Collective Consciousness and its Discontents

Fullilove, Mindy T.; Wallace, Rodrick

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-76765-9

Cited by 38 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…This includes both a form of niche construction (Wallace, 2010), and distributed cognitive institutions acting on various scales (Wallace and Fullilove, 2008). This is most easily done by invoking the set of interacting information sources dual to cognitive process via network information theory (e.g., El Gamal and Kim, 2010, p.2-26): Given a basic set of such dual information sources, say (X 1 , ..., X k ), that can be partitioned into two ordered sets, say X(J ) and X(J ), then the splitting criterion of the larger system becomes H(X(J )|X(J )).…”

Section: Physiological Cognition and Culture Intertwinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is most easily done by invoking the set of interacting information sources dual to cognitive process via network information theory (e.g., El Gamal and Kim, 2010, p.2-26): Given a basic set of such dual information sources, say (X 1 , ..., X k ), that can be partitioned into two ordered sets, say X(J ) and X(J ), then the splitting criterion of the larger system becomes H(X(J )|X(J )). Generalization to three or more such ordered sets seems direct, and leads to a theory of collective consciousness in which different global workspaces act at different scales of size and time (Wallace and Fullilove, 2008).…”

Section: Physiological Cognition and Culture Intertwinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, humans, whose overall genetic structure is more uniform than that of chimpanzee populations, do not communicate well across the many different cultural modes. Wallace and Fullilove (2008) argue that stabilizing complex systems of interacting cognitive institutions is exceedingly difficult, suggesting that the interpenetration of individual physiological dynamics with both embedding institutional and cultural structures, and their historical trajectories, can become a powerful determinant of health and illness at all levels of analysis.…”

Section: Physiological Cognition and Culture Intertwinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health promotion

Wallace

2013

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A survey of the cultural psychology and related literatures suggests that Western biomedicine's fascination with atomistic, individual-oriented, interventions is a cultural artifact that may have little consonance with complex, subtle, multiscale, multilevel, social, ecological, or biological realities. Other cultural traditions may, in fact, view atomistic strategies as inherently unreal. A contrary perspective -similar to that of health promotion -implies that the most effective medical or public health interventions must be analogously patterned across scale and level of organization: 'magic strategies' will almost always be synergistically, and often emergently, more effective than 'magic bullets'. The result can be formally derived in a relatively straightforward manner using an adaptation of the Black-Scholes econometric model applied to the metabolic cost of bioregulation under uncertainty. Multifactorial interventions focused at the human 'keystone' ecosystem level of mesoscale social and geographic groupings may be particularly effective.The analysis indicates that there is unlikely to be much in the way of 'simple' chronic disease. That is, serious comorbidity is usually inevitable, and may often be a consequence of therapeutic intervention itself. Study suggests that pairing of medical and prevention strategies with appropriate mesoscale neighborhood/social network interventions would:(1) Damp down unwanted treatment side effects.(2) Make the therapeutic alliance between practitioner and patient more effective. (3) Improve patient compliance. (4) Enhance placebo effect.(5) In the context of real stress reduction, synergistically improve the actual biological impacts of medical interventions or prevention strategies.Much of this is well-known and has been repeatedly described across a vast array of public health and health policy literatures, but the results will be developed here from first principles, involving the interaction of cognitive and environmental phenomena across both scale and levels of organization, echoing something of the pioneering insights of Maturana and Varela. With some added complexity, the analysis can be extended to developmental trajectories, in a large sense, through a kind v PeerJ PrePrints | https://peerj.com/preprints/8v2/ | v2 received: 21

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Section: Physiological Cognition and Culture Intertwinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Physiological Cognition and Culture Intertwinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Physiological Cognition and Culture Intertwinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health promotion

Wallace

2013

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“…In higher organisms, which must generally function under real-time constraints, elaborate secondary back-up systems have evolved to take over behavioral control under such conditions. These typically range across basic emotional, as well as hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, responses (e.g., Wallace, 2005a, 2012, 2013; Wallace and Fullilove, 2008). Dysfunctions of these systems are implicated across a vast spectrum of common, and usually comorbid, mental and physical disorders (e.g., Wallace, 2005a, b; Wallace and Wallace, 2010, 2013).…”

Section: Canonical Failure Modesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodied cognition, embodied regulation, and the Data Rate Theorem

Wallace¹

2013

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The Data Rate Theorem carries deep implications for theories of embodied cognition, extensions providing a spectrum of necessary conditions dynamic statistical models useful in empirical studies. A large deviations argument, however, implies that the regulation and stabilization of such systems is itself an interpenetrating phenomenon necessarily convoluted with embodied cognition. For humans, the central regulatory role of culture has long been known. Although a groundstate collapse analogous to generalized anxiety appears ubiquitous to such systems, lack of cultural modulation in realtime automatons or distributed cognition man-machine 'cockpits' makes them subject to a pathology under which 'all possible targets are enemies'.

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“…In higher organisms, which must generally function under realtime constraints, elaborate secondary back-up systems have evolved to take over behavioral control under such conditions. These typically range across basic emotional, as well as hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and hypothalamicpituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, responses (e.g., Wallace, 2005aWallace, , 2012Wallace, , 2013Wallace and Fullilove, 2008). Dysfunctions of these systems are implicated across a vast spectrum of common, and usually comorbid, mental and physical disorders (e.g., Wallace, 2005a, b;Wallace, 2010, 2013).…”

Section: A Canonical Failure Modementioning

confidence: 99%

Embodied cognition, embodied regulation, and the Data Rate Theorem

Wallace

2014

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The Data Rate Theorem that establishes a formal linkage between linear control theory and information theory carries deep implications for the design of biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA), and for the more general study of embodied cognition. For example, modest extensions of the theorem provide a spectrum of necessary conditions dynamic statistical models that will be useful in empirical studies. A large deviations argument, however, suggests that the stabilization of such systems is itself an interpenetrating dynamic process necessarily convoluted with embodied cognition. As our experience with mental disorders and chronic disease implies, evolutionary process has had only modest success in the regulation and control of cognitive biological phenomena. For humans, the central role of culture has long been known. Although a ground-state collapse analogous to generalized anxiety appears ubiquitous to such systems, lack of cultural modulation for real-time automatons or distributed cognition man-machine 'cockpits' makes them particularly subject to a canonical pathology under which 'all possible targets are enemies'. More general dysfunctions of large-scale topology and connectivity analogous to autism spectrum and schizophenoform disorders also appear likely. A kind of machine psychiatry may become a central engineering discipline as the number of computation cores in real-time critical systems increases exponentially over the next few decades.

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Collective Consciousness and its Discontents

Cited by 38 publications

References 59 publications

Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health promotion

Magic Strategies: the basic biology of multilevel, multiscale, health promotion

Embodied cognition, embodied regulation, and the Data Rate Theorem

Embodied cognition, embodied regulation, and the Data Rate Theorem

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