Characteristics and Problems of the Gifted: neural propagation depth and (2009)
flow motivation as a model of intelligence and creativity
Felicitometrie: Geluk in een progressief evolutionair wereldbeeld (2009)
Schröder, Jantine, Theuns, Peter, Heylighen, Francis, Bernheim, Jan
Questions on happiness and well-being have preoccupied human thought from time immemorial. The emancipation of the theme from the sphere of morality and religion and its entry in science however is...
Steffen Staab, Francis Heylighen, Carlos Gershenson
I first encountered the principle of self-organization in my last year of high school, when our teacher had us give a series of talks on a high-level view of the works of Ilya Prigogine, Humberto...
Carlos Gershenson, Francis Heylighen, Centrum Leo Apostel
This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical...
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group, (2008)
Towards an anticipation control theory of mind ABSTRACT: xxxxxxx
Francis Heylighen, Centrum Leo, Apostel Vrije
a cybernetic perspective on the new science of the mind
Trust in Communication between Individuals: A Connectionist Approach (2008)
Frank Van Overwalle, Francis Heylighen, Margeret Heath
How is social information transmitted in a group? Several studies in social cognition documented that communication about groups typically tends to bolster stereotypes and shared beliefs about these...
Francis Heylighen, Margeret Heath, Frank Van
ABSTRACT: We propose a first step in the development of an integrated theory of the emergence of distributed cognition/extended mind. Distributed cognition is seen as the confluence of collective...
Steffen Staab, Francis Heylighen, Carlos Gershenson
I first encountered the principle of self-organization in my last year of high school, when our teacher had us give a series of talks on a high-level view of the works of Ilya Prigogine, Humberto...
A distributed model for tacit design knowledge exchange (2008)
Ann Heylighen, Francis Heylighen, Johan Bollen, Mathias Casaer
Abstract. The distributed cognition approach, and by extension the domain of social intelligence design, attempts to integrate three until recently separate realms: mind, society, and matter. The...
Title: Nodal Growth Algorithms for the Learning of Invariant Representations (2008)
Dirk Bollen, Francis Heylighen, Marko A. Rodriguez
Previous relevant activities of the research groups The Evolution, Complexity and Cognition (ECCO) group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel has investigated the selforganization...
UNCONSCIOUS CONTRIBUTIONS Applying a connectionist model to design knowledge exchange (2008)
Ann Heylighen, Francis Heylighen, Johan Bollen, Mathias Casaer
The distributed cognition approach, and by extension the domain of social intelligence design, attempts to integrate three until recently separate realms: mind, society, and matter. The field offers...
From Quantity to Quality of Life: r-K selection and human development (2008)
Francis Heylighen, Centrum Leo Apostel
ABSTRACT: Evolutionary fitness is defined as the number of an organism's offspring likely to survive, apparently privileging quantity, rather than quality, of life. However, models of population...
ABSTRACT. The "global brain " is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by the people of this planet together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect...
Global Progress I: empirical (2008)
Francis Heylighen, Jan Bernheim
evidence for ongoing increase in quality-of-life
Time Order Cybernetics, Francis Heylighen
Equal causes have equal effects" is reformulated by defining causality as a distinction-conserving relation. Unpredictable, respectively irreversible, processes are analysed as processes in...
Complex Adaptive Systems, and Artificial Life. Historical Roots (2007)
Cliff Joslyn, Francis Heylighen
Greek "kybernetes", or "steersman", it was defined as "the study of control and communication in the animal and machine". Over time, the meaning...
The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society (2007)
The organismic view of society is updated by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems. Global society can be seen as an autopoietic network of...
The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society (2007)
The organismic view of society is updated by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems. Global society can be seen as an autopoietic network of...
Francis Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, V. Cognition
Variety: a measure of the number of possible states or actions Entropy: a probabilistic measure of variety Self-organization: the spontaneous reduction of entropy in a dynamic system Control:...
2001a): Bootstrapping knowledge representations (2007)
from entailment meshes via semantic nets to learning webs
General Systems 18, p. 93-112. A Structural Language for the Foundations of Physics (2007)
It is argued that the difficulties to establish foundations for a unified physical theory are due to the predicative structure of the traditional scientific languages, whose descriptions reduce all...
ABSTRACT. The Principia Cybernetica Project was created to develop an
to be published in: Kybernetes 2001 (or 2000). (2007)
Bootstrapping Knowledge Representations, Francis Heylighen
The symbol-based, correspondence epistemology used in AI is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics.
Abstract: The explosive development of “free ” or “open source ” information goods contravenes the conventional wisdom that markets and commercial organizations are necessary to efficiently...
Phd Dissertation Presented, Carlos Gershenson, Promoters Prof, Dr. Bart D’hooghe, Prof Dr, Francis Heylighen, ...
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Phd Dissertation Presented, Carlos Gershenson, Promoters Prof, Dr. Bart D’hooghe, Prof Dr, Francis Heylighen, ...
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Complexity and Philosophy (2006)
Heylighen, Francis, Cilliers, Paul, Gershenson, Carlos
The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective...
Van Overwalle, Frank, Heylighen, Francis
A multi-agent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other, and as such is a network of networks. The individual...
A Nodal Growth Algorithm for Concept Discovery (2006)
ABSTRACT. This working paper proposes a new type of algorithm
Frank Van Overwalle, Francis Heylighen
A multiagent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other and, as such, is a network of networks. The individual...
How can we think the complex? (2004)
Gershenson, Carlos, Heylighen, Francis
In this chapter we want to provide philosophical tools for understanding and reasoning about complex systems. Classical thinking, which is taught at most schools and universities, has several...
Mediator Evolution: a general scenario for the origin of dynamical hierarchies (2004)
A general scenario is proposed to understand the evolutionary transitions that lead to the emergence of higher level systems through the assembly of independent components. First, multilevel...
ABSTRACT. It is argued that social and technological evolution is characterized by ephemeralization, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of all material, energetic and informational processes....
Protocol requirements for self-organizing artifacts: Towards an ambient intelligence (2004)
Carlos Gershenson, Francis Heylighen
We discuss which properties common-use artifacts should have to collaborate without human intervention. We conceive how devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, and home appliances, could be seamlessly...
When can we call a system self-organizing (2003)
Carlos Gershenson, Francis Heylighen, Centrum Leo Apostel
Abstract. We do not attempt to provide yet another definition of selforganization, but explore the conditions under which we can model a system as self-organizing. These involve the dynamics of...
Variation in the contextuality of language: An empirical measure (2002)
Francis Heylighen, Jean-marc Dewaele
Abstract: The concept of formality/contextuality is proposed as the most important dimension of variation between linguistic expressions. Formal communication conveys information explicitly, through...
Hebbian Algorithms for a Digital Library Recommendation System (2002)
Francis Heylighen, Johan Bollen
This paper proposes a set of algorithms to extract metadata about the documents in a digital library from the way these documents are used. Inspired by the learning of connections in the brain, the...
The global brain as a new utopia (2002)
The role of utopias Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire ” liberalism that has replaced them...
Mining Associative Meanings from the Web: from Word Disambiguation to the Global Brain (2001)
ABSTRACT. A general problem in all systems to process language (parsing, translating, etc.) is ambiguity: words have many, fuzzily defined meanings, and meanings shift with the context. This may be...
Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics (2001)
Francis Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn
I. Historical Development of Cybernetics....................................................... 1 A. Origins..................................................................................... 1 B....
Evolutionary Transitions: how do levels of complexity emerge (2000)
It is a common observation that complex systems have a nested or hierarchical structure: they consist of subsystems, which themselves consist of subsystems, and so on, until the simplest components...
Formality of language: Definition, measurement and behavioral determinants (1999)
Francis Heylighen, Jean-marc Dewaele
ABSTRACT. A new concept of formality of linguistic expressions is introduced and argued to be the most important dimension of variation between styles or registers. Formality is subdivided into...
The Science Of Self-Organization And Adaptivity (1999)
this paper by the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO), as a Senior Research Associate.
. Collective intelligence is defined as the ability of a group to solve more problems than its individual members. It is argued that the obstacles created by individual cognitive limits and the...
Advantages and Limitations of Formal Expression (1999)
. Testing the validity of knowledge requires formal expression of that knowledge. Formality of an expression is defined as the invariance, under changes of context, of the expression's meaning,...
What makes a meme successful? Selection criteria for cultural evolution (1998)
Meme replication is described as a 4-stage process, consisting of assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. The effect of different objective, subjective, intersubjective and...
A System to Restructure Hypertext Networks Into Valid User Models (1998)
Johan Bollen, Francis Heylighen, Leo Apostel
Introduction. 1.1. Information retrieval in the WWW. T he Internet and its associated WWW (World Wide Web) hypertext protocol have been experiencing an exponential growth during the past few years....
Objective, subjective and intersubjective selectors of knowledge (1997)
It is argued that the acceptance of knowledge in a community depends on several, approximately independent selection "criteria". The objective criteria are distinctiveness, invariance and...
The symbol-based, correspondence epistemology used in AI is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics. The latter leads to bootstrapping knowledge...
Johan Bollen, Francis Heylighen
Abstract In spite of these similarities, the WWW lacks some The World Wide Web has a number of striking similarities with other learning networks (natural or artificial). Its structure is that of a...
The World-Wide Web as a Super-Brain: from metaphor to model (1996)
Francis Heylighen, Johan Bollen
Abstract ticular has been characterized by the explosive develop-If society is viewed as a super-organism, communication networks play the role of its brain. This metaphor is developed into a model...
. A new conceptual framework is proposed to situate and integrate the parallel theories of Turchin, Powers, Campbell and Simon. A system is defined as a constraint on variety. This entails a 2 2 2...
Fitness as Default: the evolutionary basis of cognitive complexity reduction (1994)
Given that knowledge consists of finite models of an infinitely complex reality, how can we explain that it is still most of the time reliable? Survival in a variable environment requires an internal...
Fitness as Default: the evolutionary basis for cognitive complexity reduction (1994)
Given that knowledge consists of finite models of an infinitely complex reality, how can we explain that it is still most of the time reliable? Survival in a variable environment requires an internal...
Synopsys of the Principia Cybernetica Project (1993)
Cliff Joslyn, Francis Heylighen, Valentin Turchin
this article, who are responsible for implementation of the system and the collection and development of the material. Similar to a journal, it may rely on an Editorial Advisory Board, and other...
A Cognitive-Systemic Reconstruction of Maslow's Theory of Self-Actualization (1992)
Maslow's need hierarchy and model of the self-actualizing personality are reviewed and criticized. The definition of self-actualization is found to be confusing, and the gratification of all needs is...
Evolution, selfishness and cooperation (1992)
Abstract. It is argued that replicators evolving through natural selection on
A Cognitive-Systemic Reconstruction of Maslow's Theory of SelfActualization (1992)
Maslow's need hierarchy and model of the self-actualizing personality are reviewed and criticized. The definition of self-actualization is found to be confusing, and the gratification of all...
Coping with Complexity: concepts and principles for a support system (1991)
Introduction It does not need to be argued that life in society today is more complex than it ever was. Through the new media of communication and transport our horizon has widened radically, and we...
Cognitive Levels of Evolution: from pre-rational to meta-rational (1991)
The principle of natural selection is taken as a starting point for an analysis of evolutionary levels. Knowledge and values are conceived as vicarious selectors of actions from a repertoire. The...
Relational Closure: a mathematical concept for distinction-making and complexity analysis (1990)
Relational Closure Mathematical, Francis Heylighen
Complexity is defined as the combination of distinction and connection. Analysing a complex problem hence demands making the most adequate distinctions, taking into account connections existing...
Classical and Non-classical Representations in Physics II: Quantum Mechanics (1990)
The conceptual and formal structure of quantum mechanics is analysed from the point of view of the dynamics of distinctions, occcuring during the observation process. The Hilbert space formalism is...
Classical and Non-classical Representations in Physics (1990)
Dynamical representations used in physics are analysed from a "second order" viewpoint, as distinction systems constructed by an observer in interaction with an object.
Relational Closure: a mathematical concept for distinction-making and complexity analysis (1990)
ABSTRACT. Complexity is defined as the combination of distinction and connection. Analysing a complex problem hence demands making the most adequate distinctions, taking into account connections...
Self-Organization, Emergence and the Architecture of Complexity (1989)
ABSTRACT. It is argued that the problems of emergence and the architecture of complexity can be solved by analysing the self-organizing evolution of complex systems. A generalized, distributed...
Building a Science of Complexity (1988)
ABSTRACT. It is argued that in order to solve complex problems we need a new approach,
Design of a Hypermedia Interface Translating between Associative and Formal Representations
. It is argued that in order to efficiently tackle complex problems, user and support system should intimately interact, complementing each other's weaknesses. Strengths and limitations of human...