David Chalmers talk on simulation and the singularity

A very good and highly entertaining talk by David Chalmers on dealing with the superintelligence to come.

Here

Alan Baker paper on simulation and emergence

In this month’s  Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation the philosopher Alan Baker has a good paper on simulation and emergence which clarifies a couple of important points in the the existing literature:

Simulation-Based Definitions of Emergence

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

One approach to characterizing the elusive notion of emergence is to define that a property is emergent if and only if its presence can be derived but only by simulation. In this paper I investigate the pros and cons of this approach, focusing in particular on whether an appropriately distinct boundary can be drawn between simulation-based and non-simulation-based methods. I also examine the implications of this definition for the epistemological role of emergent properties in prediction and in explanation.

The full paper is here

Review of Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology

Paco and I are really happy to read this review by Douglas Candland from this month’s PsycCritiques: Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books (American Psychological Association)

Beautiful genetic algorithm application about 2 minutes into this video

Hat tip to Reddit.  About two minutes into the video from the BBC series The Secret Life of Chaos.  This is truly a wonderful application of a genetic algorithm.

Daniel Dennett: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers

Just signed a contract with Routledge to edit a big collection of the best scholarship (articles, bits of books, maybe web stuff) published on Dan’s philosophy over the past 40 years. This will be a fun project for me. Four volumes on different aspects of his stuff. Scheduled for release in 2012.

I’ll teach a course on Dennett this summer to help me get organized and to get back into his more recent work.

Philosophy and Complexity

As the deadline draws near for submission to the European Complex Systems Society meeting in September, interested philosophers should know that selected papers from the Philosophy of Science section will be included in a special issue of Foundations of Science on philosophy and complexity.  You can send a six page paper by the Feb 15 deadline and then revise your paper for the special issue.  You can send your paper via this url

Computational Social Science Articles List/Reference Volume

Nigel Gilbert has compiled a reference book composed of papers in computational social science.  I think that the list gives a good sense of the shape of the field and was very proud to see that ‘Computational Models of Emergent Properties’ is included.   More details here.

ECCS 2010 – European Conference on Complex Systems

2010’s European Conference on Complex Systems is being organized by Jorge Louca in Lisbon. The call for papers includes a call for papers in philosophy of science. – submissions deadline February 15, 2010

See here

and

here

This should be a good venue for philosophers interested in complex systems

Social Network Software

David Rodrigues has a useful set of links for social network software here

This will be useful for participants in the winter school.

Winter School 2010

The 2nd Winter School in Complexity Sciences will take place at the Lisbon University Institute, on January 11-15, 2010. The programme of this edition is organized around the subject “Formal approaches for the representation and analysis of social network structures”.

The Winter School is organised in the context of the International Doctoral and Master Programs in Complexity Sciences proposed by the Lisbon University Institute and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. The Winter School is also supported by the ASSYST Coordination Action and the Complex Systems Society. The Winter School will propose a state-of-the-art of the new theories, methodologies and algorithmic proposals to the study of topological features of complex networks.

Target audience

The sessions are intended for faculty, graduate students, master and PhD students, researchers and others who would like to gain an understanding of the new formal approaches to the representation and interpretation of network structures.

http://complexsystemsstudies.eu/winterschool