Rodrick Wallace

Consciousness, crosstalk, and the mereological fallacy: An evolutionary perspective

The cross-sectional decontextualization afflicting contemporary neuroscience - attributing to the brain what is the province of the whole organism - is mirrored by an evolutionary decontextualization exceptionalizing consciousness. The living state is characterized by cognitive processes at all scales and levels of organization. Many can be associated with dual information sources that speak a language of behavior-in-context. Shifting global broadcasts analogous to consciousness, albeit far slower - wound healing, tumor control, immune function, gene expression, etc. - have emerged through repeated evolutionary exaptation of the crosstalk and noise inherent to all information transmission. These recruit unconscious cognitive modules into tunable arrays as needed to meet threats and opportunities across multiple frames of reference. The development is straightforward, based on the powerful necessary conditions imposed by the asymptotic limit theorems of communication theory, in the same sense that the Central Limit Theorem constrains sums of stochastic variates. Recognition of information as a form of free energy instantiated by physical processes that consume free energy permits analogs to phase transition and nonequilibrium thermodynamic arguments, leading to dynamic regression models useful for data analysis.

Serial Forced Displacement in American Cities, 1916–2010

Serial forced displacement has been defined as the repetitive, coercive upheaval of groups. In this essay, we examine the history of serial forced displacement in American cities due to federal, state, and local government policies. We propose that serial forced displacement sets up a dynamic process that includes an increase in interpersonal and structural violence, an inability to react in a timely fashion to patterns of threat or opportunity, and a cycle of fragmentation as a result of the first two. We present the history of the policies as they affected one urban neighborhood, Pittsburgh’s Hill District. We conclude by examining ways in which this problematic process might be addressed.

Adaptation, punctuation and information: a rate-distortion approach to non-cognitive 'learning plateaus' in evolutionary process.

We extend recent information-theoretic phase transition approaches to evolutionary and cognitive process via the Rate Distortion and Joint Asymptotic Equipartition Theorems, in the circumstance of interaction with a highly structured environment. This suggests that learning plateaus in cognitive systems and punctuated equilibria in evolutionary process are formally analogous, even though evolution is not cognitive. Extending arguments by Adami et al. (2000), we argue that adaptation is the process by which a distorted genetic image of a coherently structured environment is imposed upon a species.

Gene expression and its discontents

Gene expression and its discontents : , Gene expression and its discontents : , کتابخانه دیجیتال جندی شاپور اهواز

Collective consciousness and its pathologies: Understanding the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States

We address themes of distributed cognition by extending recent formal developments in the theory of individual consciousness. While single minds appear biologically limited to one dynamic structure of linked cognitive submodules instantiating consciousness, organizations, by contrast, can support several, sometimes many, such constructs simultaneously, although these usually operate relatively slowly. System behavior remains, however, constrained not only by culture, but by a developmental path dependence generated by organizational history, in the context of market selection pressures. Such highly parallel multitasking – essentially an institutional collective consciousness – while capable of reducing inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic malfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between workspaces and the possibility of pathological resilience – dysfunctional institutional lock-in. Consequently, organizations remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failures analogous to, but more complicated than, those afflicting individuals. Remediation is made difficult by the manner in which pathological externalities can write images of themselves onto both institutional function and corrective intervention. The perspective is applied to the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States.

A scientific open season: Comment on ‘A colorful origin for the genetic code: Information theory, statistical mechanics and the emergence of molecular codes’ by T. Tlusty

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Tlusty’s application of rate distortion and topological arguments to the genetic code [1–5], not only for insights regarding the code itself, but for possible applications to a broad class of biological phenomena associated with information transmission. Although not emphasized by the review, a rate distortion approach to the genetic code can be rigorously restated in more traditional information theory terms and generalized to nonequilibrium dynamics constrained by the availability of environmental metabolic free energy [6]. But the genetic code is only the first of a large nested set of biological information processes, characterized, in its second step, by protein production also constrained by rate distortion dynamics and metabolic free energy [7]. What may be of particular interest, however, is an application of Tlusty’s topological arguments to the ‘protein folding code’. As Kamtekar et al. [8] point out, experimental studies of natural proteins show how their structures are remarkably tolerant to amino acid substitution, but that tolerance is limited by a need to maintain the hydrophobicity of interior side chains. Thus, while the information needed to encode a particular protein fold is highly degenerate, this degeneracy is constrained by a requirement to control the locations of polar and nonpolar residues. This is the precise protein folding analog to Tlusty’s error network analysis of Section 3, and the coloring arguments should thus apply, in some measure, to protein folding as well. Normal irregular protein symmetries were first classified by Levitt and Chothia [9], following a visual study of polypeptide chain topologies in a limited dataset of globular proteins. Four classes were observed; all α-helicies; all β-sheets; α/β; and α + β , with the obvious interpretations. While this scheme strongly dominates observed irregular protein forms, heroic work by Chou and Cai [10] on a massive dataset recognizes three more symmetry equivalence classes; μ (multi-domain); σ (small protein); and ρ (peptide). Generalizing Tlusty’s Table 1 according to the genus γ of the underlying graph, that is, the number of holes, we obtain

Pathologies in functional connectivity, feedback control and robustness: a global workspace perspective on autism spectrum disorders

We study the background to problems of functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorders within the neurocognitive framework of the global workspace model. This we proceed to do by observing network irregularities detracting from that of a well-formed small world network architecture. This is discussed in terms of pathologies in functional connectivity and lack of central coherence disrupting inter-network communication thus impairing effective cognitive action. A typical coherence-connectivity measure as a by-product of various neuroimaging results is considered. This is related to a model of feedback control in which a coherence function in the frequency domain is modified by an environmentally determined interaction parameter. With respect to the latter, we discuss the stability question that in theory may counterbalance inessential metabolic costs and incoherence of processing. We suggest that factors such as local overconnectivity and global underconnectivity, along with acute over-expenditure of metabolic costs give rise to instability within the connective core of the workspace.

Expanding the modern synthesis II: Formal perspectives on the inherent role of niche construction in fitness

Expanding the modern synthesis requires elevating the role of interaction within and across various biological scales to the status of an evolutionary principle. One way to do this is to characterize genes, gene expression, and embedding environment as information sources linked by crosstalk, constrained by the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory (Wallace, 2010a). This produces an inherently interactive structure that escapes the straightjacket of mathematical population genetics and other replicator dynamics. Here we examine fitness from that larger perspective, finding it intimately intertwined with niche construction. Two complementary models are explored: niche construction as mediating the connection between environmental signals and gene expression, and as a means of tuning the channel for the transmission of genetic information in a noisy environment. These are different views of the same elephant, in a sense, seen as simplified projections down from a larger dynamic system.

Symmetric top behavior in the perturbed 2B2 state of NO2

Abstract The observed symmetric top properties of fluorescence from the perturbed visible 2 B 2 state of NO 2 are attributed to average behavior of high vibrationally excited perturbing ground-state levels. Such attribution precludes assignment of an equilibrium configuration to the perturbed 2 B 2 state, except as a weighted average, and explains the considerable variation in effective rotational constants from band to band. Examination is made of why such quasi-symmetric behavior does not appear in, for example, NH 2 .

Culture and the Trajectories of Developmental Pathology: Insights from Control and Information Theories

AbstractnCognition in living entities—and their social groupings or institutional artifacts—is necessarily as complicated as their embedding environments, which, for humans, includes a particularly rich cultural milieu. The asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories permit construction of a new class of empirical ‘regression-like’ statistical models for cognitive developmental processes, their dynamics, and modes of dysfunction. Such models may, as have their simpler analogs, prove useful in the study and re-mediation of cognitive failure at and across the scales and levels of organization that constitute and drive the phenomena of life. These new models particularly focus on the roles of sociocultural environment and stress, in a large sense, as both trigger for the failure of the regulation of bio-cognition and as ‘riverbanks’ determining the channels of pathology, with implications across life-course developmental trajectories. We examine the effects of an embedding cultural milieu and its socioeconomic implementations using the ‘lenses’ of metabolic optimization, control system theory, and an extension of symmetry-breaking appropriate to information systems. A central implication is that most, if not all, human developmental disorders are fundamentally culture-bound syndromes. This has deep implications for both individual treatment and public health policy.