Simplexity : Simplifying Principles for a Complex World , livre ebook

Odile Jacob - Alain Berthoz

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199 pages

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“Simplexity, as I understand it, is the range of solutions living organisms have found, despite the complexity of natural processes, to enable the brain to prepare an action and plan for the consequences of it. These solutions are simplifying principles that enable the processing of information or situations, by taking into account past experience and anticipating the future. They are neither caricatures, shortcuts, or summaries. They are new ways of asking questions, sometimes at the cost of occasional detours, in order to achieve faster, more elegant, more effective actions.” A. B. As Alain Berthoz demonstrates in this profoundly original book, simplicity is never easy; it requires suppressing, selecting, connecting, thinking, in order to then act in the best way possible. And what if we, in turn, are inspired by the living world to process the complexity that surrounds us? Alain Berthoz is professor at the Collège de France where he is co-director of the Laboratoire de physiologie de la perception et de l’action. [Laboratory for the physiology of perception and action]. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and is the author of Le Sens du mouvement [The Brain's Sense of Movement] and La Décision [Emotion and Reason].

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Science

Evolution

Sciences et techniques

Life Sciences

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Publié par	Odile Jacob
Date de parution	20 décembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782738147455
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Originally published in French as La Simplexité by Alain Berthoz © Editions Odile Jacob, 2009.
A previous English version was published as Simplexity © Yale University Press and Editions Odile Jacob, 2012.
The present English-language edition is published by Editions Odile Jacob.
© Odile Jacob, January 2019.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without writtenpermission of the publisher. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system ortransmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writingof the publisher.
www.odilejacob.com www.odilejacobpublishing.com
ISBN : 978-2-7381-4745-5
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo .
C ONTENTS

Preface
The Wonders and Deceptions of Simplicity
The Originality of Life
Acknowledgments
FIRST PART - Remember to dare
CHAPTER ONE - Making the Complex Simplex
Patterns and Small Worlds
Tools for Life
CHAPTER 2 - Sketching a Theory of Simplexity
Inhibition and the Principle of Refusal
The Principle of Specialization and Selection: Umwelt
The Principle of Probabilistic Anticipation
The Detour Principle
The Principle of Cooperation and Redundancy
The Principle of Meaning
CHAPTER 3 - Gaze and Empathy
The Repertoire of Gaze Movements
How to Simplify a Problem in Geometry
The Baby's Gaze
Learning to See
Gaze: An Anchor for Action
Don't Repair, Replace! Vicariance and Substitution
Who Is in the Mirror?
Gaze and Empathy
CHAPTER 4 - Attention
“I Choose, Therefore I Am”
Attention and Decision Making
Selective Ignorance
Attention and Vigilance
Biased Competition
Attention and Emotion
Development of Attentional Processes
CHAPTER 5 - The Brain as Emulator and Creator of Worlds
Phenomenal Perception
Dreaming and Newton's Laws
Shortcuts
The Brain as Emulator of Reality
“Déjà-Vu, Déjà-Vécu”
Resonance
Redundancy
The Critical Period, or the Weeping Camel
Identifying Objects
CHAPTER 6 - Simplexity in Perception
Encoding the Continuous by the Discrete
Controlling Uncertainty and Randomness
Specialization and Modularity
Speed
Resolving Ambiguities
Separating Content from Context
The Brain's Feeling for Shape
The Simplexity of the Haptic Sense: How Not to Crush a Raspberry
Why Is the Tip of a Finger Round?
Detecting Smells: Dimensionality
Making a Simplex Decision
PART TWO - Walkingon the moon
CHAPTER 7 - The Laws of Natural Movement
An Essential Simplification
The Secret of the Nevers Attack
When Anatomy Dictates Geometry
Internal Models
Changing Variables to Reduce Complexity
Uncertainty and Probability: Bet Rather Than Calculate
Contraction
CHAPTER 8 - The Simplex Gesture
The Concept of Gesture
Matching Gestures and Words
Work Gestures
The Sacred Gesture: Jesus and Buddha
Synergies of Bodily Expression of Emotions
CHAPTER 9 - Walking: A Challenge to Complexity
The Lamprey and the Salamander
Planar Covariation
Gravity: Ally of Simplexity
How Not to Fall
Controlling Locomotion from the Head: A Great Invention
Let's Hear It for the Skeleton!
Do the Same Laws Govern Movement of the Arms and Walking?
PART THREE - The realm of thought
CHAPTER 10 - Simplex Space
The Brain Is a Geometrical Machine
Space: A Common Way to Encode Perception
The Problem of Multiple Geometries
The Curious Geometry of the Colliculus
Near and Distant Spaces: A Matter of Interlocking
Changing Point of View
Do Men and Women Employ the Same Simplex Mechanisms?
Multiple Frames of Reference and Cognitive Strategies
The Hippocampus: A Cognitive Map?
Global and Local: Maps and Directions
Space Is Encoded as a Grid
Sleep Aids Memorization
CHAPTER 11 - Perceiving, Experiencing, and Imagining Space
The Concept of Simplex in Mathematics
The Role of the Body in Sensory Experience
The Concept of “Affordance” and Gibson's Theories
CHAPTER 12 - The Spatial Foundations of Rational Thought
Is the Language of Space the Same in Different Cultures?
The Maze and the Garden
Ecumene Space
Drawing in the Service of Literary Creation
Return to Reality
The Particular and the Universal: Ockham's Razor
Epilogue
The Joy of Roofs and Staircases
The Magic of Street Corners
Music and Cerebral Lateralization
Consciousness: A Simplex Theory of Reality
Love: The Ultimate Form of Simplexity?
A Little Potpourri in the Form of an Afterword
Simplexity Is . . .
Notes
Index
Preface

How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. . . . Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. . . . By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken.
—Albert E INSTEIN

This book invites you to reflect on a new concept: simplexity. I use this term to designate a most remarkable invention of life and one that applies at any number of levels, from molecules to thoughts, individuals to pairs, and ultimately to consciousness and love.
Complexity has become a major buzzword. The economy is complex. Life in megacities is complex. The mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease are complex. Finding the right biofuel to replace gasoline is complex, and so is managing separate families to achieve both the harmonious rearing of children and sexual freedom for parents. We are staggering under the weight of complexity. As if that were not enough, we belong to various social, religious, and political groups and must juggle any number of identities: citizen, neighbor, doctor or bricklayer, tourist, patient, client, or voter. Each of these factors shapes us and imposes on us certain behaviors, norms, customs, and habitus (sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s expression for deeply “embodied” ways of doing and thinking) that place us in ever-changing, interlocking social and psychological webs of a complexity unequaled in the history of humankind.
Scientific theories of matter and life must also contend with the complexity of natural processes. No domain is immune. Physics has long been searching for a way out of complexity. Although the discipline is fairly mature, faced with complexity, it must accept the uncertainty relationships that define the very limits of knowledge and admit, for example, that we cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle.
In an effort to formalize complexity, scholars from all disciplines created an institute devoted to the subject in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Physicist and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of quarks, is one of its founders. His book The Quark and the Jaguar elegantly summarizes the steps involved in constructing a theory of complex adaptive systems. 1 Everybody is familiar with the metaphor: The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil triggers a tornado in Texas. In other words, a very simple law of organization can give rise to complex structures. 2

The Wonders and Deceptions of Simplicity
Our brains are overwhelmed by the immense quantity of information required to live, act, and understand. In response to the challenges of complexity, ways of simplifying things are proliferating. Intended to keep us all from going mad, these approaches slap on a facade of simplicity in the form of fancy mathematical theories that mask their authors’ failure to grasp reality. Motivated by special interests, these mathematical models can lead to calamities, as evident in the recent financial crisis and the failure of the banking system due in part to artificial, completely unrealistic “models” of “ Homo economicus. ” Similarly, efforts to facilitate decision making tend to reduce humans to logical processes so as to model them using logico-mathematical theories that simplify real life. But despite the quest for effective solutions, “simple heuristics that make us smart,” 3 the truth is that today we are like the mythical Theseus lost in a labyrinth, without Ariadne’s thread to help us find the way. We are made to think that the exit is just at the end of the corridor, but the corridor leads nowhere. Lost in the genuine complexity of the world, aware of the ineptitude of formal models, we are easy prey for fundamentalist beliefs and obscurantism.
This need to simplify touches everything. The quest is evident in all areas of social and political life, of medicine, science, technology, and day-to-day existence. The complexity of electronic gadgets is disguised by their ease of handling. It takes huge software programs to make computers user-friendly. Tax forms and medical protocols are being simplified, as are administrative documents. Criminal proceedings are being simplified to accelerate them. We can now vote electronically and have a simple choice between candidates we see debating on a television screen. People’s lives are being simplified by creating supermarkets where they can find all the product “solutions” they need. Engineers are trying to simplify the design of “light pipes,” 4 and chemists have uncovered simplifying principles for enzymatic and kinetic reactions. 5 The result of this frenzy of simplification i