Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

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Contact: Caitlin Lorraine McShea, Program Manager, cmcshea@santafe.edu

User:JessicaFlack

From Complex Time
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Name
Jessica Flack
Affiliation
SFI
Email address
jflack@santafe.edu

Biography

[[Biography::I am a professor at SFI where I also run the Collective Computation Group with David Krakauer. We work on fundamental problems in evolutionary theory concerning collective behavior, collective computation, and collective intelligence—at all levels of biological organization—from societies of cells to societies of individuals to machine-human hybrid societies. We use insights and tools from biology, evolutionary theory, evo-devo, statistical physics, cognitive science and neuroscience, complexity science, animal behavior, information theory, theoretical computer science, and dynamical systems. 

Our work is empirically grounded and often motivated by deep understanding of finite, heterogenous, and typically relatively small model systems in which components have only partly overlapping interests and are noisy information processors dealing with noisy signals. So far we have worked with neural data, data from animal societies, slime moulds, and data from human societies. 

My particular interests are in the role of collective computation/intelligence in the origin of space and time scales and in the emergence of robust structure and function in nature and society. And I am fascinated with the idea that components in adaptive systems construct their macroscopic worlds through collective coarse-graining in evolutionary and/or learning time.]]

Related links

Involvement in the Complex Time Research Theme

Organizer

This user is listed as an organizer for the following meetings:

  1. The Origin and Implication of Time in Adaptive Systems

Attendee

This user is listed as an attendee for the following meetings:

  1. 2019 Advisory Board Meeting
“Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points toward the past… I shall use the phrase “time’s arrow” to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.”
-Arthur Eddington
“It was Darwin’s chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence, rather than their occurrence, which becomes highly improbable.”
-Ronald A. Fisher