Our plans for the annual board meeting of PCP in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
have become more concrete. Johan Bollen, Alex Riegler, Cliff Joslyn and
Francis Heylighen will meet during the period August 1 to 20, and will be
joined by Valentin Turchin from August 9. The accompanying workshop on
"Emergent Semantic and Computational Processes in Distributed Information
Systems" (see http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~joslyn/pcp/workshop98.html) on August
10-11 is now taking concrete shape, with most abstracts available on the
web. This workshop wil hopefully be the start for a fruitful collaboration
between PCP and the "Symbiotic Intelligence Project"
(http://ishi.lanl.gov/symintel.html), which groups researchers from Los
Alamos National Laboratory and Santa Fe Institute. The subject would be the
application of self-organizing systems to support collective intelligence
on the web.
The Brussels PCP group has received another extensive visit, this time by
Liane Gabora, an artificial life/memetics researcher from UCLA, and member
of the editorial board of the Journal of Memetics. There is a good chance
that she will join us to do research at the Center "Leo Apostel" (CLEA) on
the emergence of culture during evolution. Liane has developed an
"autocatalytic" model for the emergence of culture or thought, inspired by
Stuart Kauffman's work on the origin of life and sparse distributed memory
models of cognition. This fits in both with PCP's theory of metasystem
transitions, and CLEA's project on "transitions between hard and soft
layers of reality". More info on her work can be found at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/seminars/Gabora.txt . A recent paper is
available at http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1997/vol1/gabora_l.html
Most papers to be presented at the symposium on memetics, organized by PCP
and the Journal of Memetics, are now available on the web:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMETSY.html. The symposium will take place for
two and a half days, from August 26 (afternoon) to August 28. The latest
issue (June) of the Journal of Memetics has been published at
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/index.html
The project on progress in global quality of life which we submitted was
unfortunately not accepted by the funding agency. Neither was Alex
Riegler's application for a 3 year Postdoc research contract at CLEA. We'll
have to try again next year, or find alternative sources of funding. Johan
Bollen has carried out extensive psychological experiments, in
collaboration with people from the Catholic University of Leuven, to test
the basic assumptions that underly our "learning web" methodology
(http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LEARNWEB.html). At first sights, the results seem
positive, but the data need much further processing.
After a year of relatively low level activity, the discussions on our
PRNCYB-L mailing list have become very intensive again. Especially the
topics of "non-physical experience", "mind and body", "reductionism, holism
and complexity" and "will and free will" have produced dozens of messages
each. John J. Kineman is presently exploring the possibility to create a
two-way gateway between the PRNCYB-L emailing list, and a HyperNews
discussion system on the web, that could be used also by non-PRNCYB
subscribers. HyperNews was originally developed by another PRNCYB member,
Daniel LaLiberte. You can try out a first prototype at
http://HyperNews.ngdc.noaa.gov/HyperNews/get/ecosci/1.html
WHAT'S NEW IN PCP WEB
The following nodes in Principia Cybernetica Web have undergone substantive
editing, or have been newly added. Note especially the whole series of new
papers. All documents are available via http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/RECENT.html
* Jun 29, 1998: Links on Future Development (links added)
* Jun 19, 1998: History of the Principia Cybernetica Project (updated)
* Jun 19, 1998: PCP-news digest (new!)
* Jun 17, 1998: Searchable Index (Altavista search improved)
* June 16, 1998: several new papers have become available: (new!)
* * Francis Heylighen & Jan Bernheim: "Global Progress: an empirical
analysis and an evolutionary framework" (Working paper for the CLEA study
group "Evolution and Progress")
* * Cliff Joslyn: "Are Life and Meaning Coextensive?", in: Evolutionary
Systems, ed. G. van de Vijvers, Kluwer Academic Publishers, in press.
* * Luis Rocha and Cliff Joslyn: "Simulations of Evolving Embodied
Semiosis", In: Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on Virtual Worlds and
Simulation 1998. Landauer C. and K.L. Bellman (Eds). The Society for
Computer Simulation International, pp. 233-238.
* * Johan Bollen & Francis Heylighen: "A connectionist system to
restructure hypertext networks into valid user models", submitted to: New
Review of HyperMedia
* * several papers to be presented at the symposium on Memetics
* Jun 5, 1998: Basic References on the Global Brain / Superorganism (links
added)
* June 2, 1998: What makes a Meme Successful?, a short paper by F.
Heylighen for the Memetics Symposium (new!)
* May 25, 1998: About Francis Heylighen (updated)
* May 19, 1998: Heylighen F. (1988): "Formulating the Problem of
Problem-Formulation", in: Cybernetics and Systems '88, Trappl R. (ed.),
(Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht), p. 949-957 (new!)
* May 19, 1998: Problem-solving (new!)
* May 19, 1998: Finding words through spreading activation (program
functions again)
* May 8, 1998: Semiotic Terms (links added)
* May 8, 1998: Links on Computer Interfaces and the Web (links added)
DISCUSSIONS ON PRNCYB-L
The following topics were announced or discussed on the PRNCYB-L mailing
list (see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/mail.html). The full text of all
original messages and replies is available via the PRNCYB-L archive:
http://www.fmb.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce/PRNCYB-L/thread.html
* Experience, awareness, consciousness, ... - Mario Vaneechoutte
* Reducionism, Hollism and Complexity - Ricardo Ribeiro Gudwin
* Will and free will - Mario Vaneechoutte
* Cybernetics99 (fwd) - Cliff Joslyn
* new website at http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics - Felix Geyer
* 1998 European Systems School [fwd] - Francis Heylighen
* Conf.- Closure: Emergent Organizations & Dynamics [fwd] - Francis Heylighen
* Non Physical Experience - Norman K. McPhail
* pask/agree to disagree - Arno L. Goudsmit
* umwelt - Arno L. Goudsmit
* Robot vs. human slaves - Cliff Joslyn
* Webmind project [fwd] - Francis Heylighen
* Umwelt , Environment, Ecoment? - Jerry LR Chandler
* semantic closure and open-ended evolution - Alexei Sharov
* mind and body - Walter Fritz
* VWSIM 99 CALL FOR PAPERS (fwd) - Cliff Joslyn
* New member: Attila Csanyi - Cliff Joslyn
* New member: Alexander Brown - Cliff Joslyn
* New memberL Norman McPhail - Cliff Joslyn
* New member: Brian Dolan - Cliff Joslyn
* New member: Eduardo Blasina - Cliff Joslyn
* New member: Prof. Jan Sarnovsky - Cliff Joslyn
* New Journal: Emergence [fwd] - Francis Heylighen
* Comments please: Capturing Social Embeddedness - a constructivist
approach- Bruce Edmonds
* causation - John J. Kineman
UNSUBSCRIBING
If you want to unsubscribe from this mailing list, use the form at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PCPNSUBS.html or send the following one line
message to the address Majordomo@listserv.vub.ac.be
unsubscribe pcp-news
_________________________________________________________________________
Francis Heylighen <fheyligh@vub.ac.be> -- Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels, Krijgskundestr. 33, 1160 Brussels, Belgium
tel +32-2-6442677; fax +32-2-6440744; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html