Category: Philosophy

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Systems

Associative conditioning in gene regulatory network models increases integrative causal emergence

Federico Pigozzi, Adam Goldstein & Michael Levin — 09 July 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08411-2

When is a system more than the sum of its parts? When and how do the properties of active components enable the emergence of a high-level, integrated decision-making entity1,2,3,4,5? These questions bear on issues in ecology, philosophy mind, psychiatry, swarm robotics, and developmental biology6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. In a sense, all intelligence is collective intelligence14,15 because even human minds supervene on a collection of cells which are themselves active agents. One practical way to define integrated emergent systems is by the fact that they have goals, memories, preferences, and problem-solving capabilities that their parts do not have. For example, while individual cells solve problems in metabolic, physiological, and transcriptional spaces, what makes an embryo more than a collection of cells is the alignment of cellular activity toward a specific outcome in anatomical morphospace16. Here, we focus on one aspect of emergent agency: integrated, distributed memory.

What does this mean for psychodrama and group work  (see Logeman 1999)   We think of groups as systems?

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Marx in Moreno’s Writing

Karl Marx: A Singer to the Hammer and Sad Eyes

I’ve been writing here about my close reading of Moreno’s writing on Marx and revolution.  I’ve been reading Who Shall Survive and other sources.

I’ve stopped posting chapters here as I’m editing in Google Drive

See my whole effort here. 

That link is auto updated with every edit!!

 

 

 

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The First Mention of Marxism in “Who Shall Survive?” – Religion

The first time Moreno mentions Marx in Who Shall Survive?, is in the Preludes of the Sociometric Movement (1978; xiv, xv)

The advent of sociometry cannot be understood without appraising my presociometric background and the historic-ideological setting in the Western world, during and after the First World War. Marxism and psychoanalysis, the two opposites, each had spent their theoretic bolt, the one with Nikolai Lenin’s “State and Revolution” (1917), the other with Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929). The two opposites had one thing in common: they both rejected religion, they both disavowed he idea of a community which is based on spontaneous love, un-selfishness and sainthood, on positive goodness and naive cooperativeness. I took a position contradictory to both, the side of positive religion.

To summarise: Moreno makes it clear he is not creating his work in a vacuum. Freud and Marx are the ideological setting in the Western world, during and after the First World War. Moreno says “The two opposites had one thing in common: they both rejected religion”. Moreno took the side of positive religion. Continue reading “The First Mention of Marxism in “Who Shall Survive?” – Religion”

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The invisibility of the structure of human society

 

The invisibility of the structure of human society

Becoming objective toward society encounters more obstacles than being objective toward our own mind.  Perhaps we can pretend to grasp the involvement of the ego because it operates within us. However, we cannot pretend to know the involvement of the socius as it is outside us; but it is an outside to which we are inescapably tied.

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I’m meditating by rewriting a passage by Moreno. The lines above are where I got to.  The gender & grammar needed  fixing etc.  I think his idea shines through in the passage above.  See his original below.

I love seeing the equivalence of ego and socius.

Here is the original:

“but the degree of invisibility of the structure of human society, of its sociodynamics, is much greater than that of the single individual. The effort of becoming objective toward the socius encounters many more obstacles than to be objective toward his own individual mind. The involvement of the ego he can still grasp, perhaps he can pretend to know it because it operates within him. The involvement of the socius, however, he cannot pretend to know as it operates outside of him; but it is an outside to which he is inescapably tied.”

See this post. Where there is more on this topic.

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Is a system a “thing”?

Perhaps in an approach of the social universe we can learn from Democritus and close our eyes to the actual configurations social “matter” presents to us families, factories, schools, nations, etc. Perhaps a mind not distracted by the gross facts in society will be able to discover the smallest living social unit, itself not further divisible, the social atom.

 

J.L. Moreno “Who Shall Survive?” p 291

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