POSTPONED: Gus Koehler: Applied Complexity Seminar

[Stephen Guerin]

Gus's talk is postponed to April 22nd

TITLE: Chronocomplexity
SPEAKER: Gus Koehler
AFFILIATION: Time Structures (http://www.timestructures.com)
TIME: Friday April 22, 3:00p (yes, tea and snacks will be served)
LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room

ABSTRACT:
Virtually all political and economic actors talk continually in
time-related terms.  Tactics, long-term strategy, and happenstance merge
as time and timing become the common denominators of policy making and
economic strategy. Is there more than one temporality that needs to be
taken into consideration in such circumstances?  Is temporality the same
across all temporal levels and scales and across an ecology, including
its layers? But this begs  fundamental questions such as: Is the
direction of causality always from the present into the future for all
temporalities? Or, do stochastic events have the same temporal
characteristics as events that are not uniformly temporally distributed?
  Is the behavior space created by a thousand computer agents moving in
computer time with only about ten different behaviors enough to
demonstrate the temporal complexity of a living population? Perhaps it
would more interesting to focus on the collective spatial-time flows of
changing events as they continuously structurate the agent and its
environment according to some sort of morphodynamics rules.  In this
approach there would be no entity; only process.  The theologian and
philosopher, St. Augustine nicely summarized our dilemma. "What is time?
If no one asks me, I know but if I wanted to explain it to the one who
asks me, I plainly do not know."

I will present my recent research that proposes a way to answer these
questions drawing on concepts from biology (time-ecology, heterochrony),
physics (back-ground independent time) and dimensions, cognitive
psychology, complex systems, and the extensive scholarly literature on
time.  My goal is to propos a problem that is so juicy that some of you
might be interest in creating a new approach to autonomous agent
simulation. This work received initial funding from NSF, has received a
favorable review from the Advanced Technology Program, and is published
in various academic journals.

[Gus Koehler]

Thank you Stephen.

Gus

Gus Koehler, Ph.D.
Principal
Time Structures
1545 University Ave.
Sacramento, CA 95825
916-564-8683
Fax: [phone]
www.timestructures.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 10:57 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] POSTPONED: Gus Koehler: Applied Complexity Seminar

Gus's talk is postponed to April 22nd

TITLE: Chronocomplexity
SPEAKER: Gus Koehler
AFFILIATION: Time Structures (http://www.timestructures.com)
TIME: Friday April 22, 3:00p (yes, tea and snacks will be served)
LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room

ABSTRACT:
Virtually all political and economic actors talk continually in
time-related terms.  Tactics, long-term strategy, and happenstance merge
as time and timing become the common denominators of policy making and
economic strategy. Is there more than one temporality that needs to be
taken into consideration in such circumstances?  Is temporality the same
across all temporal levels and scales and across an ecology, including
its layers? But this begs  fundamental questions such as: Is the
direction of causality always from the present into the future for all
temporalities? Or, do stochastic events have the same temporal
characteristics as events that are not uniformly temporally distributed?
  Is the behavior space created by a thousand computer agents moving in
computer time with only about ten different behaviors enough to
demonstrate the temporal complexity of a living population? Perhaps it
would more interesting to focus on the collective spatial-time flows of
changing events as they continuously structurate the agent and its
environment according to some sort of morphodynamics rules.  In this
approach there would be no entity; only process.  The theologian and
philosopher, St. Augustine nicely summarized our dilemma. "What is time?
If no one asks me, I know but if I wanted to explain it to the one who
asks me, I plainly do not know."

I will present my recent research that proposes a way to answer these
questions drawing on concepts from biology (time-ecology, heterochrony),
physics (back-ground independent time) and dimensions, cognitive
psychology, complex systems, and the extensive scholarly literature on
time.  My goal is to propos a problem that is so juicy that some of you
might be interest in creating a new approach to autonomous agent
simulation. This work received initial funding from NSF, has received a
favorable review from the Advanced Technology Program, and is published
in various academic journals.


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