Feel free to distribute this announcement to anyone who might be interested. The next seminar will exceptionaly be Friday 23rd.
You are hereby invited to the tenth seminar in our new interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition (ECCO) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be> : "Life": Compartmental Organization, Communication and Problem-Solving Activity. Arnold de Loof (KUL) Abstract: The primordial question in biology is: “What is Life?” In my opinion, answering this question is not so impossible as textbooks of General Biology usually suggest. I first asked the question: “What changes at the very moment that a given living entity passes from ‘still alive’ to just ‘not alive anymore’?” The answer is: “Communication activity at the highest level of compartmental organization is lost”. The next questions concern the nature and variability of biological compartments. Understanding the way Nature managed to construct about 16 levels of compartmental organization is essential to answer the above-cited primordial question. It took me quite a while to unravel nature’s system. It turned out to be based on very few, simple principles. Any compartment, whatever its nature is constructed according to the sender-receiver principle (= communicating compartment). Almost everybody overlooked the causal relationship between this type of organization and the difference making property between non-living and living matter, namely problem-solving activity. The essence is that any message released by a sender, whatever its nature, is written in coded form. This means that any receiver invariably faces the problem as to how the capture, decode, amplify and respond to the incoming message. In my opinion, “life” is a verb: it is the total sum of all acts of communication/problem-solving activity executed at moment t by a given compartment at all its levels of compartmental organization: L = ΣC in its simplest formulation. This definition enables some novel insights into the theory of evolution, in particular with the ‘status’ of selection as the driving force of evolution. When? Next Friday 23rd March, 2-4 pm. Where? The seminar room is B 0.036 (building B, level 0, close to the human sciences computer rooms), on the VUB Campus Etterbeek. Coffee and drinks are available. Free entrance: everybody welcome! _____ Seminar Program for the coming weeks: Date Speaker Topic More 28 Mar Mehmet Tezcan A complex systems critique to mainstream IR theory: A case study of foreign policy integration in Europe as a complex system Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1867> 11 Apr Klaas Chielens The Status of Memetics as a Science: update Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/node/2154> (the discussion link links to the abstract). _____ See and discuss the past seminars! Date Speaker Topic More 10 Jan Carlos Gershenson Towards Self-organizing Bureaucracies Presentation <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ECCO/Seminars/SOBs-ECCO.pdf> Paper <http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0603045> Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1657> 17 Jan Francis Heylighen Characteristics and Problems of the Gifted: neural propagation depth and flow motivation as a model of intelligence and creativity Presentation <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ECCO/Seminars/Giftednessseminar.pdf> <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ECCO/Seminars/Giftednessseminar.pdf> Paper Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1617> 25 Jan Jan Bernheim A Progressive Evolutionary Worldview Presentation <http://pcp.vub.ac.be/ECCO/Seminars/Bernheim2007.ppt> Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1825> 31 Jan Clément Vidal A Minimal Philosophical Agenda. Worldview Construction as a Philosophical Method Presentation <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/%7Eclement/seminars2007/ecco-clem.ppt> Paper <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/%7Eclement/vidal2007-wp.pdf> Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1660> 7 Feb Mixel Kiemen Complex-Adaptive information processing Presentation <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1661> Discussion 14 Feb Wim Christiaens Apostel's Concept of Causality: Defining Being by Folding "logic" on "life" Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1662> 21 Feb Dirk Kenis Knowledge Management in Virtual Communities: opportunities for Agile Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) Presentation <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/%7Eclement/seminars2007/ecco-kenis.pps> Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1663> 28 Feb Erden Göktepe Mediating International Agents: a Question of Efficiency Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1664> Postponed! Karin Verelst Deixis and Truth from Aristotle to Poincaré Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/node/2152> 14 Mar Helen De Cruz Universal Selection Theory and the Evolution of Mathematics Discussion <http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1659> More informations about the ECCO seminars: http://www.knosos.be/?q=node/1666 (PDF <http://www.knosos.be/system/files/ecco_seminars_2007_3.pdf> program with abstracts). Best regards, Clément Vidal. _________________________________ http://clement.vidal.philosophons.com <http://clement.vidal.philosophons.com/> Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group, Free University of Brussels. Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium. +32 (0) 2 640 67 37
