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.
An affordance is a relational property of both a System and its Environment.
An attractor defines a stable system (S1).
Causation happens between Systems demarcated by System Boundaries, horizontally as well as vertically.
A complex system is a Dynamical System that has the following attributes:Derived from Mitchell (2009) and Ladyman & Wiesner (2020).
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.
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 is descent with modification, that is change in the heritable characteristics of populations of individuals over successive generations.
An implicit Model is an evolved, embodied representation of a System’s Environment.
In its most common sense, innovation is the creation and introduction of new, redesigned, or substantially improved Products, processes or Systems.
Interoception is a Living System’s sense of of its internal state, parallel to how Perception is the sense of its Environment.
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.
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.
If we want to Prioritise abstraction over metaphor, the concept of a System Boundary needs to be stripped of its metaphorical content.
As a first approximation, a meme is System behaviour that can be copied.
A model is a simplified representation of a System.
The world is a hierarchy of systems.
Perception is the active sampling a System does of its Environment to validate its Model.
A System samples its Environment to build, update and use Models of it.
Rationalism à la Eliezer Yudkowsky has two connected fundamental flaws – an ontological and an epistemological one.
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.
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.
Systems "try to survive" and are differentially well equipped for that, depending in their specific Environment.
We make sense of the world in order to act in it.
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.
On an abstract level, Strategy is a set of System activities, structured in a process.
Every Strategy is based on an (implicit or explicit) assessment of the situation, that is the Model a System has of its Environment.
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.
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 or, more precisely, dissipative and autocatalytic structures that are precursors of autonomous, e.