Philosophy, Systems Theory and Risk Science

...we are the prisoners...

2012-01-30T07:38:00.000-08:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Noahs_Ark.jpg/276px-Noahs_Ark.jpg

We are the prisoners in the technological Doppler effect, formatted by the EgoNarcissistic isotopy: I-am-therefore-I-am, therefore I-am-therefore-am…; we are the inhabitants of an ondulatory of “naked singularity”.

Borrowing from Cioran: only suffering is ubiquitous, not God; if Noah possessed the gift of prophecy, he would have to sink the ark.

Economics, Life and The Stubborn Black Swans...

2012-01-21T04:48:00.000-08:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Cygnus_Atratus_Singapore.jpg/320px-Cygnus_Atratus_Singapore.jpg

«Does today's dominant economic and financial thinking violate the laws of physics?»

«low probability high impact risks and unknown unknowns or black swans»

«New Model of Economics based on Physics (...) A new model of economics ought to aim to contribute to the development of the scientific understanding of the way our economic systems work holistically (…)»

http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pageid=http%3A//www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/301211.php

“Laws of physics”?!?

There are rules/laws of structure that necessarily follow the evolving dynamics of life/death and that, therefore, necessarily change at the rhythms of the things, in their evolving entanglement in survival interface, from the imminent FutureNow to the sustainability flux of the PresentNow.

The so-called “black swans”, that Taleb worked from Popper, are necessary to the autopoietic/systemic sustainability, there are always “black swans” out there, they are only unexpected to human cognitive schemes that are unreasonably focused upon “monstrative” situations of control, incompatible with the dynamics of survival: control of the others, of other species, control of life, of the differences, control of evolution itself by part of a single species: the human.

The crossing-over of different disciplinary areas is desirable, more, necessary to the general entangled pathos of survival, because of that, not only a dialogue with Physics is needed, but also with the Life Sciences and all the other sciences, which Economics, necessarily, has to deal with/coordinate itself with/relate itself with/dialogue with...

...but, above all, it is necessary to make a cognitive effort to think things beyond the models' conditioning. It is necessary to free ourselves from a certain obsession with control.

Things can only be perceived in their cognitive completeness, if we are able to think ourselves in relation to ourselves and in relation to the things, without disconnecting ourselves from the projective rotative pathos that operates at the level of the dynamics of systemic sustainability.

By pathos one should understand its primitive sense, of some thing that happens, both in reference to what happens as well as in reference to what is affected by what happens.

Revolutionem, Revolutus, Revolvere… Revolution?

2011-10-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

Revolution?

The system is us, the institutions are us, the agents are us, the markets are us, the responsibility is ours. The revolution must be in us.

When the altruistic practices become an effective permanence, we can speak of a revolution.

When the dignity ceases to be just a postulate to become a generalized effective practice, we can speak of a revolution.

When the tolerance and cooperation replace the Darwinian competition, we can speak of a revolution…

…until then, any social revolution will only be the replacement of a predatory power by other predatory powers.

..“But what next?”....

2011-10-06T04:42:00.000-07:00

http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/10/05/occupation-nation-ritual-arrests-and-candle-light-vigils-what-next/

“But what next?”

For now, and with some inspiration in Baudrillard’s matrix, what we have is a desperate capitalism sustained by a Moebian Double Bind operationalized in manipulation by anticipation.

The discourses and contra-discourses are programmed and simulated towards effects of banalization and respective integration, idiotically sustained in perspectives of system control by inertia and closing. Inertia because the people cease to react, closing by control by way of normative formatting of discourses and the respective contra-discourses.

The final goal is the zombification by iterative banalization. This is systemically dangerous for all, also for those that, in their pathological delirium of power, think themselves Laplacian daimones.

...on transcendence...

2011-09-30T14:58:00.001-07:00

All the systems are conditioned by rules/laws of structure that are determined, in fundamental terms, by their respective formative initial conditions.

But what is a rule/law? What is the nature of a rule/law? What can be the ontological status of a rule/law? How can the rules/laws of structure, determined by initial conditions that the system did not choose, condition all its life? All its choices? Its actions? Its paths? Because even if the system can rewrite its initial conditions, that rewriting will, still, be conditioned by its vital laws of structure responsible for the system’s integrity.
In this context, what pertinence can there have the projection of scenarios, configured by pre-figurated degrees of freedom? Within what parameters would it be possible to consider planes of systemic transcendence?
Transcendence involves the concept of limit, to transcend is the act by which someone, or some thing surpasses or “escapes” the limits imposed by the immanence.
An act of transcendence is an arbitrary act of projective opening that gifts the system with the ability to launch itself, or jump, towards outside of itself, as position of itself in itself, in that which, with pertinence, can be designated by systemic jump, that is, the jump that installs in the systemic identity the ontological rotative dyad, conceptually synthesizable as the other of itself in itself.
Transcendence is the dynamics, in the immanence, for the enacting of a systemic surpassing, still sustained by the immanence: this is about growth, development, evolution...

...reciprocity...

2011-09-29T04:03:00.000-07:00

Any system enacts an anomaly when it refuses the vital dynamics of reciprocity: the enacted anomaly is, in the system, the motifeme – the invariant entity without adaptive clinamen – of the tautological narrateme without humus..., without world, without the others in face of oneself and with oneself.

When the human agents refuse a vital dynamics of reciprocity, they are enacting an anomaly of themselves: excluding themselves from that which connects them with the others and with themselves: the “mutuum”. When the agents put themselves as monstrative reifications of dogmatic divine postulates, they are enacting an anomaly of themselves.

On Information - Definition

2011-09-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

With the growth and development of the scientific, technical and technological work, there have been localized and signalized sequences of coexistent conceptual systems, organized, articulated, distributed and circulated around the problems that are specific of each epoch and that configurate webs of theoretical/empirical statements, constituents of the domains of discourse and of memory, in which it is related what was learnt, what was seen, what is deduced or induced, what is admitted as probable, true or valid and what is postulated.

The techniques and technologies with which we, currently, work and (co)exist are a consequence of the human labor applied to science and technique.

Presently, and borrowing some words of Pierre Lévy (2000), we participate in the silent explosion of the hypercortex infinitely reticulated of the World Wide Web, dynamically configured as a new workspace, interpreted from two fundamental notions: the notion of knowledge and the notion of information, with root in the Latin informatio, from the verb informo with the meaning of: action of forming, representing, sketching, planning... .

This term arose, in the 13th Century, designating the set of acts susceptible to establish the proof of an infraction and of revealing its authors, in the course of the preliminary instruction of a process. Later on, information came to be defined as designator of events or of facts that are given to know to someone, individual or collective.

From the 20th Century, information acquired new semantic contents, through its usage, by some disciplinary areas. Thus, in Biology, it designates the set of elements that a living being receives in permanence, through its own organism or through its ecosystem, making part of the exchanges of energy and matter that allow for the maintenance of its structure and that impede its disaggregation.

Later on, Systems Theory approached and developed, in terms of epistemological framework, the notion of information as an equivalence to the mathematical measure of probability of an event, to occur, in the set of possible events. The quantity of information is defined, in Information Theory, in terms of an entropy measure.

At the root of Information Theory, there were the concerns, by part of the Bell society, to encounter a means of transmission of messages that would be, simultaneously, more economic and safer, thus aimed at a theoretical construction of a system of communications to a practical application in which a transmitter could transmit, through a certain channel, a message to a receiver.

The adaptive flexibility, linked to the development of the concept of information in its theoretical/practical use, agilized its application to all the disciplinary areas, making indispensible its usage as a fundamental scientific criterion of any statement.

In ontological terms: the information is not fact, is not act, is not thing, is not entity, is not place, has no topos that is proper to it,..., the information is a systemic dynamics towards the fact, towards the act, towards the thing, towards the entity, towards the place, towards the topos... .

Currently, and ever more, by way of the technological developments, linked to the expansion of the Internet, the information flows reticularly through self-referent polissemic planetary webs, crossing over local/global strategic arbitria of power radiculated in hybrid intentionalities of obsolete arbitrariness, perceived by syntheses of cognitive presentiment of metaphysical root of fundament, linked to the vital impulse of survival of search for causes, search for reasons of existence, of life, of search for reasons of legitimacy, reasons of dignity.

Censorship in the US Free(?)Media: NPR

2011-08-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

The following link is an article in NPR on the origin of life:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/08/16/139673287/hunting-the-replicators-how-did-life-begin

Below are the comments that were placed in NPR, the last ones, as will be indicated, were censored by NPR.

Perhaps it is a bit reductive to make depend a notion of life upon self-replication. Both the amoeba as well as the rock are two concrete physical existents that make exchanges with the environment in a dynamics of aggregation and disaggregation, in the case of the amoeba, life and death.

Both the rock as well as the amoeba are two self-motivated agents. Regarding a rock, it can be a mix of organic and inorganic. In the amoeba as well as in the rock there take place self-sustained dynamics necessary to the maintenance of the integrity of both structures/systems...

Interesting would be to take a conjectural look at the molecular dynamics, to perceive a kind of "social and associative instinct" of the atomic elements that enacted the molecules. There is a kind of sociability that makes the molecules fit to make associations, linkages and exchanges towards a greater thermodynamic stability.

In Philosophy, being, existence and life are still open issues. Science is very much concentrated on the issue of life, but before life there is the issue of the existence. Because if there are doubts in the classification of what is or is not life, what is a fact, and, because of that, is the case, is that all things there in the world, in the cosmos, if one prefers, are all existent things/entities/agents, be these things/entities/agents: rocks, amoebas, viruses, humans, ants, or even aliens...,

Mark, I don't get your point. The origin of reproduction and/or replication was not the issue that I raised.

My question is about the definition of life and the relation between life and existence.

All the living systems are existents, but not all the existents/systems are, in scientific terms, considered as living systems, what I state is that: to base, in fundamental terms, a definition of life upon reproduction or replication dynamics is quite reductive, which does not mean that I do not wish to know how reproduction and/or replication were enacted by the systems that are not classified as life.

All the chemical elements that constitute the brain of each of us existed in the cosmos long before us..., long before any system classified as living. Whatever is called life was enacted by such chemical elements.

Well, it is my conviction that to state that reproduction is an "attribute" is an error. Reproduction is dispositional, this is a fact, such as consciousness of the human animals is dispositional.

But this dispositional, in regards to reproduction, as capability to life generate more life was enacted by what?

Of course, one can always recur to the easiest solution, the solution that one has always in the pocket, ok it was God. But that is the solution of those who wish to resolve the issue more quickly.

Avoiding God's argument, probably, we have to state something like: only life could generate life, and the capability of replication could only be generated by life itself, and the question remains: what is life?

To classify is easy, to explain is harder.

For instance to explain the difference between life and existence is certainly hard.

Life is autopoietic, self-referent, one might well keep that in mind.

And existence? What is that?

I like to think of the noumenon as that which hides itself in what shows itself, it is that which we do not see in what we see. Which does not mean that we do not have the noumenic experience...

Mark, that perspective points towards a dependence of life upon reproduction/replication, that is, a reproduction/replication system comes before life. Then, what is life? And what is that which enacted a reproduction/replication system? If life comes after a reproduction/replication system then..., this reasoning enters into a looping worst than the egg and the chicken.

If there is only life because there is replication, then life is an effect of a replicating system that is not being classified as life, or is it? And you are pointing towards an eternity: that there has always been life? If one considers that life had a beginning somewhere in this cosmos you can make a reduction until God, but is God a living entity? Is God an existing entity? Does God exist? Is God a replicating system (God forbid, this Universe was enough)?

Ok, Seth, I opened the way for the statement that the thinking is to one side and the experience is to the other. But these things are complicated and complex. Gnosis has the primitive sense of action of knowing, action of learning through a certain (co)naturality of knowing by direct and spontaneous contact through perception (aisthesis/aistheton).

Of course, I am pointing towards a certain systemic synchronization between the perception and the perceived thing.

I defend that replication is dispositional, and I think that there is not a robust definition of life that allows us, human animals, to perceive the fundamental causality that is at the origin of life.

If I ask you, Mark, what the nature of life is, by nature understand that which some thing is necessarily, what some thing must be without which it would lose its integrity, how would you answer? Why does life enact replicating agents, for instance? Yes, because agents are life, but they are not the life, they are not life itself.

If life is a proprium of the living things, what is the proprium of life itself?

What about the humus? Does live need its individuated replicators?

We are talking about life here, but we should actually talk about LifeAndDeath, because what we have, in general terms is life and death everywhere, and not simply life. We cannot solve the problem of definition of life, without incorporating in that definition the definition of death as a fundamental necessity of life itself, in constitutive terms.

The following was censored by NPR.org:

Well, Mark, we are all here looking for explanations, we are all here looking for explanatory causes, we are all here looking for the origin of the things. Probably, if we were not motivated by a certain “idea” of control, we would obtain better answers, because we would ask better questions.

Each of us can be considered a manifestation or an expression, or even a position (in Spinozan terms) of life, we are life, but we are not the life, nor even parts of life. Thus, reproduction is dispositional in each of us, living manifestations, or manifestations of life, but reproduction is not a part of us, such as a thought or a feeling is not a part of us, but we are the ones thinking and feeling, reproduction is just a to be able to, in each of the beings that are us.

Life and death do not mean that life is a part of death or that death is a part of life, it just means that: that which we call living is sustained by a LifeAndDeath dynamics.

If we radicalize and go back to a fundamental approach, probably that which can be localized as an asymmetry is a problem of human cognition, which processes things in accordance with a before and after, or in accordance with dualities either-or, in the sense that LifeAndDeath constitute an ontological unit in terms of permanence in the existence of all the things.

Of course a definition of life, in the sense of The Life, has to cognitively synthesize a constitutive antinomy at the level of the causes and a paradox at the level of the effects and incorporate that synthesis in the understanding of the nature of that which we call life.

We have to start to understand that there are noumenic reasons that are simultaneously and spontaneously the affirmation and the negation of itself, without rupture, without fracture, without loss of permanence of itself as position of itself. Of course, this points towards an eternity.

If life can be eternal? It can!

If the existence is before life? Yes!

If the existence depends upon life? No, not at all. This is my conviction.

But upon what does existence, itself, depend? Upon the being, itself, because existence is!

And upon what does the being, itself, depend? Probably upon the nothing, that is still being..., and here we are in a cognitive strange looplooping...

The game of the life is not about winning or losing...

2011-06-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

The general notion of game, as conceptual synthesis, depends upon the general notion of life, considered as autopoietic referent and reference to the emergence of adaptive schemata.

The game, in its fundamental sense, as game of the life that does not intend any end or finality other than the permanence of the action of the game in the game, exhibits a nature and effectiveness of schemata that legitimates the definition of game as enactive dynamics permanent and undetermined that makes the life persist and insist in the life.

The living is living while it is playing. The eternity of life persists through the eternity of the game. The game of the life is not about winning or losing, only about permanence in the living of the existence of all the things.

on system...

2010-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

System is "anything" (res) existent: being or entity constituted by parts that, articulated between themselves, form a permanent integral whole.

Sistema é qualquer “coisa” (res) existente: ente ou entidade constituída por partes que, articuladas entre si, formam uma totalidade íntegra permanente.

Chaos, Artificial Life and Risk Mathematics

2010-08-16T01:46:00.000-07:00

Carlos Pedro Dos Santos Gonçalves
UNIDE - ISCTE Business School - Lisbon University Institute

Maria Odete Madeira
Massacritica, Lda.

August 15, 2010

Abstract:

The current work addresses the importance of chaos theory and artificial life as scientific bases for the development of a mathematical research of risk in the systems, within the framework of risk science and risk mathematics. It is argued, in particular, that a combination of chaos theory and artificial life may provide for a theoretical basis for the understanding of systemic situations of risk.

It is presented, within the context of category computation theory, a notion of morphic incompressibility and it is addressed how statistical laws emerge in chaotic dynamics, which becomes morphically compressible at the statistical level, while being morphically incompressible at the individual orbits' level. The issue of the systemic origins of chaos is addressed in connection with this dual (orbit) incompressibility/(statistical) compressibility.

Through the introduction of a one-dimensional game of life, that combines a coupled map lattice and a cellular automaton, in a model of an artificial ecosystem, it is, then, shown that artificial life can be effectively combined with chaos theory, in order to support the development of a mathematical theory of risk.

Keywords: Chaos, artificial life, risk, risk science, risk mathematics, morphic incompressibility, coupled map lattices, cellular automata, game of life

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1659253

Multifractal Financial Chaos in an Artificial Economy

2010-06-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

Carlos Pedro Dos Santos Gonçalves
UNIDE - ISCTE Business School - Lisbon University Institute

June 19, 2010

Abstract:
A model is proposed of a population of competing companies that are in a coevolutionary race and whose evolutionary performance is evaluated by a financial market, composed of value investors and of a breed of arbitrageurs that perform bargain arbitrage, trying to identify 'bargains' in the form of relative misspricings and, acting accordingly, buying assets with higher value at lower prices and selling assets with lower value at higher prices.

The model's equations are based on coupled networks of nonlinear maps, in this way, the model is focused on a coevolutionary process between companies and financial market. It is shown that, for a wide range of dynamical couplings and parameters, Multifractal Self-organized Criticality (MSOC) takes place, with the emergence of patterns of turbulence that closely resemble actual financial turbulence. The relation between arbitrage and multifractal financial turbulence is addressed.

Keywords: Multifractal chaos, financial turbulence, multifractal self-organized criticality, evolutionary arbitrage theory, financial markets’ efficiency, tail risk, evolutionary finance, microscopic financial modeling

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1576990

From Eternity to Eternity…

2010-06-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Being the being of the being the same being that is of the becoming, as being that becomes, and, thus, alterity of itself, in itself, fundamental issues are placed, in what regards the relations of scale and the laws of structure that may be perceptioned, apprehended and formalized towards fixed human languages, which, due to that fixity, are incapable of capturing the fundamental (co)dynamics of simultaneous permanence and change in a same being, a (co)dynamics in which the constituent and constitutive antithetical movement determines the dynamics of scale that displace themselves in percolating multifractal webs, dependent upon the systemic processing (co)implicated in the locality/nonlocality of the respective systems.

Having, also, to consider, in those same issues, that the limit to the formalization, on the part of the human agents, is processed at the level of the individuated limit of the system itself, as self-referent noumenon, dependent upon its preformative and formative initial conditions, inaccessible to possible algorithmic schemes, assembled from the systemic effects, observed in ontological situational contexts and processes that spill over towards eidetics that transcend the mathematical reason, as human language that develops and uses disciplinary tools made available towards effects of calculation and measurement.

Thus, other mechanisms of cognitive processing will have to be introduced, such as, processes and arbitria of systemic synchronization, linked to autopoietic cognitive reasons and dynamics.

Quantum Game of Life I - Life and Death

2010-04-07T10:14:00.000-07:00

By Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

The first version of the Quantum Life model is now published in Netlogo at the website:

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/community/Quantum%20Life%20I

This is a model of a Quantum Game of Life with path-dependent local quantum computation, exemplifying a Quantum Cellular Automaton.

Each patch can be either vacant of life or occupied by a living entity.

At each round of the game, a patch can be actualized into one of the two alternatives: (1) vacant of life or (2) occupied by a living entity, with a certain probability amplitude defined by the local patch quantum (game) state.

There are two alternative rules through which this game is played:

(1) - The clustering rule;

(2) - The spatially and temporally independent rule.

In the first rule, there is the production of a flocking (or herding) phenomenon, that is, the birth of living entities tends to occur through clustering, making emerge, in the quantum game, a quantum gravitic mechanism where the birth and death of living entities tends to lead to clusters of living entities.

In the second rule, the flocking (or herding) phenomenon is absent, the birth and death of living entities occurs with a fixed local probability for each patch, such that there is a fixed local probability for a vacant patch to become occupied by a living entity and a fixed local probability for a living entity, residing in a certain patch, to die.

See also the following video for another version of the model, with a simulation of the clustering rule:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14jdqWEe0wE

"Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets"

2010-04-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

“Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets (...) By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.”

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/moral-control-0330.html

In the above quoted article, it is imperatively stated that “Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets” and that “By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.”.

Any living systems can be affected by electromagnetic fields. In what regards human organisms, of course that these are affected by electromagnetic fields in their cognition, of which the ethical judgment and the moral judgment are examples, this is not any Eureka moment.

Electromagnetic fields, a dog bite, an earthquake, hunger, the need to go to the toilet, common cold, a headache all of that affects an organism’s cognitive production, towards fundamental judgments. Anything that affects a body, affects the body’s cognitive functions. What's the surprise? Where’s the Eureka moment?

In an interconnected network a “disruption” of a local region of the network can have effects upon the whole system, but that does not legitimize a reduction of the system to that specific region, which is what is done in the research work that is reviewed in the article and reinforced by the review itself. This reduction is a scientific error.

What seems evident is that the people that have produced these experiments practice applied science, compromised by schemes of control, without considering the concepts and nature of the systems with which they are working.

Matters like the nature of human cognition, in proto-conscious and conscious aspects (reflection, reflexivity, reflexibility), towards judicative valorative judgments of survival, in situations of border with homeostatic processing, linked to mechanisms of risk evaluation for situational systemic self-references of rhythmic enactive intentionality, in abstract and concrete planes, articulated with the respective languages, none of this was considered in the research, nor in the article that reviewed it.

Other fundamental matters, linked to the nature of human cognition, such as the perceptive and affective porosity and the arbitriu, implicated in the systems of exchanges of matter, energy and information between an organism and the situational living web in which it is immersed, towards systemic effects of locality and nonlocality that are synthesized in any cognitive judgment, must be considered in any study that addresses human cognitive judgment, of which a moral judgment is an example. No human judgment can be reduced to black boxed input-output systems.

Conclusive statements like: “Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets”, “By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations(...)” and “(...) You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior (...) To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing (...)”, all of these statements are scientific nonsense, “intellectual impostures” of an applied science that intermixes a bad Cartesianism with a bad Behaviorism, contaminated by an illusion of control.

on the strange loop...

2010-03-19T04:36:00.001-07:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

A strange loop is a feedback circle, linked to the systemic identity, as self-computable rotative dispositional dynamics, in which the system folds upon itself, without leaving itself, maintaining the constituent and constitutive systemic integrity.

A strange loop is rotatively projective. The projective rotativity is assumed, in the notion of systemic identity, at the level of the ontological mechanisms of projectivity, intrinsic to the systems, signalized at the level of the effectivenesses that act upon the effects, and are postulated at the level of the causes, as formative capabilities that act upon the preservation of the integrity of the systems in survival interfaces.

On Parson’s Quasi-Concrete Objects

2010-03-15T03:39:00.000-07:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Abstract existents are object/figures of thought and of reason, they may have, or not, simultaneously, correlationable concrete existence/examples.

In relation to the concrete/abstract the term “quasi” does not apply.

The term “quasi” can be applied to the relation between the potency/act, in which, in the potency, the intensity towards the act can generate, in the propension/tendency, displaced in the horizon of possibility, a situation or process of latent state, in which, in epistemological and ontological terms, the usage of the term “quasi-concrete” could be adequate.

But, regarding abstract objects, the term “quasi-concrete” is not applicable.

On the logos of the things...

2010-03-09T03:46:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The things have to be “listened” to, perceptioned, interpreted and understood in their rotative topoi. We have to see what is in the things and not what we want or wish to think about them.

The sun has its logos, the stars, and the planets, an ant, a stone, a spider... each has its own logos that explains it, as such, and that logos does not depend upon us human observers... it is its logos and its truth.

If we interest ourselves, if we want to know what things are, we have to make an effort to synchronize our rotative rhythms with the rotative rhythms of the things that we want to know, to make emerge a gravitic point of systemic synchronization in order to listen to them... perceive them... understand them.

On Truth...

2010-03-03T03:10:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

(Worked from Heidegger’s thinking)

If the discourse speaks the truth, which as a word («truth») that it is, it states, about the discourse, that it is true, because it speaks the truth. Truth?

What is, thus, understood by «truth»? This word «truth», elevated (?) and spent and worn out, that designates that which makes true something that is true, but what is «the true»?

It is said of something, that it is true if that something has an effective (actual) reality, thus, it could be said of the things that are true, that they are effective (in act), which leads one to state that the contrary of the true, that is, the false would be a non effective (in act) reality, however, it is the case that the things that are false, are also effective (actual), as realities of which it is said that are not true. Being effective (actual), therefore, characterizes both the true and the false (Plato, Parricide).

But if both (true and false) are effective, what can distinguish the true from the false? The character of authenticity? The true will be the authentic and the false the inauthentic. This authentic resends towards something anticipated and constantly considered as authentic of a reality and that is in conformity with that same reality.

Thus, of a statement, it is said to be true when that which it states is in conformity with the thing that is stated in it, and about which the statement itself is. What is in conformity is what agrees, then, being true and truth mean (in the statement) the agreement of something with what was previously thought about it and the conformity of the thing with that which is intended in the statement.

There is, thus, a double character in the concordance such that the truth is the resembling of the thing to the knowledge (veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus) and, also, such that the truth is the resembling of the knowledge to the thing (veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem). The truth, thus conceived, presupposes the truth of the thing in the statement and always means a “to conform to”…, concordance, compatibilized order, synchronized order… relations, proportions… systems…

Unus – Unitas – Religare: Autonomy

2010-02-27T12:33:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Unus is the Latin term for unique, indivisible, irrepeatable. It is a name to designate an individuated form, any form,that, as such, possesses an identity that is in conformity with an idea (eidos) of unity, from the Latin unitas/atis, defined as a systemically available property to be exemplified by any identity, be that identity: ente, entity, process, situation, relation, or simply thing (res).

The unity is, in itself, described by its internal cohesion, consistency and coherence. All that is unus, or unique, participates from, or has unity, because to have unity is to be unique, irrepeatable. Each ente, or individuated thing (res) is unus, and, thus, unique: ens et unum convertuntur; because each thing, or ente, possesses an identity that relinks (religare) it and determines it in itself and by itself, in what is its autonomy: reference to itself, as rotative self-position of itself.

... the Being is event... the logos-there...

2010-02-25T03:19:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Dasein was the term that Wolff used in order to translate the Latin term exsistentia, from the verb exsistere, that etymologically denotes origin. In Heidegger, the notion of existence, as dasein, lost the theoretical sense, present in Husserl, as object of thought.

For Heidegger, there was no existence outside the existing things and all existing things (ek-sistence) were rooted in the physis as beings, projectively as beings-towards- death, coexisting in a complex system of references to a future existentially anticipated.

For Heidegger, each entity is one of the modes of the Being, and, each entity, is also its difference, each entity is the being-there (Dasein) referring to itself (ek-sistence) .

The truth of the Being (aletheia) belongs to the Being itself..., to be physis is aletheia. The Being gives itself (es gibt) as Being and Time and, thus, as something that has given itself, the Being is event (Ereignis), the logos-there...

"Arbitriu"...

2010-02-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The iteration of the low weight thinker emerges, more and more, in the form of a social mechanism, invested of memetic effectiveness towards effects of reduction of the human thinking to a replicator without ability and will to question and, because of that, the low weight thinker easily, willingly, eagerly alienates his/her/(its?) autonomy in contra-adaptive eidetics, polarized by marketed effectivenesses, that presuppose the anthropophagic production of fast food for thought, in an organically self-sustained cycle.

Words become poster signs, or post it signs, that, stripped away from their meaning, become useful to use and recycle, feeding a schizophrenic market.

If one can argue, and reason, and question, one becomes dangerous.

The death of Socrates, however, is repeated today, not only for political reasons, by a power hungry elite, but by the low (weight) thinker, that wishes to play the senseless word game, without having to perform the great effort of thinking, and questioning, and learning. The repetition of facts is the death of questioning and the decay of reflexive arbitriu.

On Consciousness: "suneidos"..., "conscientia"…

2010-02-23T06:25:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

There is no neurobiological evidence for such a thing as a substantialized and localized consciousness, in the human organisms, the evidence is that there are permanent states of consciousness, produced by the neurobiological cerebral work, the causality of which is to produce images from electrochemical neural patterns connected to modifications that occur in the organism, when it interacts with the external environment. This neurobiological work involves the whole organism, in terms of the relation, strategically situational and processual, always precarious and variable, that the organism maintains with itself and with the environment.

The terms reflection, reflexivity and reflexibility allow one to understand the neurobiological process involved in the acts of consciousness.

All systems have their reflexivity and reflexibility mechanisms, and some of these evidentiate adaptive behaviors more successful than our own. One can, with plausibility and reasonableness, state that the cosmos, as a system, it too, has its own mechanism or mechanisms of reflexivity and reflexibility, necessary to its integrity.

Consciousness, as a concept, synthesizes the primitive radicular sense, genetically incorporated in the Latin notion of “conscientia”, from the Greek term “suneidos” which means “concomitant knowledge”, that is: a multiplicity of knowings can be lived and experienced internally, in a single act of knowledge, in each present moment, and, in this way: “to be aware of” (“ser ou estar consciente de”) always involves intentional and relational cognitive dynamics that are rotatively and projectively situational and processual.

"The transhumanist business"...

2010-02-20T01:53:00.000-08:00

On the article: http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/428 placed on twitter by http://twitter.com/FQXi

The comment is taken from the comments placed on twitter by http://twitter.com/ousiadasein under the hashtag #identity

...The identity of the organism does not depend upon the organism’s memories. Even if an organism “loses” its memories that organism is still an irreducible referent as presence and existence in the world.

About the download of memories… it is important to remember that a memory incorporates, always, cognitive syntheses in which protoconscious and conscious processes intervene.

Also, any conscious process is constituted, in its formative basis, by emotions and feelings. The emulation of a brain, postulated by the transhumanist business, does not capture the nature of human cognition. The brain is not the key, but the whole system.

Transhumanism is a badly thought out word… human transcendence does not mean a change of nature, it means to go beyond the human limits without the negation of the human, in the human, still human.

Much more can be said about the conceptual mistakes of transhumanist thinkers and “futurologists”. Concepts are being used as catchphrases for selling technological products.

Vox mundi: vitalis mundi, vitalis reticulis, sanis mundi…

2010-02-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The perception and respective systemic computation of the enactive emergence of a rhythmic ontology of citizenship in systems of interconnected networks, in what regards the rights and duties that incorporate the autonomous exercise of each citizen, in nonlocal contexts of power, in which the local critical self-exclusion, linked to the circulation and processing of local/global information/knowledge, may lead to the loss of autonomy towards general contexts of survival, legitimates some critical reflection about the possible phenotypic effects with formative consequences in the levels of perception of the systemic risk towards effects of survival and dignity, in which the enactive alienation may potentiate the development of behaviors of weak adaptive, or even counter-adaptive, adhesion, with homeostatic systemic consequences at the levels of the maintenance of the local/global systemic integrity.

Vox mundi…, it is about thinking the notion itself of democracy in contexts of systemic nonlocality , in which the notion of individual, or human subject, is cognitively (co)computed with the notion of citizen/citizenship, towards effects of immediate, or day-to-day, survival, in which an individual ontology of alienated survival may displace counter-adaptive enactive effects that are undesirable to the “current interconnected democratic game”.

Vitalis mundi, vitalis reticulis, sanis mundi…, it is about thinking the imperative of sovereignty, from ethical/cognitive syntheses, processed from intersystemic local/global dynamics, related to dignities, vital to the interconnected human survival.

On perception...

2010-02-01T09:33:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The perceptive systemic dynamics of information/knowledge processing depend, directly, upon agile local cognitive systemic weavings, supported by interconnected cooperative systemic networks, and, indirectly, depend upon local mechanisms, connected to nonlocal cognitive interfaces, in which intervene cognitive dynamics of abstraction, supported by local systemic dynamics of reflection, reflexivity and reflexibility.

Identity, Reflexivity, Reflexibility and Projectivity

2010-01-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The notion of identity, with origin in the Latin identitas/atis, has the same meaning as mesmidade (Portuguese), from the Latin metipse/metipsimum, with sameness as the corresponding word in English.

The identity, or mesmidade (sameness), signalizes the permanence of the same (mesmo), in itself, in face of itself (self-reference), by itself, from a dynamics of systemic reciprocity, self-determined by a value of equality, displaced by the intrinsic rotative dynamics of reflexive monadological coincidence of each existent/system.

The identity, or mesmidade (sameness), is determined by the dispositional/intentional/reflexive character of each existent, as inalienable self-reference, that is: the permanent rotative coincidence that any individuated structure has with itself and that attributes to it an irreducible structural autonomy.

The systemic rotativity, determined by the ontology of the identity, is linked and dependent upon the mechanisms of projectivity, signalized in the systems, at the level of the effectivenesses that act in the effects, and postulated at the level of the causes, as formative capabilities that act in the preservation of the integrity of the systems in interface of survival.

The notion of projectivity, worked upon in abstract languages towards the application to the concrete systemic activity, was ontologically synthesized from a semiotic network of meanings with Latin root in:

- projectio, onis, with the meaning of action of extending;

- projecto, as, are, with the meaning of to expose and, also, of to launch forward;

- projectus, a, um, with the meaning of extension;

- projicio, is, ere, jeci, jectum, with the meaning of to expose, exposition.

The projectivity is systemically inseparable from the systemic dynamics of reflection, reflexivity and reflexibility.

Reflection, from the Latin reflectere, has the meaning of (re)turning back, and regards the projective rotative systemic activity of the agents, of any agents, be those agents: particle, field, atom, molecule, cell, animal, person, or thing, ente or entity. That activity being linked to the respective strategies and effectivenesses, entangled in the computation and exchanges of matter, energy and information, included in the computation/production of deliberative judicative valorative syntheses.

Reflexivity, from the Latin reflexu, means folded onto itself, and it is a dispositional systemic rotative capability that allows the agents and/or the systems the direct valorative cognitive processing of themselves, from their causes, or originating formative reasons (ratio, proportio) to and towards which the system intentionally directs itself with the objective of producing (re)evaluative deliberative judicative valorative syntheses.

Reflexibility is an intrinsic dispositional systemic property, common to all the things, to all the systems, as existing things and, because of that, rotatively present in their own light, in themselves, in face of themselves (self-reference) and by themselves.

The reflexibility is in the systems and is approachable in the systems, and regards the visibility or perception of these same systems, as an own mode of being, a character, while things, beings or entities that show themselves, make their apparition (aparecem), remain (permanecem) and seem (parecem), in their own visibility.

The "lingua" of a people...

2010-01-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

The lingua (Latin, Portuguese) of a people, of each people, is a structurating active autonomous system of articulated and interrelated signs that transcends the individual acts of the speech, locating itself in the fundament of the identity of that people, of each people, in what regards its thinking, feelings, beliefs, cognition, autonomy, arbitriu (Latin),…,… .

Time Aion...

2010-01-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

By. Maria Odete Madeira

Aion is the Greek term for that which is without end in the Time, aidios (Aristotle, Meta., 1072b). Outside the Greek philosophical contexts, the term Aion, incorporated in the common daily language, meant period of life.

Melissus made an approximation of the term Aion to the term Apeiron (without limit), primordial substance in Anaximander. In a later development, Plotinus (Enn., III,7,4) attributed to Aion the meaning of mode of existence of the Being.

That which is without end in the Time (Khronos) was systemically expanded and synthesized in a notion of Time Aion, in which it is conjecturally postulated the originating formative primordial existence of an iterative orthogonal rotative flux, incorporated in the fundament of all the existing things.

(re)tension and the (pro)tension: proportion

2010-01-03T10:35:00.001-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

“Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur”

Medieval adage that synthesizes an eidos of proportion: whatever is received, is received according to the mode of receiving of the receiver.

The (re)tension and the (pro)tension (from the Latin tensio) can consistently be synthesized, in an abstract language, as primitive notions for the gathering and utilization of information, in the assumption that the patterns that configure the systems incorporate, in their formative nature, mechanisms of potential rotative projective resonance, linked to the reflexibility of the systems, with appetence and capability to place in relation that which, in the systems, is the act made proportionately available as presence to the potency (semper quod ens) and that, because of that, determines it.

In the retension: the game, the rules, the names, the verbs, the signs, the meanings, the desires, the will, the rhythms, the myths, the rites, the potency…; in the protension: the act, the fact, the event, the fatum…

Ondulatory dynamics: ousia... dasein...

2009-12-28T02:46:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Metaphysicorum quo legis sanus mundo erat luminosa projectione divinae in res mundi.

Essence has its Greek correspondent in ousia, noun formed from to einai which, in turn, also means being. In its origin, essence meant, just, being, later on, and through the usage, it came to mean that which is. The accent in the verb displaced itself to the subject (ypokeímenon, subjectum) to which the being is attributed.

…Simulacrum: active sign of the trace (Derrida)…

…If we are, then we exist (ousia; dasein). Isolation is the refusal of the “Being” of all the things, placed as the “Nothing” from which all the things announce themselves in their being-there-of-the-being (Heidegger)…

...Ousia means that thing which is being (verb)… that thing which is presence in the existence. Ousia signalizes directly the being (noun) that is being (verb)…

...The systemic activity of each referent displaces, in the systems, dynamics of ondulatory rotativity, fit to produce signifier (significante(s)) structures in topologies of complex webs of signifieds (significados), with local effects at the level of the plurality of the senses, perceptioned and computed by the respective systems.

Topos: the place of the things, the place of each thing.

2009-12-21T11:52:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Topos is the primitive Greek term for place, not a place available for the things but the place of each thing, each entity, its irreducible spatial extension.

Thus it was assumed the notion of topos by the Greek philosophers, and thus it was worked upon and expanded in conceptual terms, along the Western philosophical thinking, in which it had its origin.

Underlying the notion of topos is the philosophical assumption that all that exists has a place that is constitutively proper to it (Aristotle, Meta.7080b, 1083b; Phys.IV, 209a, 208a-213a, 212a, 208b, 209b).

Plato (Tim., 52a-c) and Aristotle worked on the concept, linking it to the notion of arché (principle), from which the nature of the things could be understood and explained, in what regards its origin.

feelings, ethos and pathos…

2009-12-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-452820/Christian-lion-lived-London-living-room.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5vRPKIS5UM&feature=related

The above story and video show a situation in which one can speak of a long-term memory related with affective feelings between two species. In this case, regarding the lion, one cannot speak only of a core consciousness, one must consider an extended consciousness, we are far from a merely emotional plane, there is, in the lion, an autobiographical memory that functions with respect to the recognition of the others and of the past relational bonds created with these others. This is not merely mechanical.

Emotions are part of the bio-regulatory devices and are linked to core consciousness, but that is not the case of feelings. Feelings are linked to the extended consciousness, long-term memory, an ethos and a pathos... and semiology of affects.

Also, it is known, for instance, that predators with complex social relations, that hunt in packs, develop strategies in approaching preys, these strategies differing with the preys and the environmental conditions. Many animal species learn, have creative and adaptive responses to the environment. Monkeys develop tools and strategies to solve problems (even new problems related to an interaction with urban environments), the same with ravens. Ravens provide for a casuistic of strategic behavior, such that there is evidence that ravens are capable of strategic reasoning. It is not at all the case that animals do not plan or develop strategies.

Planning and strategies are not unique to humans, and the empirical evidence is by now widely divulged, worked upon by animal behavioral science, a branch of biology and cognitive science.

Moreover, from complex systems science, we now know that any complex adaptive system is goal-directed and has a strategic nature in regards to its activity. Any complex adaptive system is an agent. The notion of strategic intention linked to an elaborate cognitive planning has long since been abandoned. Any complex adaptive system produces natural and emergent strategic planes, anticipatory theory (Popper), adaptive schemata (Gell-Mann and Holland). Anticipation is inseparable of the agency of complex adaptive systems.

Even ants, that have basic rudimentary language and are mostly mechanic, produce emergent rational strategic responses through the known process of stygmergy. The studies in swarm intelligence show how strategic intention can emerge from more basic mechanical automata.

The notion of strategy and plan in human-centric terms has been abandoned in face of the bulk of biological empirical evidence.

Synchrony

2009-12-17T10:39:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

All communicational systemic contexts have the ability to synchronize in a systemic point outside each organism that comprises the system, a point of intersubjective coincidence.

When one speaks of intersubjectivity one is referring to the crossing over of various synchronized subjectivities in an external systemic point of coincidence, of agreement. This systemic point constitutes the whole of the systemic communicational synthesis (it is a fractal point), and the organisms (as complex adaptive systems) are able to read, in this point, what they need to projectively and adaptively anticipate the right response.

One may see this happening, for instance, in chases between predators and preys, in the improvisation of a jazz band, in the financial markets (the bubbles and the crashes being side-effects of an underlying adaptive response to synchrony).

When one speaks of intuition, one inevitably opens the interpretation of the results to an identification of an ability that each organism has of adaptively and projectively capture information and respond to it.

Intuition comes from the Latin in+tueri, tueri which means “to see” and in which means “in”, “within”. Intuition is the action of seeing directly within the things, in this case seeing directly, within the context, the anticipatory responses that each complex adaptive system may give to a situation. Systems and contexts being synchronized in this fit adaptation.

Any complex adaptive system has basic mechanisms of anticipation. Each system can anticipate the response of the other because the context functions as an anticipatory systemic transcendental to which the individuals are linked through an intersubjective synchronized rhythmic network, it takes place here the emergence of a reflexive and projective whole that anticipates, for each individual, the fit synchronized responses.

…,hypertextualizing…,

2009-12-07T02:09:00.000-08:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira

Any hypertextual dynamics depends upon formative syntactic/semantic networks, linked to situations of use, committed to rotative communicational references, displaced by hybrid multitemporal topologies, conditioned by values of reference, in processes of eidetic radicularity with pragmatic effects at the level of the effectivenesses, in cognitive processings, from which ontologies of systemic risk are not excluded.

Exsistere, sistere, exsistentia, existência, existence

2009-09-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

By: Maria Odete Madeira
Exsistere, sistere, exsistentia, existência, existence: reality, being, life, presence. Existence denotes origin, (arché), in the classical Latin it means to show oneself, to appear. The exsistence is the irrecusable topos of each presence, the place of each body.
Imposing itself gravitically to each ente or entitas that is present in the world, the existence signalizes a projective character of necessity (agakh, necessitas), replicator of an eidos of permanence.
Each ente or entitas is in the existence, (co)existing in a complex system of references, reflexively projective, radicularly incorporated in the rotative systemic topos of each ente or entitas as its (of each) nutritive possibility.

Ontologies: On the Concepts of: Possibility, Possible, 'Acaso', Aleatorial and Chaos

2009-09-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

Maria Odete Madeira

Massacritica, Lda.

Carlos Pedro Dos Santos Gonçalves

UNIDE - ISCTE Business School - Lisbon University Institute

September 7, 2009

Abstract:
In addressing the interdisciplinary field that is growing at the intersection between chaos theory and risk science it becomes necessary to reconsider the notion of chaos in its linkages with the notions of possible, possibility, “acaso” and aleatorial.

Aiming at such an interdisciplinary effectiveness, the present article addresses the notions of possible, possibility, “acaso”, aleatorial and chaos in terms of their respective constituent and constitutive systemic topoi, from the formative ontological systemic dynamics, structurally dependent upon the initial conditions of the respective systems and cognitively computed/processed by these same systems, from the perception and recognition of themselves, as individuated resonating rotative positions, in the inter-systemic web of survival.

The (inter)systemic risk is, then, addressed in connection with the chaos in the deterministic systems. An example of Malcolm effects and synchronized risk being researched upon for a two-dimensional nonlinear map that produces multifractal chaos. This allows for the signaling of conceptual linkages that occur at the intersection of chaos theory and risk science, between homeostatic mechanisms, synchronization and chaos.

Keywords: Possibility, possible, “acaso”, aleatorial, stochastic, clinamen, chaos, Malcolm effect, multifractal chaos, synchronization, risk, risk science, multifractal self-organized criticality

Working Paper Series

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469613

Conhecimento tácito, conhecimento explícito, autopoiésis, superveniência

2009-08-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

O conhecimento tácito e o conhecimento explícito estão, consensualmente, sinalizados e classificados pela comunidade científica como dois tipos de conhecimento, o que significa que existe a evidência de que, quer em termos ontológicos, quer em termos epistemológicos, o conhecimento tácito e o conhecimento explícito seguem diferentes leis de estrutura que os individuam e sinalizam como duas naturezas irredutíveis, entre si, podendo, deste modo, atribuir-se-lhes um carácter de permanência que é compatível com as categorias de necessidade e autonomia e que, por essa razão/causa, invalida afirmações, tais como aquela de que entre o conhecimento tácito e o conhecimento explícito podem ocorrer processos de transferência. É correcto falar-se em processos de conversão, mas é incorrecto falar-se em processos transferência.

A evidência é a de que o conhecimento tácito é um conhecimento sistémico, organicamente processado através de mecanismos dinâmicos espontâneos proto-conscientes, ou mesmo inconscientes, e que, por isso mesmo, é um conhecimento não-verbalizável, e a de que o conhecimento explícito é um conhecimento sistémico, organicamente mediado por mecanismos dinâmicos conscientes e que, por isso mesmo, é um conhecimento verbalizável.

A conversão de conhecimento tácito a/para conhecimento explícito depende de processos neurobiológicos conscientes, nos quais é desenvolvida uma dinâmica de projectividade rotativa ressonante, através da qual o organismo consegue a sincronia homeostática que lhe permite a produção de schemata que fazem corresponder a um certo conhecimento tácito, um certo conhecimento explícito facilmente verbalizável e que, por isso mesmo, pode ser alvo dos processos/procedimentos sistémicos de transferência que envolvem a passagem de conhecimento explícito para outro conhecimento, igualmente, explícito.

Em todo este processo, torna-se relevante sinalizar o carácter de superveniência do conhecimento explícito relativamente ao conhecimento tácito, bem como todo o dinamismo sistémico autopoiético desenvolvido pelos respectivos organismos, nos quais se inclui as estratégias e as eficácias, desenvolvidas nos sistemas de trocas de matéria, energia e informação.

Economic Equilibrium, Chaos and the Malcolm Effect

2009-07-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

By: Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

The notion that economic equilibrium leads to a fixed point dynamic equilibrium and that all randomness, and, therefore, uncertainty and risk come from exogenous shocks that change the equilibrium from one (attracting) fixed point to another (attracting) fixed point was a useful argument in justifying a neoclassical economic discourse of power that defends the idea that a self-regulating free market does not produce bubbles and crises, the crises being produced, according to this perspective, by inefficiency sources such as transaction costs, market regulation, State intervention.

This argument allows one to confabulate a market economy as something that is completely controllable, with a predictable mechanics, and a manageable exogenous risk of a mild nature.

This "useful" reasoning about the equilibrium was, however, put into question by the applications of chaos theory to economic dynamics. In the book Cycles and Chaos in Economic Equilibrium, edited by Jess Benhabib (1992), it is shown, through several examples, that the very same homeostatic mechanisms that lead to an economic equilibrium can also lead to a dynamic instability, the conditions of economic equilibrium and the dynamics at the economic equilibrium may, thus, produce complex chaotic motion. A market economy may, therefore, be in economic equilibrium and, at the same time, not in a fixed point equilibrium.

The endogenous risk that occurs from chaotic dynamics falls into a notion of deterministic risk that may coevolve with external shocks.

In a model proposed by Tönu Puu (1997), in the book Nonlinear Economic Dynamics (pages 240 to 243), it is assumed that the investment is adaptive, in such a way that a period of rapid growth and the formation of a bubble may become unstable and, thus, lead to an economic crises (see figure 1 below). Similarly, when a crisis occurs there is a limit below which it becomes advantageous to invest due to low costs.

Fig.1 - Bubbles and crashes (example near t=600 and t>=850) in simulated income

The video, below, is an example of the Malcolm effect (Crichton, 1991) taking place in Puu's model. There is economic growth up to a point where the system is at its highest growth rate, at that point there is a quick fall, and a crisis takes place with large swings in the growth, accounting for a high variability.

This effect is described by Crichton in the book Jurassic Park, the name Malcolm effect being attributed to the fictional chaos theorist Ian Malcolm.

The Malcolm effect is a general crisis dynamics where the system suddenly crashes exactly when it is functioning at its highest performance.

For the Malcolm effect to occur it must be possible for the system to produce a sharp jump. In economics this means that a bubble would not be followed by a corrective slow fluctuation showing convergence to a period slower economic activity, instead the bubble would burst into a period of high volatility and a few large downward swings that would characterize an economic crash and a period of economic crisis (as it takes place in the video below).

The occurrence of bubbles, crisis and phenomena like the Malcolm effect are not accounted for in the traditional equilibrium models but they are shown to occur in simple nonlinear models of market economies functioning in economic equilibrium, which puts into question the neoclassical argument that if the markets were left on their own all would go well and no bubbles and crashes would ever occur.

Economic equilibrium cannot be taken as a synonym of attracting fixed point dynamical equilibrium.

The video is also available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf-2pEP6HVg

The figure and video were produced with the software EF Chaos 101.

Afairesis, Abstractio ou Abstracção

2009-07-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

Abstractio foi o termo escolhido por Boécio para a tradução do termo grego afairesis. Abstractio ou abstracção é uma dinâmica cognitiva sistémica operativa, através da qual uma parte, uma característica ou um elemento de uma totalidade sistémica integrada é separada dessa mesma totalidade da qual depende constitutivamente, enquanto existente concreto, particular e contingente, para ser constituída (essa parte) como um objecto de pensamento, conceptualmente existente e disponível para ser abordado e cognitivamente sintetizado como uma entidade universal com um valor objectivo.

Carlota Pérez - Solução para a crise?

2009-07-14T04:09:00.000-07:00

Acerca das afirmações de Carlota Pérez em http://www.ionline.pt/conteudo/13109-carlota-perez-economista-que-tem-solucao-crise

por Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

Creio que estamos a viver um pleno de economia interconectada globalizada. Esta crise evidencia uma falha perspectívica da análise de risco, que assume a diversificação financeira e uma base correlacional como elementos decisionais, ignorando a possibilidade de criação de interconectividades por via da gestão de carteiras e, em particular, dos fundos de investimento.

Aquilo que esta crise evidencia, em primeiro lugar, é a falência de uma razão local de nó que esquece a rede. O que Pérez propõe é um retrocesso a uma razão local centralizadora. Os anos de 1970 e 1980 padeceram de problemas (aftereffect) devido a um Bretton Woods incompatível com um sistema complexo adaptativo em processo de internacionalização, o regresso a um Bretton Woods e a um Keynesianismo de Estado continua a ser uma aposta numa razão de nó centralizador que esquece a rede.

O neoliberalismo falha pela incapacidade de perceber os mercados enquanto sistemas adaptativos complexos interconectados com redes sistémicas e ecossistémicas complexas não-lineares. Um neokeynesianismo falharia também porque procuraria impor uma lógica de controlo centralizador sobre um sistema complexo acentrado. Após a falência de um tal neokeynesianismo teríamos de lidar com uma sobreposição de crises, resultantes: das instabilidades emergentes de um sistema económico que está a evoluir de uma economia planetária para uma economia transplanetária (veja-se o rápido desenvolvimento das tecnologias espaciais); das crises ambientais vindas do aquecimento global; das crises e instabilidades resultantes de uma falência dos mecanismos de controlo centralizados impostos sobre um sistema acentrado.

A solução fiscal que tenta travar o comportamento de curto prazo dos mercados financeiros baseia-se numa lógica errada acerca do comportamento de mercado, travar o comportamento de curto prazo dos mercados financeiros é impedir a adaptabilidade dos mesmos, o que teria consequências de longo prazo quando uma crise se sobrepusesse a uma inércia de mercado. Poderia conduzir a crashes ainda maiores.

As soluções do século XX, do Keynesianismo e do neoliberalismo funcionam segundo lógicas de economias de Estado ainda em processo de internacionalização, necessitamos de um pensamento económico alternativo baseado na hipótese da eficiência adaptativa, nas ciências da complexidade e na ciência risco, para lidar com a natureza do sistema que temos. Não está na altura de ilusões locais mecanicistas, estamos perante crises de mercados vivos não capturáveis nos modelos Keynesianos e neoclássicos.

Sobre a "Teoria"

2009-07-12T05:07:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

O termo teoria, com origem no grego theorein, condensa um duplo significado sistémico: o de espectáculo, ou espaço sistémico de representação, abordado intencionalmente nas suas dinâmicas semióticas topológicas e tipológicas e a respectiva visão intencional do mesmo, em que se inclui o exercício de exame crítico, o exercício de contemplação e os mecanismos homeostáticos de prazer, ligados à satisfação do desejo.

A relação de entrelaçamento gravítico do signo teoria com o signo visão determina, na raiz genética do termo, uma dinâmica de exercício sistémico activo fundamental que faz depender a teoria, ela mesma, do acto de percepção de alguma coisa através da vista, significando percepção o acto primitivo imediato pelo qual alguma coisa ou coisas são cognitivamente processadas.

Deste modo, enquanto signo, a teoria está sistemicamente dependente das coisas, de todas as coisas presentes no mundo, sejam concretas ou abstractas, e que, enquanto tais, podem ser percepcionadas enquanto coisas existentes que podem ser abordadas, a partir das sínteses cognitivas, contraídas no signo teoria, no pressuposto configurado a partir da génese do mesmo termo, por sua vez, determinada, a referida génese, pelo exercício sistémico dinâmico metabólico, envolvido nas trocas de matéria, informação e energia, intencionalmente visadas pelas teias gravíticas sistémicas, o que permite atribuir à teoria uma natureza gravítica complexa de organicidade rotativa dinâmica evolutiva ligada à sobrevivência dos sistemas.

Reflexão, Reflexividade, Reflexibilidade

2009-07-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

Reflexão, do latim reflectere, tem o significado de voltar atrás, e diz respeito à actividade sistémica rotativa projectiva dos agentes, de quaisquer agentes, sejam esses agentes: partícula, campo, átomo, molécula, célula, animal, pessoa, ou coisa, ente ou entidade. Estando essa actividade ligada às respectivas estratégias e eficácias, emaranhadas na computação e respectivas trocas com o meio, incluídas na computação/produção de sínteses valorativas judicativas deliberativas.

Reflexividade, do latim reflexu, significa dobrado sobre si mesmo, e é uma capacidade rotativa sistémica disposicional que permite aos agentes e/ou aos sistemas o processamento cognitivo valorativo directo de si mesmos, a partir das causas, ou razões formativas originantes às quais o sistema se dirige intencionalmente com o objectivo de produzir sínteses valorativas judicativas deliberativas (re)avaliativas.

Reflexibilidade é uma propriedade sistémica disposicional intrínseca, comum a todas as coisas, enquanto coisas existentes e, por isso mesmo, rotativamente presentes na sua própria luz, em si mesmas, a si mesmas e por si mesmas, enquanto autonomias.

A reflexibilidade está nas próprias coisas, entes ou entidades, e tem que ver com a visibilidade ou percepção das mesmas, como um modo de ser próprio, um carácter, enquanto coisas que se mostram, aparecem e parecem, na sua visibilidade. Todas as coisas têm o poder, enquanto capacidade, de mostrar, de reflectir a sua própria luz, a sua própria verdade, aquilo que são, aquilo que fazem, e naqueles, entes ou entidades, dotados de pensamento, discurso e vontade, aquilo que pensam, querem, desejam.

Ideia; Conceito

2009-05-25T02:21:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

Ideia (do grego eidos) – tem que ver com a forma das coisas, o aspecto, a figura, o desenho.

Uma ideia individual é, sempre, uma representação ou projecção figurada (imagem, forma, aspecto, desenho) de alguma coisa, seja essa coisa uma palavra(s), um som(s), um objecto(s), situação(ões), processo(s), o que quer que seja… .

Conceito é, sempre, uma síntese cognitiva judicativa valorativa acerca de algo, alguma coisa ou coisas, sejam essas coisas abstractas ou concretas: ideias, formas, figuras, mundo, pessoas, sentimentos, processos, situações, ... .

Os conceitos devem ser contextualizados. Num universo científico, o(s) conceito(s) sintetiza(m): processo(s) cognitivo(s), apoiado(s) por procedimentos conjecturais científicos, e, assim, o(s) conceito(s) tem(têm) um valor científico objectivo.

Mas, também, se pode falar de conceitos, em contextos de opinião, a opinião de cada um, por ex: o conceito de vida, de bem, de mal, de beleza, de humanidade, de dignidade… . Estes conceitos sintetizam as perspectivas individuais: opiniões, crenças, escolhas, sentimentos e, assim, têm, apenas, um valor, particular ou subjectivo, de opinião.

relação/relações

2009-05-06T01:56:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

Relação, do latim relatione, significa o acto de referir, como o acto de pôr em conformidade alguém ou alguma coisa, seja esse alguém um ente ou entidade, ou uma diversidade de entes ou entidades concreto(s)/a(s) ou abstracto(s)/a(s), factos, acontecimentos, situações ou processos. A relação pode ser abordada como um mecanismo organizador que opera, activa e sinergeticamente na formação de estruturas sistémicas, como condição de possibilidade de formação dos pontos de sincronização que determinam constitutivamente a formação do sistema ou rede de relações a partir do seu fundamento enquanto individuação e, assim, enquanto entidade e identidade.

A Systems Theoretical Formal Logic for Category Theory

2009-04-30T01:40:00.000-07:00

by

Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

Mathematics researcher at UNIDE-ISCTE
cpdsg.research@gmail.com (primary); cpdsg@iscte.pt

Maria Odete Madeira
Interdisciplinary researcher in philosophy of science and systems science
mosmg.research@gmail.com (primary), mariaodete.sm@gmail.com

Abstract

A systems theoretical thinking on the categorial object and morphism is developed, leading to areflection on the philosophical and mathematical foundations of category theory, which allowsfor the introduction of a formal language for category theory and of a categorial calculus as amorphic web-based logical calculus. A formal system, built from such calculus, is proposed and the logical semantics is addressed. Both syntax and semantics are independent from set theory.

Keywords: System, object, morphism, morphic web, individuation, entity, identity, categories,n-categories

1. Introduction

"In the present work, we propose a systems theoretical approach to category theory, introducing a formal language (LCat) and a formal system (FCat′ ), that incorporate the main system theoretic foundations of the categorial object and morphism. The formal system is based upon a morphic web calculus that we call categorial calculus. Both the logical syntax and semantics of such calculus are addressed and shown to be independent from set theory, which makes the theory itself independent from set theory.

In section 2., we address the categorial object as a system, providing for the philosophical ground of the main work. In section 3., we introduce the formal language LCat and a formal system FCat1−6 that is able to address the simpler structures of category theory.

In section 4., we address the morphic wholes as systems, through the so-called border marker. This leads to a development of the identity laws into a more ontologically and systemically complete logic, that addresses both systemic individuation and identity. The formal system, developed in section 4., is called FCat′ and it is capable of dealing with category theory, n-category theory and a different class of structures that cross systemic levels, which are more complex hierarchical structures than the ones worked upon in n-category theory.

In section 5., we address the logical semantics. In section 6. we conclude with a few final remarks.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396841

James Lovelock - "É a vida que desenha o planeta"

2009-04-19T02:52:00.000-07:00

“Os meus amigos do mundo científico e académico adoram especular sobre o que é que havia antes do Big Bang, ou sobre como se formou a vida na terra nos tempos primordiais. Até agora não o sabemos, excepto – e isso é muito importante – que temos muita sorte por fazermos parte de um Universo que se organiza a si mesmo. Onde quer que existam fluxos de energia, como a luz solar proveniente de uma estrela, formam-se sistemas e estruturas que vivem, que sobrevivem durante algum tempo e que depois se extinguem de novo. A vida é um desses sistemas, embora seja diferente dos outros, porque é quase imortal, e a razão pela qual é quase imortal reside no facto de que é capaz de transmitir, de uma geração para outra, o conhecimento acerca daquilo que é importante fazer.”

James Lovelock, in Eduardo Punset, Frente a Frente com a Vida, a Mente e o Universo – É a vida que desenha o planeta, p.99

Metodologia, Método, Modelo: definições

2009-03-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

Metodologia – termo formado, a partir do grego methodos + logos

Metodologia significa, etimologicamente, o estudo dos métodos [processos (caminhos) e instrumentos] usados para se fazer pesquisa científica.

A metodologia é uma disciplina normativa que tem por objecto o estudo sistemático e lógico dos princípios que dirigem qualquer pesquisa científica, desde os pressupostos básicos, até às técnicas de investigação.

Não deve ser confundida com teoria, uma metodologia não é uma teoria. A metodologia, enquanto critério de pesquisa científica, interessa-se, apenas, pela validade formal, ou condições de validade formais, e não (nunca) pelo conteúdo dos critérios científicos, relacionados com os métodos e técnicas os quais estão mais centrados na capacidade de fornecer conhecimentos específicos/determinados.

Assim, a metodologia, mais do que uma descrição formal de técnicas e métodos a serem utilizados na pesquisa científica, indica a opção que o pesquisador fez para resolver determinada situação, ou problema (que pode(m) ser teórico(s) ou prático(s)) relacionado(s) com o seu objecto de investigação o qual tem de ser, obrigatoriamente, desenvolvido dentro de um quadro científico, enquadrado/enquadrável no paradigma(s) ou teoria(s) vigentes.

O método (methodos) é um procedimento científico, reflexivamente ordenado, constituído por instrumentos básicos, aos quais se aplica, de forma adequada, a reflexão/conjectura e a experimentação. O método tem por objectivo orientar todo o percurso da pesquisa, de modo a alcançar os objectivos preestabelecidos no projecto de pesquisa.

Modelo é uma representação conceptual, ou física, de um processo, ou de um sistema, ou, ainda, de um fenómeno ou de um objecto.

O domínio de aplicação de um modelo científico é definido por aquilo, ou aquela estrutura, que é representado/a no modelo, seja essa estrutura conceptual/abstracta ou física/material.

O comportamento daquilo que é representado por um modelo científico é definido em termos das interacções e/ou relações/relacionamentos entre os seus elementos/componentes, e não (nunca) pelos seus elementos/componentes, considerados individualmente, enquanto singularidades tautológicas referentes.

Procedimentos metodológicos de investigação

2009-03-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

Procedimentos metodológicos de investigação:

identificação, sinalização ou localização de um padrão // observação desse padrão // abstracção/conjectura // procedimentos reflexivos // conclusão ou prova final

1º- identificação, sinalização ou localização de um padrão que figurará como proposta de tese e que pode ser concreto ou abstracto, devendo entender-se por padrão uma proporção que possa ser exemplificada ou expressa por uma estrutura ou configuração, tal como, por exemplo, um objecto, um problema, um enunciado, um facto, um acontecimento, etc… .

2º- observação desse padrão utilizando a formação do próprio observador/investigador, bem como toda a informação/conhecimento, previamente aprovada e disponibilizada pela comunidade científica que seja adequada e, assim, aplicável como critério metodológico àquilo que está a ser alvo de investigação.

3º - abstracção/conjectura feita a partir da observação/experiência.

4º - procedimentos reflexivos que visam a percepção, compreensão, interpretação e explicação do objecto que está a ser trabalhado e que podem ser auxiliados ou apoiados, separadamente ou conjuntamente, por procedimentos lógicos, matemáticos, hermenêuticos, etc…, aqueles que forem cientificamente adequados ao objecto e respectivo contexto/situação/processo.

5º - conclusão ou prova final que deverá exibir de forma desambiguada argumentos conclusivos, suportados por teoria(s) científica(as) que estabeleça(am) critérios de legitimidade/validade científica acerca do objecto constituído como tese e que, enquanto tal, foi observado/investigado.

Digitizing the Continuum

2009-03-08T06:02:00.001-07:00

by Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

The reign of the digital imposes itself with the digitocracy over the continuum. The mathematical continuum, irreducible to the countable, is negated as interdict, as dangerous illegality.

Of mathematics, it is demanded a logocentered logicity, a reifying and imprisoning reduction that strives to reduce the semantic to the syntactic and, thus, extends the formal incompleteness to a semantics that does not possess it.

The mathematical intuition is substituted by the cold deduction that, incapable of scaling new horizons because it lacks imaginative capability, does not explore the mathematical idea and its apprehension by the mathematician that intuits it in a sensual immediateness produced by an imaginative synthesis, idea, itself, by nature, irreducible to a logical logocentrism, as Gödel proved it.

To scale new horizons… to think beyond the barriers of the code… dangerous activities… incompatible with a digitocracy extended to the mathematical activity itself. The formal language ceases being just an instrument of discursive organization and of formalization auxiliary to the proof, to become an instrument of thought control.

From abstractive auxiliars, the language and the formal system become instruments of alienation of the mathematical thinking itself, that, to think the formal, empty of semantics, loses its object of intentionality – the mathematical object, in itself, as abstract object of thought, which, as Gödel proved it, is irreducible to the purely syntactic, to the purely logical.

To digitize the mathematical continuum in the mathematical discrete means to abolish, from the thought, a universe of thinkable forms, to impose the limit of the digital, useful to an effort of computative mechanocracy in which the instrument of the number abolishes the analogical and, thus, the interval itself and the continuum. Without interval, without continuum, without shades, without infinitesimal differences, without empty spaces, thought as empty spaces because continua of nothing. End of the différance towards the end of the différence.

Even if different, digitized, we come to occupy the same houses in the bar codes in which we become, clones in our condition of slaves to the digit.

Badly interpreted Gödel’s theorem, to justify that the notion itself of mathematical truth is reducible to a logical validity, in a first step towards the algorithmization of truth, of geometry, of the continuum, of the interval, of the grey, of the individual as individual, separated from the rest, and non-slaved to the number… and non-slaved to a machine incapable of imagining, incapable of innovating, incapable of jumping outside the tyranny of the formal system, itself limited in itself and right from the point in which it deals with the numbers themselves and with simple arithmetic.

The end of the mathematician (second target), as well as the end of the philosopher (first target) are the two first steps to abdicate from our thought and from those natural systems of systemic homeostasis, thinkable as antibodies that protect us from the dictatorships of the formal and of the machines as ends in themselves.

Digitalização do Contínuo

2009-03-07T03:10:00.000-08:00

Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

O reino do digital impõe-se com a digitocracia sobre o contínuo. O contínuo matemático, irredutível ao contável, é negado como interdito, como ilegalidade perigosa.

Da matemática, é exigida uma logicidade logocentrada, uma redução reificante e aprisionadora que tenta reduzir o semântico ao sintáctico e, assim, estende a incompletude formal a uma semântica que não a possui.

A intuição matemática é substituída pela dedução fria, incapaz de escalar novos horizontes, porque não possui capacidade imaginativa, não explora a ideia matemática e a sua apreensão pelo matemático que a intui numa imediatez sensual produzida por uma síntese imaginativa, ideia, esta, por natureza, irredutível a um logocentrismo lógico, como o demonstrou Gödel.

Escalar novos horizontes… pensar para além das barreiras do código… actividades perigosas… incompatíveis com uma digitocracia alargada à própria actividade matemática. A linguagem formal deixa de ser somente um instrumento de organização discursiva e de formalização auxiliar à demonstração, para passar a ser um instrumento de controlo de pensamento.

De auxiliares abstractivos, a linguagem e o sistema formal passam a ser instrumentos de alienação do próprio pensamento matemático, que, para pensar o formal, vazio de semântica, perde o seu objecto de intencionalidade – o objecto matemático, em si mesmo, enquanto objecto abstracto de pensamento, o qual, como Gödel demonstrou, é irredutível ao puramente sintáctico, ao puramente lógico.

Digitalizar o contínuo matemático no discreto matemático significa abolir do pensamento um universo de formas pensáveis, para impor o limite do digital, útil a um esforço de mecanocracia computativa em que o instrumento do número abole o analógico e, assim, o próprio intervalo e o contínuo. Sem intervalo, sem contínuo, sem matizes, sem diferenças infinitesimais, sem espaços vazios pensados como espaços vazios porque contínuos de nada. Fim da différance para o fim da différence.

Ainda que diferentes, digitalizados, passamos a ocupar as mesmas casas nos códigos de barra em que nos tornamos, clones na nossa condição de escravos do dígito.

Teorema de Gödel mal interpretado para justificar que a própria noção de verdade matemática seja redutível a uma validade lógica, num primeiro passo para algoritmização da verdade, da geometria, do contínuo, do intervalo, do cinzento, do indivíduo enquanto indivíduo separado dos restantes, e não escravizado ao número… e não escravizado a uma máquina incapaz de imaginar, incapaz de inovar, incapaz de saltar para fora da tirania do sistema formal, ele próprio limitado em si mesmo, e desde logo, quando lidando com os próprios números e aritmética simples.

O fim do matemático (segundo alvo), assim como o fim do filósofo (primeiro alvo) são os dois primeiros passos para abdicarmos do nosso pensamento e daqueles sistemas naturais de homeostasia sistémica, pensáveis como anticorpos que nos protegem das ditaduras do formal e das máquinas enquanto fins em si mesmos.

humanidade

2009-03-05T00:36:00.000-08:00

Por: Maria Odete Madeira

O reconhecimento intersubjectivo da humanidade, em nós, como um telos constitutivo supremo que a vida nos doou, compromete-nos responsavelmente com o direito e o dever de defender a nossa humanidade como um bem que é nosso, que é incondicional e que é inalienável.

Sovereign Good

2009-02-15T03:28:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

It is the words... it is the discourse of the others... that address us… it is the face of the others… the gaze of the others… it is the existence of the others… that searches, in us, the imperative that unites our voice… our discourse… our existence… to the voice… to the discourse… to the existence… of the others that gaze upon us and that address us, invoking and evoking the good… the wisdom… the justice… in us.

Life

2009-02-10T02:39:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

All living organisms exhibit dispositional regulatory mechanisms that operate intentionally in the maintenance of their respective lives.

Life is also desire of life (Damásio). This desire (desiderium) acts as an archetypal impulse or primitive vital instinct that intends the success of life itself, through an intentional and effective operativeness.

Life, as potency tends towards its own horizon of possibility of actualization. Desire functions as a potentiating mechanism of operativity of that tendency towards its actualization as existence.

Life, as permanent desire of itself, is also a permanent lacking of itself, therefore, the desire (conatus, impetus, vis viva) determines, in the root of life itself, its own irreducible irrefusableness.

In this way, life is, for life, itself, an absolute value.

...presence... ousia... dasein

2009-02-04T04:37:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

The trajective displacement of the Western metaphysical thinking is ontologically connected to the trajective displacement of the being as presence (ousia, dasein).

The identity of the presence, constituted as eidos, assumed in the Cartesian cogito a topology vehiculated to the categories of evidence and certainty, becoming, in this way, vulnerable to the domain of the repetition, incorporated in the metastasized form of representation of the Cartesian eidos present to itself and aware of itself, as relation to itself, in itself.

In the interior of the presence (ousia, dasein), the domain of the presence assured, with Descartes, the representation of itself as available truth, replicable by any rational motion of irreducible self-affection logocentric/phonocentric (Derrida)...

...but a notion of presence depends upon a notion of existence, which, in turn, depends upon a notion of being, which, in turn, depends upon a notion of nothing, all this interconnected with a notion of life/death.

Certainly that the notion of presence continues to be, in Philosophy, an open question, that cannot be resolved from solipsistic criteria.

We, human organisms, animals as any others, think in presence, in existence and in life because we are there with the others, with all the others, upon which we depend as survivors and subsistents: we question ourselves, we wish to know of reasons: what does it mean to state that we are? What does it mean to state that the others are? What does it mean to state that we exist, that we (co)exist? What is life? What is death?

Presence/ousia/dasein is not a matter of egocalculation, but a matter of autopoiesis, a matter of enaction.

Philosophy

2009-01-25T03:59:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

Philosophical arguments are not developed from answers but from questions. One thing is the authors of philosophy and the thinking and models of these authors, another thing is the philosophical thinking, itself.

To have philosophical thinking implies a very hard work and a development of capabilities to be able to unfold monadologically a locality in a non-locality, and for that it is necessary training, because it is not about the thinking of each one, but about the capability that each one has to access an eidos/logos, and to learn from that eidos/logos, to learn how to question about the things.

Each answer brings already, in the mechanism of unfolding of that answer, a new question. A philosopher is not whoever wants to be one, because it is not about the thinking of each one, it is about a capability to ascend to a non-local universal that is independent of each one, and in order to do that it is not enough to want to do so, it is necessary to learn, and to learn, and to learn, and… above all, it is necessary to learn how to question the things, themselves. It is not a matter of what we know, it is a matter of what we know not.

It is not about making algorithmic reductions, or logical deductions, or to affirm oneself as philosopher, it is not about dogmatic revelations.

As an exercise of questioning the things, one cannot be afraid or annoyed with the questions, it is necessary some humility.

Unfortunately, the fast-food teaching and the pragmatic application-oriented science, where it only matters the immediate answers that solve immediate problems, algorithmized for an easier consumption, does not allow nor favor an exercise of a fundamental thinking based on questioning; questions, beyond a certain point, become a nuisance.

One cannot give, in philosophy, a ready to consume answer. To address, philosophically, an issue is to address it with questions. A philosophical discussion starts with questions and does not end, but go on, indefinitely with more questions. Question to question, to question, to question,… (verb and process).

Within such an exercise of questioning, one cannot abruptly end the debate with a quick and superficial exit, and must follow the questions where they lead.

The questions cannot be placed in the most general form and only skim very lightly the real subject. In a philosophical debate all the cards have to be laid out on the table, since the questions have to be about the things themselves and not about the (often manipulated) shadows of the things.

On Derrida's Deconstruction

2009-01-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

The postmodern deconstructionist movement inscribes itself in a skeptic referential frame, organized and structured, from methodological criteria based upon a fundamental relativistic principle that strived to demonstrate the fallibility of that which was considered to be dogmatic evidences.

It is in the limit zone, displaced by the exercise of conceptual oppositions that the mechanism of deconstruction, proposed by Derrida, as a methodological criterion, is applied.

Questioning the unity of the concept of end, Derrida strives to question the discourse, the sense, the individual and collective values, with the objective of determining the strategic theoretical/practical borders between Philosophy and Literature.

Beyond the essences: the pathos

2009-01-10T03:27:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

The term pathos can mean: event, experience, suffering, emotion, attribute.

In general terms it means: something that happens, that can have by reference that which is the cause, or that which is the effect of that which happens.

In Aristotle, the pathos is the logos of the contingence, it is the logos of the event, it is the logos of the attributes acquired by the subjects, it is the logos beyond the essences.

Pathos is the place of the difference subtracted to the identity, the mark of the asymmetry that prevails in the proposition and that determines it, as such.

Destined to be surpassed in the identity and by the identity of the subject, the pathos is, simultaneously, all that the subject is not, and all that the subject sees.

Rotatively displaced by a fundamental ambiguity, the pathos trajects and projects a (co)condition of constitutive irreducibility that, simultaneously, imposes that a subject cannot be its attribute and that its attribute cannot be a substance.

In Aristotle, the identity of the logical subject supports itself in the pathos, resending towards the origin of a propositional order whose contradictory character allows the unveiling of a presence of an identity inscribed in an order of permanent reason that has in itself an active principle of becoming, as an active principle of the being, itself, as potency, that makes it come to the presence, from itself, as eksistente dasein (Heidegger), or act.

sub-jectum - beyond the being

2008-12-17T06:59:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

Autrement qu'être... outramente... ipseity and alterity (Lévinas, Ricoeur)... dialectics of the dictum, as major sense of the subjectivity (sub-jectum, beyond the being).

Ipseity as response (res-posta) to the convocation of the alterity,... as ethics of the pre-original vocative and accusative of the human... between the same and the other, between the dictum and the irreducible to say is the character of the ontological difference as an amphibology, between the entity and the being, that, in the end, restates the verbality of the verb linked to the substantiality of the name. I am my logos to myself, I am by the being, I am by my voice.

Chaos

2008-12-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

Primeiro que tudo havia o Caos e a Noite e o negro Érebo e o vasto Tártaro (Aristófanes, Aves).

Before every thing there was the Chaos and the Night and the dark Erebus and the vast Tartarus (Aristophanes, Birds).

The notion of Chaos comes from the Greek Khaos, with the primitive sense of opening, or primordial interval, from which all the things came (Hesiod, Theogony).

The concept of Chaos has been addressed, perspectivically, along the Western thinking, from a double referential ontological displacement in which the Chaos can be signaled as an originating operative negative, meaning: void, indetermination or disorder; or it can be signaled as an originating operative positive, meaning: undifferentiated absolute wholeness.

Anaxagoras incorporated the meaning of absolute wholeness in an idea of initial homogeneity. In Plato’s Timaeus, the Chaos is referred as chaotic mass, and, in Aristotle’s Physics, it is addressed as empty space.

Later on, Schelling tried to synthesize the notion of Chaos, in an idea of absolute potency, worked upon from Aristotle.

Nietzsche, in turn, strongly influenced by Spinoza, thought the Chaos as a vital dynamism.

Quantum Game of Life II

2008-12-01T04:26:00.000-08:00

by Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

Below is a video of a simulation of the quantum game of life, implemented in Netlogo.

Following the previous blog post on this game, each cell (patch) can be in a vacuum state, or it can become punctured by a qubit state.

In the video, the grey cells correspond to the vacuum states that may potentially become occupied by a qubit state Q> = a0>+b1>, while the black and white cells have become occupied (in act) by a qubit state. Each color corresponding to one of the two basis states of the qubit, that is, white corresponds to 0> and black corresponds to 1>.

The actualization of each of the two qubit computational basis states occurs through a probabilistic process since there is decoherence in the qubit histories. The model works with two gate rules, a simple Haddamard rule, and a chaotic rule that exemplifies path dependent quantum computation. The video above uses path dependent quantum computation, in the dynamics of creation and anihilation as well as in the qubit information dynamics.

The video is also available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14jdqWEe0wE

Quantum Game of Life

2008-11-29T05:50:00.000-08:00

by Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

The following are pictures of a simulation of a quantum game of life, implemented in Netlogo:

Initial Configuration

After a Few Steps

Each cell (patch) can be in a vacuum state, or it can become punctured by a qubit state. In the pictures the black cells correspond to the vacuum states that may potentially become occupied by a qubit state, while the white cells have become occupied (in act) by a qubit state.

Quantum information is, thus, created and annihilated out of an information vacuum. A clustered patchworked dynamic geometry emerges, in the current simulation, from local connectivity rules that make it more probable for clustering to occur.

Defining Complexity

2008-11-28T14:13:00.000-08:00

by Maria Odete Madeira

Diversity and complexity are contextually (co)implicated , depending, the nature of each, from the nature of the context, in which they are rooted and upon which they systemically depend. This means that to refer the term complexity to a single definition would be not only impoverishing but also difficult in terms of a desirable explicative rigor.

To speak of complexity one must comprehend complexity, itself. To comprehend comes from the Latin cum+prehender that means to apprehend conjointly, thus, the term “comprehend” folds, it its own definition, the diversity that allows one to design it also as complex, in the sense in which it folds in the same act of comprehension, successive resendings between different individuals, or subjects, which implies an explicare and, thus, an unfolding of the subjectivity in intersubjectivity.

Any attempt to define complexity will have to consider, in the act itself of defining complexity, the complexity implicated in the act of comprehension, necessary to that definition.

Comprehending complexity systemically depends upon individuals, groups, species, cultures, societies and civilizations, in their differences, multiplicities and diversities.