New papers (and book chapter) out! (2022-09-02)
The Pandemic Experience Survey II: A Second Corpus of Subject Reports of Life Under Social Restrictions During COVID-19 in the UK, Japan, and Mexico
The second in a series of reports on subjective experiences of life under social restrictions during COVID-19 in Japan, the UK and Mexico has been released. The report details data we collected in a follow-up survey a year after our previous one. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people's experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people's reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods.
Enacting Ontological Design: A vocabulary of change from organisms to organizations
A preprint of Mark James's Enacting Ontological Design chapter has just gone up online. In it the frameworks of enactive cognitive science (e.g., Baran- diaran 2008, 2017; Di Paolo et al. 2018) and ontological design, particularly the work of Tony Fry (e.g., 2009), are synthesized to give a general account of how humans act toward change at multiple scales. The chapter will feature in the forthcoming text Organizational Cognition: The Theory of Social Organizing. ed. Gahrn-Anderson, R., Cowley, S. J., and Secchi, D.
The thermodynamics of reproduction constrain species ranking dynamics and diversity
Diving into the dynamics of ranking and thermodynamics of replication. Did we uncover a constraint on phylogenetic diversity limiting potential uniqueness?
Irruption Theory: A Realist Framework for the Efficacy of Conscious Agency
Here it finally is: Irruption Theory. Dr. Froese has been maturing these ideas about consciousness his whole career, and now they are out as a fresh pre-print. There is no turning back - his thinking has set course to new horizons!
What is ‘the Secret of Life’? The Mind-Body Problem in Čapek’s Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.)
Dr. Froese contributed to Jitka Cejkova's MIT Press volume celebrating the visionary Czech play that introduced the word “robot” to the world a century ago. Check it out for a playful preview of the irruption theory of consciousness.