Tomas Veloz

Complexity science explains how organization emerges from local interactions and how emergent wholes constrain their parts, yet it treats the possibilities of each substrate as fixed in advance, so that every level rests on a bottom one. We introduce immergence: the construction, by higher-level organization, of interfaces that make new degrees of freedom of its substrate causally available. Interfaces act by constraint. In weak immergence they produce new constraints from principles a system's constitutive closure already engages, as in templated replication. In strong immergence they bring into play principles that closure does not engage, as, plausibly, in avian magnetoreception. Our central claim is that interface construction is the complement of measurement. Measurement takes what a substrate makes available to an organization; interface construction changes what the substrate makes available. Three consequences follow. First, a substrate is always the substrate as accessible through some interface, and what appears as the bottom is only adjacent. Second, the scientific method must address inverse problems, which substrates could support a required function, alongside forward ones. Third, what appears as strong emergence is novelty over a substrate an interface has extended. We trace this view through evolution, perception, purpose, experience, artificial intelligence and culture, and close by proposing a matter–information interplay, grounded in process philosophy, as the ontology toward which it points.

In the first half of this two-part article, we analyzed a cognitive psychology experiment where participants were asked to select pairs of directions that they considered to be the best example of Two Different Wind Directions, and showed that the data violate the CHSH version of Bell’s inequality, with same magnitude as in typical Bell-test experiments in physics. In this second part, we complete our analysis by presenting a symmetrized version of the experiment, still violating the CHSH inequality but now also obeying the marginal law, for which we provide a full quantum modeling in Hilbert space, using a singlet state and suitably chosen product measurements. We also address some of the criticisms that have been recently directed at experiments of this kind, according to which they would not highlight the presence of genuine forms of entanglement. We explain that these criticisms are based on a view of entanglement that is too restrictive, thus unable to capture all possible ways physical and conceptual entities can connect and form systems behaving as a whole. We also provide an example of a mechanical model showing that the violations of the marginal law and Bell inequalities are generally to be associated with different mechanisms.

Context: The 4E approach proposes an alternative framework to understanding cognition and learning. However, its application to the study of creativity from new educational approaches such as STEAM is incipient. Problem: How can the 4E approach that fosters creativity be implemented in STEAM education, through participation in technology-mediated learning ecosystems? Method: Through face-to-face ethnographic participant observation, we observe students engaging in creative activities suggested by our theoretical approach. We use these observations to illustrate our theoretical approach. Results: Our examples show the many possibilities to encourage creativity by participating in STEAM educational environments that promote design and prototyping with technologies. We highlight collaborative work, disciplinary integration and learning by doing, characteristics of the STEAM approach, which favor the implementation of the 4E approach. Implications: The STEAM approach encourages creativity and learning that gives primacy to training processes over final products, so it is consistent with the 4E approach. Constructivist content: We adhere to the 4E approach to cognition: embodied, enacted, embedded and extended.

We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called chemical organization theory sheds new light on the longstanding complexity–stability debate. Namely, COT provides a novel conceptual landscape plenty of analytic tools to explore the interplay between structure and stability of ecological systems. Given a large set of species and their interactions, COT identifies, in a computationally feasible way, each and every sub-collection of species that is closed and self-maintaining. These sub-collections, called organizations, correspond to the groups of species that can survive together in the long-term. Thus, the set of organizations contains all the stable regimes that can possibly happen in the dynamics of the ecological system. From here, we propose to conceive the notion of stability from the properties of the organizations, and thus apply the vast knowledge on the stability of reaction networks to the complexity–stability debate. As an example of the potential of COT to introduce new mathematical tools, we show that the set of organizations can be equipped with suitable joint and meet operators, and that for certain ecological systems the organizational structure is a non-boolean lattice, providing in this way an unexpected connection between logico-algebraic structures, popular in the foundations of quantum theory, and ecology.

Context: The 4E approach proposes an alternative framework for understanding cognition and learning. However, its application to the study of education in the 21st century is incipient. Problem: What are the challenges of 21st-century education in the field of cognition and learning? How can the 4E approach be implemented in educational processes? Method: This introduction outlines the challenges of 21st-century education and the progress that the 4E approach has made in the different perspectives presented in the contributions of this special issue. Results: Today, we find a limited but growing number of studies on the 4E approach applied to education. We argue that the 4E approach presents a propitious field for the challenges of education in the 21st century, especially for the understanding of teaching and learning in socio-material and technological environments, as well as new research tools that support theories of learning with empirical evidence. Implications: A better understanding of the constructivist perspectives on the application of 4E in education can guide future research in education as well as novel teaching methodologies.

We present the fundamentals of the quantum theoretical approach we have developed in the last decade to model cognitive phenomena that resisted modeling by means of classical logical and probabilistic structures, like Boolean, Kolmogorovian and, more generally, set theoretical structures. We firstly sketch the operational-realistic foundations of conceptual entities, i.e. concepts, conceptual combinations, propositions, decision-making entities, etc. Then, we briefly illustrate the application of the quantum formalism in Hilbert space to represent combinations of natural concepts, discussing its success in modeling a wide range of empirical data on concepts and their conjunction, disjunction and negation. Next, we naturally extend the quantum theoretical approach to model some long-standing ‘fallacies of human reasoning’, namely, the ‘conjunction fallacy’ and the ‘disjunction effect’. Finally, we put forward an explanatory hypothesis according to which human reasoning is a defined superposition of ‘emergent reasoning’ and ‘logical reasoning’, where the former generally prevails over the latter. The quantum theoretical approach explains human fallacies as the consequence of genuine quantum structures in human reasoning, i.e. ‘contextuality’, ‘emergence’, ‘entanglement’, ‘interference’ and ‘superposition’. As such, it is alternative to the Kahneman–Tversky research programme, which instead aims to explain human fallacies in terms of ‘individual heuristics and biases’.

We present the fundamentals of the quantum theoretical approach we have developed in the last decade to model cognitive phenomena that resisted modeling by means of classical logical and probabilistic structures, like Boolean, Kolmogorovian and, more generally, set theoretical structures. We firstly sketch the operational-realistic foundations of conceptual entities, i.e. concepts, conceptual combinations, propositions, decision-making entities, etc. Then, we briefly illustrate the application of the quantum formalism in Hilbert space to represent combinations of natural concepts, discussing its success in modeling a wide range of empirical data on concepts and their conjunction, disjunction and negation. Next, we naturally extend the quantum theoretical approach to model some long-standing ‘fallacies of human reasoning’, namely, the ‘conjunction fallacy’ and the ‘disjunction effect’. Finally, we put forward an explanatory hypothesis according to which human reasoning is a defined superposition of ‘emergent reasoning’ and ‘logical reasoning’, where the former generally prevails over the latter. The quantum theoretical approach explains human fallacies as the consequence of genuine quantum structures in human reasoning, i.e. ‘contextuality’, ‘emergence’, ‘entanglement’, ‘interference’ and ‘superposition’. As such, it is alternative to the Kahneman–Tversky research programme, which instead aims to explain human fallacies in terms of ‘individual heuristics and biases’.

How can we explain the strange behavior of quantum and relativistic entities? Why do they behave in ways that defy our intuition about how physical entities should behave, considering our ordinary experience of the world around us? In this article, we address these questions by showing that the comportment of quantum and relativistic entities is not that strange after all, if we only consider what their nature might possibly be: not an objectual one, but a conceptual one. This not in the sense that quantum and relativistic entities would be human concepts, but in the sense that they would share with the latter a same conceptual nature, similarly to how electromagnetic and sound waves, although very different entities, can share a same undulatory nature. When this hypothesis is adopted, i.e., when a conceptuality interpretation about the deep nature of physical entities is taken seriously, many of the interpretational difficulties disappear and our physical world is back making sense, though our view of it becomes radically different from what our classical prejudice made us believe in the first place.