Environment

#concept #stub29 mentions

The context of a System from which it is separated by a System Boundary.

Complex Systems interact interact with their environment to exchange energy, entropy, and information in order to stay in a Non-equilibrium Steady State.

A system and its environment share Affordances – features of the environment that are salient for the system in specific ways.

Affordance

An affordance is a relational property of both a System and its Environment.

Affordances Contribute to Attractors

An attractor defines a stable system (S1).

Causal Emergence

Causation happens between Systems demarcated by System Boundaries, horizontally as well as vertically.

Complex System

A complex system is a Dynamical System that has the following attributes:Derived from Mitchell (2009) and Ladyman & Wiesner (2020).

Emotion

Contrary to the conventional view that they are hard-wired into our brain and different from and often at odds with our Rationality, emotions are constructed from the Interoception of bodily Feelings, interpreted in the light of experience and Culture: They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever Environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment.

Every System Is a Model of Its Environment

For a System to have an Implicit Model means embodying “statistical regularities of its world in its physical and functional composition”, which reduces surprise about how its world behaves and helps the system stay in stable states.

Evolution

Evolution is descent with modification, that is change in the heritable characteristics of populations of individuals over successive generations.

Implicit Model

An implicit Model is an evolved, embodied representation of a System’s Environment.

Innovation

In its most common sense, innovation is the creation and introduction of new, redesigned, or substantially improved Products, processes or Systems.

Interoception

Interoception is a Living System’s sense of of its internal state, parallel to how Perception is the sense of its Environment.

Irrational Behaviour Is Adaptive in Stochastic Environments

Behavioural Dispositions that are individually irrational in the current Environment (due to either random deviation or maladaptation) can improve the chances of a population to adapt to disruptive changes.

Living System

A living system is a Complex System that actively and autonomously upholds its System Boundary by exchanging energy and information with its Environment, thus “importing” order and staying in a Non-equilibrium Steady State.

Markov Blanket

If we want to Prioritise abstraction over metaphor, the concept of a System Boundary needs to be stripped of its metaphorical content.

Meme

As a first approximation, a meme is System behaviour that can be copied.

Model

A model is a simplified representation of a System.

Move up and Down in the System Hierarchy

The world is a hierarchy of systems.

Perception

Perception is the active sampling a System does of its Environment to validate its Model.

Prioritise Exploration Over Exploitation

A System samples its Environment to build, update and use Models of it.

Rationalism Is Not Rational

Rationalism à la Eliezer Yudkowsky has two connected fundamental flaws – an ontological and an epistemological one.

Rationality Is an Evolved Strategy

It is a fact about our social and epistemic lives that Rationality is a norm that guides our thinking about beliefs and hypotheses; it is a Concept we use to direct thinking and discourse.

Rationality

A behaviour and by extension a Behavioural Disposition is instrumentally rational iff it maximises the subjective probability for a System to achieve a certain goal given an Environment and the available Knowledge about it.

Selection

Systems "try to survive" and are differentially well equipped for that, depending in their specific Environment.

Sensemaking

We make sense of the world in order to act in it.

Strategy Is a Learning Process

Strategy is de facto always an iterative learning process, even if this is often not made explicit and information gaps between iterations make it less effective and efficient.

Strategy Is a Pattern of Actions

On an abstract level, Strategy is a set of System activities, structured in a process.

Strategy Is Based on Models

Every Strategy is based on an (implicit or explicit) assessment of the situation, that is the Model a System has of its Environment.

Strategy

Strategy is a set of choices about the use of a System‘s resources to maximise its chances to fulfil its Purpose in a given Environment.

System Boundary

A System boundary is topologically defined as the set of system components which have connections both to other system elements and to its Environment.

Systems Emerge Due to Constraints

Systems or, more precisely, dissipative and autocatalytic structures that are precursors of autonomous, e.