Francis Heylighen

Vrije Universiteit Brussel | VUB · Center Leo Apostel (CLEA)

Recently a number of techniques have been developed that stimulate people to act towards specific objectives. These include persuasive technologies, gamification, user experiences, and various methods and tools used in open-source and other communities to encourage and organize participation. After surveying various examples of such applications, w...

Aging is analyzed as the spontaneous loss of adaptivity and increase in fragility that characterizes dynamic systems. Cybernetics defines the general regulatory mechanisms that a system can use to prevent or repair the damage produced by disturbances. According to the law of requisite variety, disturbances can be held in check by maximizing bufferi...

The organismic view of society is updated by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems. Global society can be seen as an autopoietic network of self-producing components, and therefore as a living system or superorganism. Millers living systems theory suggests a list of functional components for soci...

Evolution is presented as a trial-and-error process that produces a progressive accumulation of knowledge. At the level of technology, this leads to ephemeralization, i.e. ever increasing productivity, or decreasing of the friction that normally dissipates resources. As a result, flows of matter, energy and information circulate ever more easily ac...

This paper summarizes and reviews Chemical Organization Theory (COT), a formalism for the analysis of complex, self-organizing systems across multiple disciplines. Its elements are resources and reactions. A reaction maps a set of resources onto another set, thus representing an elementary process that transforms resources into new resources. React...

A unique exploration of teleonomy—also known as “evolved purposiveness”—as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science. The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed “teleonomy” by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of li...

Maturana and Varela defined an autopoietic system as a self-regenerating network of processes. We reinterpret and elaborate this conception starting from a process ontology and its formalization in terms of reaction networks and chemical organization theory. An autopoietic organization can be modelled as a network of "molecules" (components) underg...

Understanding the underlying structure of evolutionary processes is one the most important issues of scientific enquiry of this century [...]

This paper attempts to clarify the notion of goal-directedness, which is often misunderstood as being inconsistent with standard causal mechanisms. We first note that goal-directedness does not presuppose any mysterious forces, such as intelligent design, vitalism, conscious intention or backward causation. We then review attempts at defining goal-...

We characterize living systems as resilient “chemical organizations”, i.e. self-maintaining networks of reactions that are able to resist a wide range of perturbations. Dissipative structures, such as flames or convection cells, are also self-maintaining, but much less resilient. We try to understand how life could have originated from such self-or...

While their focus is on guiding and assessing human behaviour, traditional ethical frameworks remain entrenched in the absolutist and deterministic Newtonian worldview. On the other hand, the more recent theories of relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos have inspired relativist or nihilistic perspectives that merely highlight uncertainty; as a re...

Reaction network is a promising framework for representing complex systems of diverse and even interdisciplinary types. In this approach, complex systems appear as self-maintaining structures emerging from a multitude of interactions, similar to proposed scenarios for the origin of life out of autocatalytic networks. The formalism of chemical organ...

We define the noosphere as the conscious level of the web, where global conversations are being held about collective challenges. To understand its dynamics, we review three neuroscientific theories of consciousness: information integration, adaptive resonance, and global workspace. These suggest that conscious thoughts are characterized by a “reso...

In this article, we attempt at developing a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directed systems out of networks of (chemical) reactions. Related scenarios have been proposed to explain the origin of life starting from autocatalytic sets, but these sets tend to be too unstable and dependent on their environment to maintain. We apply instead...

While art and science still functioned side-by-side during the Renaissance, their methods and perspectives diverged during the nineteenth century, creating a still enduring separation between the "two cultures". Recently, artists and scientists again collaborate more frequently, as promoted most radically by the ArtScience movement. This approach a...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Quantum phenomena are notoriously difficult to grasp. The present paper first reviews the most important quantum concepts in a non-technical manner: superposition, uncertainty, collapse of the wave function, entanglement and non-locality. It then tries to clarify these concepts by examining their analogues in complex, self-organizing systems. These...

Cybernetics is a science that studies the mechanisms of communication and control in systems, with an emphasis on circular, feedback, or self‐referential processes. It is concerned not so much with the material or components of a system, but with the abstracted relations, functions, and information flows that govern its operation. It focuses on how...

We show that TTOM has a lot to offer for the study of the evolution of cultures, but that this also brings to the fore the dark implications of TTOM, unexposed in Veissière et al. Those implications lead us to move beyond meme-centered or an organism-centered concepts of fitness based on free energy minimization, towards a social systems-centered v...

Quantum phenomena are notoriously difficult to grasp. The present paper first reviews the most important quantum concepts in a non-technical matter: superposition, uncertainty, collapse of the wave function, entanglement and non-locality. It then tries to clarify these concepts by examining their analogues in complex, self-organizing systems. These...

We propose a venture into an existential opportunity for establishing a world 'good enough' for humans to live in. Defining an existential opportunity as the converse of an existential risk-i.e. a development that promises to dramatically improve the future of humanity-we argue that one such opportunity is available and should be explored now. The...

The world is confronted with a variety of interdependent problems, including scarcity, unsustainability, inequality, pollution and poor governance. Tackling such complex challenges requires coordinated action. The present paper proposes the development of a self-organizing system for coordination, called an “offer network”, that would use the distr...

We aproach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualist perspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artefact of the outdated mechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency, intentionality, or feeling. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceives mind and matter as as...

We analyze the role of the Global Brain in the sharing economy, by synthesizing the notion of distributed intelligence with Goertzel's concept of an offer network. An offer network is an architecture for a future economic system based on the matching of offers and demands without the intermediate of money. Intelligence requires a network of conditi...

The concept of stigmergy, a mechanism for the coordination of actions via the trace they leave in a medium, can explain self-organizing activities in a broad range of domains, including social insects, collaborative websites, and human institutions. The present paper attempts to bring some order to these diverse applications by classifying varietie...

The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, including social insects, robotics, social media, and human society. Yet, it is still poorly understood, and as such its full power remains underappreciated. The present paper clarifies the issue by defining stigmergy as a mechanism of...

The present chapter wishes to investigate the wider context of human computation, viewing it as merely one approach within the broad domain of distributed human-computer symbiosis. The multifarious developments in the “social” Internet have shown the great potential of large-scale collaborative systems that involve both people and the various infor...

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Complex adaptive systems consist of a large number of interacting agents. Agents are goal-directed, cognitive individuals capable of perception, information processing and action. However, agents are intrinsically “bounded” in their rational understanding of the system they belong to, and its global organization tends to emerge from local interacti...

The present paper criticizes Chalmers's discussion of the Singularity, viewed as the emergence of a superhuman intelligence via the self-amplifying development of artificial intelligence. The situated and embodied view of cognition rejects the notion that intelligence could arise in a closed 'brain-in-a-vat' system, because intelligence is rooted i...

this paper reviews the general philosophy underlying the transdisciplinary research in the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition (ECCO) group. The ECCO conceptual framework is based on an ontology of action: the fundamental constituents of reality are seen as actions and the agents that produce them. More complex phenomena are conceived as selforgani...

The conceptual and formal structure of quantum mechanics is analyzed from the point of view of the dynamics of distinctions, occurring during the observation process. The Hilbert space formalism is simplified with the help of the concept of closure: Closure of an eigenstate under an operator is generalized to the linear closure of a subset of slate...

The worldview of science is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, time-independent, objective and context-independent. The worldview found in literature, myth and religion, on the other hand, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the...

This short comment confirms Longo’s observation about the importance of symmetries for understanding space and time, but raises the additional issue of the transition from reversible to irreversible transformations. KeywordsSymmetry–Potentiality–Reversibility

Possibly the most fundamental scientific problem is the origin of time and causality. The inherent difficulty is that all scientific theories of origins and evolution consider the existence of time and causality as given. We tackle this problem by starting from the concept of self-organization, which is seen as the spontaneous emergence of order ou...

This document is the Special Issue of the First International Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe (EDU 2008). Please refer to the preface and introduction for more details on the contributions. Keywords: acceleration, artificial cosmogenesis, artificial life, Big Bang, Big History, biological evolution, biological universe,...

The role of utopias Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire ” liberalism that has replaced them is coming under more and more criticism. Instead, the intellectual climate has turned to either gloom and doom, or an “anything goes ” postmodernist relati...

In 2001 David Allen proposed ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) as a method for enhancing personal productivity and reducing the stress caused by information overload. This paper argues that recent insights in psychology and cognitive science support and extend GTD's recommendations. We first summarize GTD with the help of a flowchart, and then review the...

this article introduces some of the main concepts and methods of the science studying complex, self-organizing systems and networks, in a non-technical manner. Complexity cannot be strictly defined, only situated in between order and disorder. A complex system is typically modeled as a collection of interacting agents, representing components as di...

Despite the intrinsic complexity of integrating individual, social and technologically supported intelligence, the paper proposes a relatively simple ‘connectionist’ framework for conceptualizing distributed cognitive systems. Shared information sources (documents) are represented as nodes connected by links of variable strength, which increases a...

This introductory paper is structured in the form of an "interview", where the author answers the following questions: Why did you begin working with complex systems? How would you define complexity? What is your favourite aspect/concept of complexity? In your opinion, what is the most problematic aspect/concept of complexity? How do you see the fu...

The explosive development of "free" or "open source" information goods contravenes the conventional wisdom that markets and commercial organizations are necessary to efficiently supply products. This paper proposes a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, using concepts from economics and theories of self-organization. Once available on the I...

A multiagent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other and, as such, is a network of networks. The individual recurrent networks simulate the process of information uptake, integration, and memorization within individual agents, and the communication of beliefs an...

The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge. This paper reviews the historical development of this new world view, focusing on its philosophical foundations. Determinism was challenged by...

The distributed cognition approach, and by extension the domain of social intelligence design, attempts to integrate three until recently separate realms: mind, society, and matter. The field offers a heterogeneous collection of ideas, observations, and case studies, yet lacks a coherent theoretical framework for building models of concrete systems...

This paper reviews a number of recent approaches to put memetics to the test of quantitative meas-urability. The focus is on the selection criteria for the spreading of memes put forward by Heylighen (1997), which include utility, novelty, simplicity, coherence, authority and proselytism. The general hypothesis is that memes scoring higher on these...

The "global brain" is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by the people of this planet together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect them together. The different approaches leading up to this conception, by authors such as Spencer, Otlet, Wells, Teilhard, Russell and Turchin, are reviewed in their historical orde...

The distributed cognition approach, and by extension the domain of social intelligence design, attempts to integrate three until recently separate realms: mind, society, and matter. The field offers a heterogeneous collection of ideas, observations, and case studies, yet lacks a solid, coherent theoretical framework for building models of concrete...

We discuss which properties common-use artifacts should have to collaborate without human intervention. We conceive how devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, and home appliances, could be seamlessly integrated to provide an "ambient intelligence" that responds to the user's desires without requiring explicit programming or commands. While the hardw...

This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical thinking and its intrinsic drawbacks when dealing with complexity. We then show how complexity forces us to build models with indeterminacy and unpredictab...

We propose a first step in the development,of an integrated theory,of the ,emergence ,of distributed ,cognition/extended mind. Distributed cognition is seen as the confluence of collective intelligence and “situatedness”, or the extension of cognitive processes into the physical environment. The framework ,is based ,on five ,fundamental assumptions...

Principles of self-organisation are presented and are applied to the fields of the Web, which has developed its form from the bottom up; e-science, in which a grid of intelligent components interacted towards a greater understanding of the science concerned; peer-to-peer systems, that lend themselves to information systems that do not work with cen...

We do not attempt to provide yet another definition of selforganization, but explore the conditions under which we can model a system as self-organizing. These involve the dynamics of entropy, and the purpose, aspects, and description level chosen by an observer. We show how, changing the level or "graining" of description, the same system can appe...

ases at a much slower rate, thus lagging further and further behind. This means that large projects, such as the Semantic Web, either will get endlessly delayed, or end up with unworkable products. We need a radically different approach to overcome this bottleneck. One step forward is IBM's "autonomic computing" (http://www.research.ibm.com/autonom...

The term cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener (1948). Derived from the Greek "kybernetes," or "steersman," it was defined as "the study of control and communication in the animal and machine." Over time, its meaning has broadened substantially, and while many specific senses persist, cybernetics is the study of the abstract principles of organi...

ases at a much slower rate, thus lagging further and furtherbehind. This means that large projects, such as the Semantic Web, either will getendlessly delayed, or end up with unworkable products.We need a radically different approach to overcome this bottleneck. One stepforward is IBM's "autonomic computing" (

The context of a linguistic expression is defined as everything outside the expression itself that is necessary for unambiguous interpretation of the expression. As meaning can be conveyed either by the implicit, shared context or by the explicit form of the expression, the degree of context-dependence or “contextuality” of communication will vary,...

This paper proposes a set of algorithms to extract metadata about the documents in a digital library from the way these documents are used. Inspired by the learning of connections in the brain, the system assumes that documents develop stronger associations as they are more frequently co-activated. Co-activation corresponds to consultation by the s...

It is argued that social and technological evolution is characterized by ephemeralizat ion, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of all material, energetic and informational processes. This leads to the practical disappearance of the constraints of space, time, matter and energy, and thus spectaculary increases our power to physically solve p...

The perceptual control theory of Powers is used to analyse the market mechanism as a negative feedback loop which controls the deviation between demand (goal) and supply (perception) by adjusting the amount of effort invested in the production process (action), through the the setting of the price. The interconnection of distributed control loops f...

In spite of these similarities, the WWW lacks some important functional attributes typical for biological and artificial neural networks. First, neural networks are normally not intended to merely store information, but to control and guide goal-directed behaviour. The WWW, however, does not perform any tasks except information storage. Second, mos...

nd in the 19th century with Ampre, who both saw it as the science of effective government. The concept was revived and elaborated by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in his seminal 1948 book, whose title defined it as "Cybernetics, or the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine". Inspired by wartime and pre-war results in m...

. Progress could in principle be measured through the change

Contents I. Historical Development of Cybernetics.......................................................1 A. Origins.....................................................................................1 B. Second Order Cybernetics............................................................2 C. Cybernetics Today.........................................

: A set of fundamental principles for the cybernetics domain is sketched, based on the spontaneous emergence of systems through variation and selection. The (mostly self-evident) principles are: selective retention, autocatalytic growth, asymmetric transitions, blind variation, recursive systems construction, selective variety, requisite knowledge...

. A general problem in all systems to process language (parsing, translating, etc.) is ambiguity: words have many, fuzzily defined meanings, and meanings shift with the context. This may be tackled by quantifying the connotative or associative meaning, which can be represented as a matrix of mutual association strengths. With many thousands of word...

. It is argued that the acceptance of knowledge in a community depends on several, approximately independent selection "criteria". The objective criteria are distinctiveness, invariance and controllability, the subjective ones are individual utility, coherence, simplicity and novelty, and the intersubjective ones are publicity, expressivity, formal...

Introduction One of the essential issues of the Principia Cybernetica Project, which aims at the development of an evolutionary-cybernetic philosophy (Turchin, 1991; Heylighen, 1991ab), is epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. When we look at the history of epistemology, we can discern a clear trend, in spite of the confusion of many seemingly...

The symbol-based, correspondence epistemology used in AI is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics.

understandable, since the emergence of hierarchical levels is a pre-eminently multidisciplinary issue, involving at least physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. Another reason for the lack of coherent results is that the problem is intrinsically difficult, involving a host of phenomena (e.g. the origin of life) about which we know very little,...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

. It is argued that the problems of emergence and the architecture of complexity can be solved by analysing the self-organizing evolution of complex systems. A generalized, distributed variationselection model is proposed, in which internal and external aspects of selection and variation are contrasted. "Relational closure" is introduced as an inte...

Margaret Mead. Hosted by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, these became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics [11]. Through the 1950s, Cybernetic thinkers came to cohere with the school of General Systems Theory (GST), founded at about the same time by Ludwig von Bertalanffy [12, 33], as an attempt to build a unified science by uncovering the...

This paper argues that both the relativist and the pessimist critiques of the idea of progress are inadequate. Progress is defined as increase in global quality of life (QOL). Such QOL is intrinsically subjective, but not relative. It can be reliably measured through “life satisfaction”-type questions. The “World Database of Happiness” provides ext...

The Principia Cybernetica Project was created to develop an integrated philosophy or world view, based on the theories of evolution, self-organization, systems and cybernetics. Its conceptual network has been implemented as an extensive website. The present paper reviews the assumptions behind the project, focusing on its rationale, its philosophic...

. The symbol-based, correspondence epistemology used in AI is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics. The latter leads to bootstrapping knowledge representations, in which different parts of the cognitive system mutually support each other. Gordon Pask's entailment meshes and their implementation in the T...

. Collective intelligence is defined as the ability of a group to solve more problems than its individual members. It is argued that the obstacles created by individual cognitive limits and the difficulty of coordination can be overcome by using a collective mental map (CMM). A CMM is defined as an external memory with shared read/write access, tha...

The principle of natural selection is taken as a starting point for an analysis of evolutionary levels. Knowledge and values are conceived as vicarious selectors of actions from a repertoire. The concept of metasystem transition is derived from the law of requisite variety and the principle of hierarchy. It is defined as the increase of variety at...

This paper examines in how far Turchin's concept of metasystem transition, as the evolutionary integration and control of individual systems, can be applied to the development of social systems. Principles of collective evolution are reviewed, and different types of competitive or synergetic configurations are distinguished. Similar systems tend to...

Given that knowledge consists of finite models of an infinitely complex reality, how can we explain that it is still most of the time reliable? Survival in a variable environment requires an internal model whose complexity (variety) matches the complexity of the environment that is to be controlled. The reduction of the infinite complexity of the s...

INTRODUCTION: THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS AS A LANGUAGE PROBLEM With the renewed interest in the foundations of physics, it has become clear that the problems encountered in this domain are more than just questions of choosing an appropriate "philosophy" or "interpretation" concerning the fundamental theories. The traditional approach advocated a pr...

It is argued that in order to solve complex problems we need a new approach, which is neither reductionistic nor holistic, but based on the entanglement of distinction and connection, of disorder and order, thus defining a science of complexity. A model of complex evolution is proposed, based on distributed variation through recombination and mutat...

Dynamical representations used in physics are analysed from a "second order" viewpoint, as distinction systems constructed by an observer in interaction with an object.

Equal causes have equal effects" is reformulated by defining causality as a distinction-conserving relation. Unpredictable, respectively irreversible, processes are analysed as processes in which distinctions are created, respectively are destroyed. Different types of partially causal and pseudo-causal relations are examined. Time order is derived...