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Collective behavior: flocks, magnets, neurons and mathematics

The analysis of collective behavior is quickly becoming cross-disciplinary. I wrote a few years ago about a study that analyzed the coordination of starling flocks. That post was based on the work of Thierry Mora and William Bialek, presented in their paper Are Biological Systems Poised at Criticality. The paper was published in the Journal […]

Bees, art, consciousness and mathematics

Studies and insights into the nature of consciousness always get my attention. Inevitably I see mathematics in the discussion, tangentially or directly (as with Giulio Tononi’s qualia space). I’d like to outline, here, a particular train of thought that emerged after reading a couple of articles and a few papers.

The first of these, written […]

Inquiries

A short article in the April 16 issue of New Scientist reported on an applied soft computing paper that proposes an improvement on what’s known as ‘particle swarm optimization (PSO).

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is an optimization technique inspired by the social behavior of birds. Described as a simple and powerful algorithm, it can be […]

The end of science?

Paperback and electronic versions of John Horgan’s 1996 book, The End of Science, have recently been published by Basic Books. Horgan wrote a bit about how the text was received in 1996 on his weekly Scientific American blog. I read the book in 1996 and wrote to Horgan about the impact it had on me. […]

Interdisciplinarity, metabiology and creativity

A paper by Virginia Chaitin was recently brought to my attention. She is currently a Post-Doc at the Univeridade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, with research interests that include, among others, the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, and interdisciplinarity. The paper I just read, Metabiology, Interdisciplinarity and the Human Self-Image, focuses on the kind […]

A mathematical philosophy – a digital view

I’ve become fascinated with Gregory Chaitin’s exploration of randomness in computing and his impulse to bring these observations to bear on physical, mathematical, and biological theories. His work inevitably addresses epistemological questions – what it means to know, to comprehend – and leads him to move (as he says in a recent paper) in the […]

Pufferfish, bowerbirds and pragmatism

One of the reasons that the nature of mathematics has been such an enigma, is that we associate it with thought, and we tend to distinguish thought from the physical world. We do find mathematics in natural structures – some of these beautifully represented in a film you may have seen called Nature by the […]

Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms

My post appeared on the Scientific American Guest Blog this morning. Here’s the link:

Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms

Pigeons, rats, monkeys and real numbers

I’d like today to stay on the topic of mathematics from the cognitive science perspective, and in particular, to make available another set of interesting studies summarized by C. R. Gallistel, Rochel Gelman and Sara Cordes. The studies are described in their contribution to the book Evolution and Culture (edited by Stephen C. Levinson and […]

Lines on ochre and the roots of creativity

A nice article, focused on the origins of creativity, appears in the March 13 issue of Scientific American. Author, Heather Pringle, surveys research that seems to indicate that the human talent for innovation actually emerged over hundreds of thousands of years ago, before homo sapiens left Africa. This is contrary to the view held previously […]