Santa Fe Institute

Workshop

July 28, 2014 - July 30, 2014
9:00 AM

A living organism is a reflection of its past environment: When it is able to sense environmental regularities over evolutionary or developmental time, an organism and its behavior can be viewed as a hypothesis about environmental states that it will encounter in the future. In viewing the organism and its behavior as a prediction, we can recast adaptation and cognition as two parts of a broader process of inductive inference. Furthermore, when aggregates of adaptive organisms generate regularities at new temporal and spatial scales, this may allow for collective cognition: The new scales provide structure for further interactions and make them more predictable, reducing social uncertainty and facilitating adaptation at the aggregate level.   In this workshop, we will consider two broad questions:  (1) How can adaptation and cognition be quantitatively understood in terms of statistical inference and information theory? (2) Can we use such a quantitative framework to understand coordinated aggregates, explaining how components with only partially overlapping interests may join to form a more predictive whole? Is there any insight to be gained from thinking about collective behavior as a computation?

SFI Host: Jessica Flack, Bryan Daniels, Chris Ellison, and Philip Poon

• * SFI community lectures are free, open, & accessible to the public.
• * Seminars & colloquia are geared for scientists but free & open to the interested public.
• * All other SFI events are by invitation only.
• * Note: We are unable to accommodate members of the public for SFI's limited lunch service; you're welcome to bring your own.