Books

The author (Walter J Freeman) had an extensive and comprehensive discussion on how brains make up their minds. His academic ideology is largely inspired by pragmatism, which adjacents his conception of chaotic neuronal dynamics to the belief that the internal "meaning" constructed through the agent's reciprocal loop with the environment creates solipsistic variance of one from another. The book consists of 7 major chapters, and each of the primary chapters addresses the scientific exploration of different levels of neurodynamics discovered in the hierarchical universe of brains. As the iconic term "neurodynamics" symbolizes, Freenman's theory is established upon a solid mathematical formulation using chaos theory. Therefore, the former chapters discuss how microscopic neurons perform synaptic discharges in relation to adjacent neurons. The appearance of and interconnections of excitatory and inhibitory neurons create a waveform, decaying neuron activity, and the asynchronous activations of the activity throughout a group of neurons give birth to dynamic patterns at the mesoscopic level, which is what chaos theory calls an "attractor" terrain. The chaos at this level leads to the macroscopic emergence of a trajectory that runs through the attractor terrain, and this trajectory constitutes intention. Freeman discusses that the attractor terrain constantly changes as new stimuli visit the brain and create meanings for the brain. This book made me want to learn more about phenomenology and how Buddhism can bridge neuroscience and its ultimate goal of empowering individuals to realize their happiness and the flee from (or transformation of in Nichiren Buddhism) Karma.

The first half of the book explains the history of Japanese law in terms of national character and the Western legal system. Particularly interesting was the legal significance of the spirit of “wa” (harmony). Historically, Japan has adopted the Western legal system as it is. The spirit of “wa” of the Japanese people is incompatible with the “dichotomized code” of “law/illegal” (legal or illegal) of the Western legal system in general, and is linked to the Japanese characteristic of being willing to settle disputes through mediation. He said that this trait is also manifested in the view of governance and mentality of the Emperor as the sovereign of the nation, as written in the then Constitution of the Empire of Japan. The Japanese national character is expressed in the fact that under the absoluteness of the emperor, we as Japanese citizens strive for harmony with “wa” (harmony). This characteristic is also true today, and the very act of “reading the air” emphasizes “harmony,” and Confucian-like obedience to the patriarchal system also seems to express the worship of absoluteness. As mentioned above, the dichotomy of “law/illegality” is incompatible with the Japanese national character that values “ambiguity,” but the words that look toward the future of Japan and the West, which must live in the complex modern world, are very impressive.

In the midst of this, I was struck by his words regarding the future of Japan and the West, which must live in today's complex world: “As social systems become more complex and values become more pluralistic, it seems to be increasingly difficult to clarify ‘this or that’ through the ‘application’ of clear regulations. (omission) Even though we can no longer rely on seemingly reliable rails as we did in the past, this means that we have become truly independent and can freely design our own social order without being bound by rules (old laws) that reflect preconceived notions. In this light, it is rather welcome that the future legal order will become more and more flexible, while maintaining the substantive codes of law and lawlessness.

The dualistic code of law/justice cannot handle the world's complex cases under the objective of serving the public interest (there is no room for balancing interests). On the other hand, if we return to ambiguous problem-solving, the legal system cannot maintain a “self-compliant structure (a system structure that decides whether to respond to external stimuli in accordance with law or lawlessness, and responds to necessary stimuli). In between, he stated that it is important to achieve a balance of interests and pragmatic law neutrality.

In today's world of rapid technological innovation, including artificial intelligence, legal rules that cannot renew themselves do not operate as a system that helps society operate. The system must be able to constantly respond to new social values and examples. The author calls this endless process of self-renewal “groping.” Can the “science of design” approach described by Herbert Simon in “The Science of Systems” be applied to the construction of a legal “system” that has no end, no finished form, so to speak? In order to keep applying the law “system” to the “external environment” of society, we select what we think is the best course of action from among multivariate alternatives. The “good or bad” among the myriad options can be judged based on the “public interest,” which the author emphasizes as a polynomial function of the “balance of interests. However, what is important in the public interest may be judged comprehensively on the basis of “precipitous” values that do not fit the “precipitous order” as the author suggests.

Although increasingly complex, at least one possible course of action for the legal profession to take with respect to the technology sector might be to “push” for the integration of innovation and ethics that the author emphasizes.

The authors start from the claim that there may be room for the science of human-made artifacts (such as machines and computer programs) to develop. He then showed the general tendency of systems that can explain their behavior independent of a detailed description of their internal systems to adapt to their external environment. Applying the systems paradigm to humans as well, he systematically discussed human internal behavior (thinking and problem solving).

In particular, Chapter 5, “The Science of Design,” argues that humans basically solve problems selectively, rather than mathematically, as if they were solving optimization problems. It is not a continuous problem like solving a differential problem, but rather a discrete selection from a given set of behavioral alternatives that results in an outcome that satisfies various restrictions and minimum utility. In the process of designing something, they are apparently selecting from a short- to medium-term perspective what is likely to bring them closer to their goal. Therefore, the system (in this case, the human) does not need to consider all the astronomical combinations of countless variables from the present to the endless future, nor can it compute them in the first place. This process is similar to that of reinforcement learning algorithms.

Finally, the author discussed complexity and its hierarchical structure. A complex system is one in which subsystems exist while maintaining some kind of relationship with each other. The holism that “an object is more than just a collection of small units” of course acknowledges emergence of new phenomena arising from the relationships among subsystems.

Totalitarianism and reductionism (the principle that things at the micro level explain everything at the macro level) are fundamentally opposed. However, the idea of loose emergence, while supporting the idea of holism, seems to be explainable by the fact that in the short term, subsystems operate independently of the main system.

The hierarchy that exists in complex systems can be explained by “quasi-decomposability,” he says. That is, the short-term behavior of subsystems is largely independent of each other, but in the long term, the behavior of those subsystems depends collectively on each other. The author further shows how the mathematical expression “quasi-resolvable matrix” can be used to show the coefficients of actions among subsystems as a matrix. Although it is an uninformed guess, it may be possible to understand the hierarchy of events by applying the quasi-resolvable matrix to more multidimensional events and machine learning them as a tensor. The data would be very sparse (sparse) and ridiculously large. I wonder if the hierarchy will be maintained after applying dimensionality reduction.

In conclusion, the author states that complex systems have a hierarchical structure and that there are potentially effective ways to describe them, and that the evolutionary process of organisms and systems can be explained.

I found complexity interesting and wanted to learn more about it. The book was difficult, but interesting and informative.