Please distribute to others who may be interested...
You are hereby invited to a seminar in our sixth
interdisciplinary
<http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108>series on
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition (ECCO)
Time:
Thursday, Oct. 8, 2-5 pm.
Place:
Room B 0.036 (building B, level 0, close to the
human sciences computer rooms), on the
<http://www.vub.ac.be/english/infoabout/campuses/index.html>VUB
Campus Etterbeek (Brussels, Belgium), in
collaboration with MOSI. Coffee and drinks are
available. Free entrance: everybody welcome!
Life is an Adventure!
An evolutionary-cybernetic unification of narrative and scientific worldviews
<http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html>Francis Heylighen
(ECCO/CLEA, VUB)
The worldview of science is based on laws. Laws
are supposed to be certain, independent of time,
context or agent. The worldview found
in literature, myth and religion, on the other
hand, is based on stories. These relate a
temporal sequence of actions taking place in a
particular context with an uncertain outcome.
While laws have the advantage of apparent
universality and objectivity, stories are more
intuitive and easier to assimilate and remember.
This talk argues that recent insights in the
theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex
adaptive systems [Heylighen, 2008] can help us to
bridge scientific and narrative
perspectives. These approaches are founded on the
concept of agent, an autonomous system that acts
on its environment in order to achieve its goals.
Given the inevitable uncertainties that a complex
environment proposes, an agent's course of action
can be conceived as an adventure. In its quest
towards its goal(s), the agent has to navigate
through a landscape of dangers, opportunities and
surprises, encountering varying degrees of
prospect and mystery. The agent can be seen to
play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge
and exploration that is very similar to the
"monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies
all myths, legends and fairy tales according to
[Campbell, 1949].
References
Campbell, J. (1949): The hero with a thousand
faces. Princeton University Press.
Heylighen F.
(2008): <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/ELIS-complexity.pdf>Complexity
and Self-organization, in: Encyclopedia
of Library and Information Sciences, eds. M. J.
Bates & M. N. Maack (Taylor & Francis)
Heylighen F. (2009) Action, adventure and
mystery: towards a unification of scientific and
narrative perspectives (draft ECCO Working paper,
available on request)
Speaker bio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Heylighen
Upcoming Seminars
22 Oct.
Clément Vidal (VUB):
Metaphilosophical criteria for worldview comparison
29 Oct.
Jon Echanove (EASE):
Leadership and human experience
5 Nov.
David R. Weinbaum (Tel Aviv Univ.):
Thoughts on the future of human evolution
12 Nov.
Petter Braathen (Memetix, Oslo):
How do social systems relate to paradox?
19 Nov. (postponed from Sep. 24)
Hector Zenil (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Is algorithmic the nature of Nature?
Dec. 1 or 2
Solomon Marcus (Rumanian Academy of Sciences)
Mistakes and failures as a source of creativity
More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108
--
Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
"... a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention" - Herbert A. Simon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon>
