how to mitigate; inter-dependent networks, predicting extreme events using time series or spatial data
* Bernardo: geography, econ; public policy in Brazil; interest in spatial analysis, tax collection etc, water, energy, sustainability; cycling
* Beth: physics, surgery; changes in metabolic networks in massive blood loss , scaling from sub-cell level processes and networks to physiological symptoms
* Vipin: interest in fractal-like structures in econ data, measuring fractal-ness; emergence of norms, how structure/dynamic of network affects this; playing soccer
* Emília: evolutionary biology; cultural evol of language using agent-based modeling; classical guitar
* Francesca: econ, social science; motivation of identity-based behavior social norms decision-making; public policy in developing countries; how beliefs are formed; manipulating norms
* Luis: physics (was astro, not anymore), networks and coop games, emegence of tolerance/intolerance, reputation; differences in cultures/societies; hiking
* Alberto: mathematics, game theory on networks; modeling of social and spatial networks; experimental econ; like futbol
* Nicholas: chem eng, econ; inter-bank networks, model trust; overlapping mutual funds; kinetic theory of gases for econ; hierarchies
* Degang/Samuel: physics; apply evol game theory to human activities; inferring influence in social networks; affect of memory capacity of players or other individual properties on overall dynamics; hiking
* Ana Maria: forensic anthropology, understanding cause of death; MFA in art; interest in scale as inter-disciplinary mode of analysis
* Diego: playing soccer, surfing; energy fluxes in coastal reef systems or human cultures; citations over time
* Flavia: biological networks; pollination, evolution; playing sports but not soccer
* James H: likes helping people, engineer; convexity of points in plane, plasma physics; agent-based modeling in macro-econ with apps in health care; how movement from local to centralized has hurt society; hiking
* Brais: role in information in different markets, evolution, evolutionary game theory; like sports
* Nhat: transmission dynamics in tropical regions; how pathogen emerges, theoretical epidemiology; long-term behaviors in time series data
* Claire: CS, mathematical models for growth of cities
* Catherine: chem, energy; distribution of energy in cities, policy, diffusion
* Sanja: ecology, inter-species interactions, parasites and how that affects ecosystem; interest in bipartite graphs and multi-layer networks
* Brian: computer science, algorithms, dynamic network models; detecting correlation and influence using temporal information; like all sports, ballroom dancing
* Ells: comp bio; video games; how social processes affect disease dynamics e.g. vaccines and autism scare
* Sarah M: ?; bio sensory systems; interest in something with networks
* Anna: math and CS; interest in how networks fail and how to make them more robust; cook, bake, calligraphy
* Sean H: ecological networks, predicting function from structure; how can constraints on function affect structure as network grows, stability; hiking, philosophy, interesting conversations
* Leto: ML, stat models for networks
* Andy: physics, fluid flow from inhalers, how drugs interact with human body and how different for different people
* Jenn: behavioral ecologist, how different levels of social structure interact, sex or status affecting sexual or other activities; ecology or evol bio; outdoor activities
* Alex: physics; geometric assymetries in branching networks; interest in fractal aspects of networks; rock-climbing
* Cecilia: ecology; inter-dependence of species in large ecol networks, parasites with > 1 species of hosts; interest in cascading effects and game theory
* Sean G: physics, micro bio; has large datasets; stochastic and deterministic models and phase transitions; outdoor activities
* Cole: emergence of life, transitions in chemical evolution, info processing; chem/bio simulations; data viz; hiking, backpacking, overnight?
* Alireza: signal processing to learn function; emergence of norms; predicting success of systems
* Heath: econ; poverty and inequality; inter-generational transition of wealth, agent-based; institutional emergence e.g. political - why some countries develop certain political structures; music
* James G: CS, national-scale agent-based modeling on order of 100 mil. agents; communication
* José: emergence and evolution, systems bio; how genotypes map into phenotypes, geometry of genotype networks; evol of complexity in biosphere; hiking
* Lin: statistical signal processing, information diffusion over networks, opinion dynamics in social networks using local interactions; interest in modeling and analyzing temporal and group dynamics, inter- and intra-relationships of groups; hiking
* Shai: econ, how society changes
* Jessica: info systems; failure in organizational networks; interest in learning about failure tolerance in non-social systems that can transfer to social systems
* Massimo: physics; condensation phenomena in networks; linguistic networks; interest in multi-layer networks, time-evolving graphs; has access to lots of data
* Ernest/Yu: econ, physics, math; collective animal behavior - birds, ants; apply concept of entropy to life; hiking, cooking
* George/Qiao: physics, stats; financial market, volatility, dynamics, entropy; access to stock market data
* Cornelia: physics, applied math, complexity econ - firm growth; hidden nodes/noise?; scale-free networks; interest in things other than econ, dynamics on networks, bio
* Rohan: evolution of early metabolic networks, how that shapes future of life; interest in networks, evol game theory, evol bio
* Stojan: stress tests on networks, can hopefully use to study bio networks; cycling, bouldering
* Pooya: electrical engineering; cascading blackouts in power networks; interest in infrastructure in networks, how they form and evolve; playing futbol
* Tom: applied math and complex systems; deconstructing bones, algorithms for ?; power grid and nonlinear dynamics, topological dynamics
* Glen: personalized genomics, correlations between ? and cancer; interest in self-identification and how that informs decisions e.g. semi-scientific beliefs; metabolic and infectious disease modeling
* Stefan: environmental science, adoption of renewable resources; social and political barriers for ?; interest in environmental management, ecology; mountains, running, hiking
* Leo: smooth dynamical systems, differential geometry, high-energy physics and quantum computation; hiking, back-packing, pen and paper discussions

Physics Lab 2014

2014-06-10T14:06:40Z

Lusczeke: /* Sunday June 15, 7:00 - 9:00 */

{{Complex Systems Summer School 2014}}

==Thursday June 12, 7:00 - 9:00 PM==

1. Diana LaScala-Gruenewald 
2. Brian Thompson 
3. Claudius Gräbner 
4. Alireza Goudarzi 
5. Stefan Pfenninger 
6. Hiroshi Ashikaga 
7. Jennifer Hellmann 
8. Alex Brummer 
9. Andy Maloney 
10. Glen Otero 
11. Bernardo Furtado 
12. Sean Gibbons 
13. Fahad Khalid 
14. Diego Barneche 
15. Morgan Edwards 

==Saturday June 14, 7:00 - 9:00==

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15. 

==Sunday June 15, 7:00 - 9:00==

1. Jessica Santana 
2. Degang Wu 
3. James Gentile 
4. José Aguilar-Rodríguez 
5. Alberto Antonioni 
6. Claire Lagesse 
7. Junjian Qi 
8. Michael Kalyuzhny 
9. Blaz Krese 
10. Rohan Mehta 
11. Beth Lusczek 
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13. 
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15. 

==Monday June 16, 7:00 - 9:00==

1. Catherine Bale 
2. Ana Maria Gomez Lopez 
3. Sarah Laborde 
4. Flavia Marquitti 
5. Lin Li 
6. Matthew Ayres 
7. Renske Vroomans 
8. Anna Olson 
9. Nhat Nguyen 
10. Cecilia Andreazzi 
11. Emília Garcia Casademont 
12. Luis Martínez Vaquero 
13. Leto Peel 
14. Sanja Selakovic 
15. Shai Gorsky

Bandelier 2014

2014-06-10T00:39:21Z

Lusczeke: /* Still Need Seats */