Cognition: from Physiology to Sociology and Back-Juniper Publishers
Juniper Publishers-Social Sciences
Opinion
The recent literature on cognition shows that
different disciplines, from biology to psychology, addressing the
unsettled problem of information processing, are converging towards a
widely shared conjecture: intelligence is the result of a process of
self-organization. Interdisciplinary unification is expected to lead to a
mathematical model establishing a bridge between life evolution and
sociology. Preliminary results show that genuinely spontaneous
organization generates intelligent crucial events, namely changes of
flying direction adapting the self-organizing society to the
environment. Moving from biology to cultural anthropology makes us
realize that the organization process may be affected by cognition
killing top-down influences. The lack of intelligence has the effect of
generating organization collapses. All this suggests that the most
benecial forms of management are horizontal rather than vertical.
The cognition issue is of central importance for
biology. Life evolution is closely connected to information processing
[1] and life and consciousness, very difficult to explain using ordinary
physics [2], are affording the stimulus for a new cosmological theory
[2]. The new theory, inspired to life evolution, should assume that the
universe evolves in time and the new theoretical perspective should turn
the origins of stars, life and consciousness from being extremely
improbable, according to the current physics, into the emergent
processes that are observed and studied.
Quantum mechanics, although remaining at the level of
strange simplicity [3], is exerting a strong influence on researchers
looking for the origin of consciousness [4,5], which is assumed to be
related to quantum mechanical coherence. This assumption, however, may
violate the attractive arguments of black holes scientists that the
unification of gravity and quantum mechanics requires quantum mechanical
decoherence rather than coherence. Tegmark [6] shows that quantum
mechanical decoherence is so fast that we must study the brain using
classical physics.
In conclusion, we are inclined to adopt a different
interpretation to explain the emergence of cognition. A widely accepted
argument is that cognitive systems, including the brain, are systems at
criticality [7,8]. Criticality is the edge of phase transition, from a
set of units with independent random dynamics to a condition of
organization. The ordinary phase transitions are generated by assigning
to a control parameter, for instance temperature, a critical value. The
processes leading to cognition must be spontaneous, thereby involving
the idea of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) [9], proposed in 1988.
This theory focuses on the generation of avalanches
with a size distribution density described by an inverse power law. More
recently another form of spontaneous organization was proposed [10],
called Self-Organized Temporal Criticality (SOTC), which establishes a
more transparent connection with cognition. This is so because SOTC
generates crucial events, which can be interpreted as changes of flying
direction, allowing the self-organizing system to adapt to its
environment. In fact, the complexity of crucial events is defined by the
time distance between two consecutive events, which is described by an
inverse power law distribution. Thus, with SOTC complexity is temporal
rather than related to the intensity of fluctuations. Using the concepts
of Kolmogorov complexity, it is possible to prove that crucial events
convey meaningful information, this being a clear sign of cognition
[11].
Difficult tasks and diseases have the effect of
turning the crucial events into ordinary random processes, corresponding
to moving the system from the critical to subcritical condition [8],
thereby affording new methods for diagnosis and medical therapies. This
is where a surprising connection with sociology and management emerges.
In fact, while the emergence of cognition is biological, sociology
requires that we move from biology to anthropology interpreted as an
extension of the Darwin life evolution. This leads us to move from the
bottom-up processes to top-down forms of organization. It is shown [12]
that the top-down approach to
organization makes the healthy crucial events of SOTC become the
source of true organization collapses.
This observation has a great importance for the management
issue. In fact, a top-down organization is associated to a
hierarchical structure, while the bottom-up organization is
realized through horizontal structures. Based on Ref [12] I
conclude that the horizontal is more efficient than the vertical
approach to organization. This is in line with the sociology
researchers of Ref [13]. These authors notice that since the mid-
1970s, international competition has forced U.S. businesses
to look for the best way to achieve and maintain a competitive
position. Their 1998 book prove that the Self-Managed Work
Teams (SMWT) are the most efficient forms of organization to
achieve high performance at the minimal cost. Examples of the
efficiency of the success of self-management are given by a team of
performing musicians adopting the SMWT prescription [14] and
by the US rms successfully adopting self-management [15].
I believe that SOTC will establish a bridge between the biological
origin of cognition and the most efficient form of management,
according important contributions to the increasingly popular
issue of how to anticipate the future [15]. This debate is deeply
related to neuroscience [16], thereby moving me back from social
management to the origin of cognition.
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