[Fis] new year lecture

[Loet Leydesdorff]

>In summary, these studies represent our preliminary attempt at finding 
>organising principles of brain function that will help to guide in a 
>more formal sense inquiry into how consciousness arises from the 
>organization of matter. The extension of this work that we are now 
>carrying out includes a description of the evolution equation of brain 
>dynamics using a probabilistic framework incorporating the 
>probabilities of connections among brain cell networks. But this is a 
>story for a future talk!  In the meantime, buena suerte for the new 
>year we just started… even though I don’t really believe in luck but 
>this is another story too, one about determinism and stochasticity..
>
>
>
>Dear Jose Luis,
>
Thank you for the lecture.

It seems to me that one has to distinguish between genesis and validity. 
"How consciousness arises from the organization of matter" is typically 
a question about the genesis; some would say "morphogenesis" or a 
next-order systems level. However, the emerging level has a 
(sub)dynamics of itself which can also function as a control mechanism. 
Construction is bottom up, but control top-down. Interesting is, in my 
opinion, the question when the balance tips in favor of the emerging 
system?

Whereas the genesis is entropy-driven, the control mechanism operates as 
a feedback and therefore in terms of generating redundancy (as different 
from entropy); against the arrow of time or, in other words, not in 
historical time, but in terms of an evolutionary clock. The emergence 
rewrites the history from which it emerged. One thus has to specify the 
differentia specifica of the next-order in terms of how it operates as a 
selection mechanism upon the variation (entropy). This specification 
cannot be achieved by focusing on the genesis as you advocate.

Hopefully, you find this a fruitful approach and contribution. The 
historical genesis can be studied objectivistically since it occurs in 
history. The selection mechanisms first have to be specified on 
theoretical ground and thus require another design; namely one of 
hypotheses and hypothesis-testing. Would you agree?

Best,
Loet

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net>; 
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of 
Sussex;

Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>, 
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC, 
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;

Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

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