This book views cognitive processes of bounded rationality at different scales and levels of organization as cultural artifacts, seen through the lens of the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories. The resulting probability models are novel, deep, and provide a route for the development of new statistical tools aimed at the address of real-world, real-time phenomena ranging across individual minds, institutions, newly-developed machine cognition, and their various co...

This book applies the powerful asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to understanding the dynamics of dysfunction in cognitive cultural artifacts encompassing individual minds, small social groupings, institutions, machine systems, and their many critical composites. A particular focus is on attempts to build ‘intelligent machines’ that would supposedly rival or surpass human minds. All such efforts are blindsided by the reality that all such machines are cultural a...

From the ‘punctuated equilibrium' of Eldrege and Gould, through Lewontin's ‘triple helix' and the various visions and revisions of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) of Laland and others, both data and theory have demanded an opening-up of the 1950's Evolutionary Synthesis that so firmly wedded evolutionary theory to the mathematics of gene frequency analysis. It can, however, be argued that a single deep and comprehensive mathematical theory may simply not be possible for the almos...

This book explores the role of deception, delay, and self-deception in the dynamics of organized conflict, taking a formal approach that hews closely to the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories. The resulting probability models can, with some effort—and some confidence—be converted to statistical tools for the analysis of real-time observational and ‘experimental’ data on institutionalized confrontation across both traditional and emerging ‘Clausewitz Landscapes’.

This book makes application to the dynamics of arousal and distraction, and to other examples. A modified version of the Kadanoff picture of phase transitions in consciousness emerges from the Morse Function itself in a surprisingly standard manner, closely associated with the breaking of groupoid symmetries driven by fundamental equivalence class algebras.Although this is far indeed from the familiar world of physical theory, it should be possible, on the basis of the probability ...

As a follow-up to COVID-19 in New York City: an Ecology of Race and Class Oppression, which showed that decades of discriminatory public policies shaped the Bronx into the epicenter of the first wave of COVID-19, this book examines the build up to the crest and subsequent ebbing of the second wave of COVID-19 across the 62 counties of New York State (NYS) and 152 ZIP Code areas of the four central boroughs of New York City (NYC). Like its predecessor, the sequel examines the vulne...

This book is a collection of essays that explore commonalities and contrasts between strategy in armed conflict and strategy in public health. The first part uses the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to study strategy as an exchange of messages between adversaries, in the context of underlying power relations. The ‘messages’ to be exchanged are constructed from an ‘alphabet’ of tactics available to each contender, in a large sense. The second part of the book e...

This book is the first social epidemiological study of COVID-19 spread in New York City (NYC), the primary epicenter of the United States. New York City spread COVID-19 throughout the United States. The context of epicenter formation determined the rapid, extreme rise of NYC case and mortality rates. Decades of public policies destructive of poor neighborhoods of color heavily determined the spread within the City. Premature mortality rates revealed the "weathering" of policy-targeted comm...

This book provides a unique formal foundation for the development of statistical tools useful in the exploration of observational and experimental data related to embodied cognition. The asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories can be used to construct statistical tools analogous to -- but different from -- regression models for the study of the often highly punctuated cognitive phenomena embedded in and hence influenced by a surrounding ecosystem of which the phenomen...

This book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to develop models of conflict between hierarchically-structured cognitive entities under circumstances of imprecision, uncertainty and stress. Characterized as friction and the fog-of-war by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, such conditions impair institutional cognition in real-time conflict and pose a real and continuing threat to organizations, such as the US military. In a linked collectio...

The creation of economic institutions that can function well under substantial uncertainties -- Black Swans -- is analogous to the dilemmas confronting our hunter-gatherer forefathers in the face of large-scale ecological unpredictability. The ultimate solution was not the development of a super hunter-gatherer technology that could ride out repeated catastrophe, but rather the invention, in neolithic times, of culturally-adapted 'farmed' ecosystems constructed to maximize food yield and m...

This book, based on published studies, takes a unique perspective on the 30-year collapse of pharmaceutical industry productivity in the search for small molecule “magic bullet” interventions. The relentless escalation of inflation-adjusted cost per approved medicine in the United States — from $200 million in 1950 to $1.2 billion in 2010 — has driven industry giants to, at best, slavish imitation in drug design, and at worst, abandonment of research and embracing of widespread fraud in co...