Re: Agent Based Modeling and Biomimicry

Posted by Peter-2-2 on Jul 15, 2008; 6:02pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Agent-Based-Modeling-and-Biomimicry-tp527821p529465.html

Good questions

Maybe the dreaded left brain right brain synopsis, men being predominantly on the left with la femme on the right

As our technology industry is moving more and more to conceptual right brained thinking this is becoming a huge challenge, dare one say " male right brain blindness '

We are using parametric technology that uses reams of feedback from the REAL world in order to visualize " what REALLY is " and major road blocks we see are the individuals sitting on the safe side of the monitor very comfortable in the abstract world forgetting completely that its only a REPRESENTATION of a REAL world. Architects sans Calatrava and Gehry love this void space with the disastrous consequences we see daily

Biomimicry as you so rightly identified is closely in tune with natural senses and indeed is impossible to understand unless these same senses are WIDE open and avatar or agent just doesn't get you there ( I haven't seen Wal-E yet and will report back. )

The scariest representation, I have seen, re this issue is Bill McDonough's speech at TED on " How is is possible that engineers and designers could create efficient mass murder killing machines like concentration camps (invented by the British in the Boar war in South Africa )  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwWWFQ2tiNY   Simple they used abstract models and designs to distance themselves from the blood and gore, no doubt with Strauss resonating nicely in the background.

Here is another info piece on the same issue with school designs http://www.ideapete.com/gwendolyn.htm

This is the same subject that scared me regarding the comments at last Fridays lecture at SFI "  Computational thinking means we do not have to worry about what is we can target whats desired and model that "  Totally Orwellian

There is an excellent book on this paradigm by a local SF ( Thats Santa Fe not science fiction although we who live here often get confused ) author George Johnson called Fire in the Mind
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Mind-Science-Faith-Search/dp/067974021X with the brilliant LANL scientists charging ahead with the left agent brain and the local Indians perfectly content in the resonant harmonic mystical beliefs that touched their soul and how the scientists are stunned when they get to the quantum and nano level to find whose philosophy REALLY works

Cannot wait for Ann's SapphoSocratic sequel, keep it rolling

( : ( : pete

Today's Topics:

   1. Agent Based Modeling and Biomimicry (Ann Racuya-Robbins)
 

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Subject: [FRIAM] Agent Based Modeling and Biomimicry

From: "Ann Racuya-Robbins" [hidden email]

Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:26:54 -0600

To: [hidden email]

To: [hidden email]

I have noticed that often more men are interested in Agent Based Modeling than women while more women are interested in Biomimicry than men. I am wondering why this is? I would like to put out this question to others.

Both ABM and Biomimicry have much to offer. To me Agent Based Modeling takes a very distant view of dynamic processes, like a five mile high view. This allows a broader view and greater scope. Individual behavior becomes a matter of probabilities. Biomimicry on the other hand is a whole mind body empathic, sympathic, compathic relationship with living beings as species and individuals. By copying or mimicking living beings, probabilities are not required because copying existing life behavior and physical properties is highly specific in design. While vast, the number of possible design solutions is bounded by what can live. What can live also contains an ethical dimension that grounds and precepts possibilities. In Agent Based Modeling the death of individuals or groups is abstracted to be expressed as parameters emerge and recede within the model. To a large extent, in Biomimicry the death of a species or individual life is the ultimate determinant of which biological qualities to mimic.

I sense that the Agent Based Modeling approach with its roots in western mathematics carries forward some of the difficulties and even cul de sacs of western intellectual life and philosophy. Like imposing platonic solid forms on the world, there are important similarities that are revealed—a common language developed for qualities of the physical world. But no individual contains or expresses these qualities except in often large and varying degrees of approximation. It can be said that these entities like platonic solids and other mathematical systems such as Agent Based Modeling are not alive nor more importantly cannot live. Of course to this extent they cannot die either which has its benefits.

It seems to me that we need a deeper integration of approaches that are outside the body but return to reside in the living and in the living body.

I would like to propose a SapphoSocratic approach. But I will leave this for another message since this one has become rather long already.

Ann Racuya-Robbins

Founder and CEO

World Knowledge Bank®

https://www.wkbank.com/knowledge/Agent_Based_Modeling_and_Biomimicry

https://www.wkbank.com

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