Examinando por Autor "Veloz, Tomas"
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Ítem Complexity and Evolution(MDPI, 2023-02) Veloz, Tomas; Heylighen, Francis; Witkowski, OlafUnderstanding the underlying structure of evolutionary processes is one the most important issues of scientific enquiry of this century. In the twentieth century, scientific thinking witnessed the overwhelming power of the evolutionary paradigm. It not only solidified the foundations of diverse areas, such as cell-biology, ecology, and economics, but also fostered the development of novel mathematical and computational tools to model and simulate how evolutionary processes take place. In addition to the application of the evolutionary paradigm and the discovery of the evolutionary features for processes of diverse nature, there is another interesting aspect which touches upon the emergence of novel evolutionary processes. Namely, the emergence of an evolutionary process requires a complex transition between a prior form where no evolutionary process is undergoing and a posterior form where the evolutionary process has been triggered. Theoretical methods to describe the emergence of evolutionary processes require the consideration of complex systemic notions, such as self-organization, resilience, contex tuality, among others. Therefore, complexity and evolution became intertwined notions: evolution not only leads to but also depends on the development of increasingly complex forms and functions.Ítem Goal directedness, chemical organizations, and cybernetic mechanisms(MDPI, 2021-08) Busseniers, Evo; Veloz, Tomas; Heylighen, FrancisIn this article, we attempt at developing a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directed systems out of networks of (chemical) reactions. Related scenarios have been proposed to explain the origin of life starting from autocatalytic sets, but these sets tend to be too unstable and dependent on their environment to maintain. We apply instead a framework called Chemical Organization Theory (COT), which shows mathematically under which conditions reaction networks are able to form self-maintaining, autopoietic organizations. We introduce the concepts of perturbation, action, and goal based on an operationalization of the notion of change developed within COT. Next, we incorporate the latter with notions native to the theory of cybernetics aimed to explain goal directedness: reference levels and negative feedback among others. To test and refine these theoretical results, we present some examples that illustrate our approach. We finally discuss how this could result in a realistic, step-by-step scenario for the evolution of goal directedness, thus providing a theoretical solution to the age-old question of the origins of purpose.Ítem Goals as Emergent Autopoietic Processes(Frontiers Media S.A., 2021-11) Veloz, TomasWhile the phenomena of reaching a goal is generally represented in the framework of optimization, the phenomena of becoming of a goal is more similar to a “self-organization and emergent” rather than an “optimization and preexisting” process. In this article we provide a modeling framework for the former alternative by representing goals as emergent autopoietic structures. In order to conceptually situate our approach, we first review some of the most remarkable attempts to formally define emergence, and identify that in most cases such definitions rely on a preexisting system to be observed prior and post emergence, being thus inadequate for a formalization of emergent goals corresponding to the becoming of a systems as such (e.g. emergence of life). Next, we review how an implementation of the reaction networks framework, known as Chemical Organization Theory (COT), can be applied to formalize autopoietic structures, providing a basis to operationalize goals as an emergent process. We next revisit the definitions of emergence under the light of our approach, and demonstrate that recent taxonomies developed to classify different forms of emergence can be naturally deduced from recent work aimed to explain the kinds of changes of the organizational structure of a reaction network. Copyright © 2021 Veloz.Ítem Modelling Worldviews as Stable Metabolisms(MDPI, 2022-10) Veloz, Tomas; Maldonado, PedroThe emergence and evolution of worldviews is a complex phenomenon that requires strong and rigorous scientific attention in our hyperconnected world. On the one hand, cognitive theories have proposed reasonable frameworks but have not reached general modeling frameworks where predictions can be tested. On the other hand, machine-learning-based applications perform extremely well at predicting outcomes of worldviews, but they rely on a set of optimized weights in a neural network that does not comply to a well-founded cognitive framework. In this article, we propose a formal approach used to investigate the establishment of and change in worldviews by recalling that the realm of ideas, where opinions, perspectives and worldviews are shaped, resemble, in many ways, a metabolic system. We propose a general modelization of worldviews based on reaction networks, and a specific starting model based on species representing belief attitudes and species representing belief change triggers. These two kinds of species combine and modify their structures through the reactions. We show that chemical organization theory combined with dynamical simulations can illustrate various interesting features of how worldviews emerge, are maintained and change. In particular, worldviews correspond to chemical organizations, meaning closed and self-producing structures, which are generally maintained by feedback loops occurring within the beliefs and triggers in the organization. We also show how, by inducing the external input of belief change triggers, it is possible to change from one worldview to another, in an irreversible way. We illustrate our approach with a simple example reflecting the formation of an opinion and a belief attitude about a theme, and, next, show a more complex scenario containing opinions and belief attitudes about two possible themes. © 2022 by the authors.Ítem Reaction Network Modeling of Complex Ecological Interactions: Endosymbiosis and Multilevel Regulation(Hindawi Limited, 2021-08) Veloz, Tomas; Flores, DanielaEndosymbiosis is a type of symbiosis where one species of microscopic scale inhabits the cell of another species of a larger scale, such that the exchange of metabolic byproducts produces mutual benefit. These benefits can occur at different biological levels. For example, endosymbiosis promotes efficiency of the cell metabolism, cell replication, and the generation of a macroscopic layer that protects the organism from its predators. Therefore, modeling endosymbiosis requires a complex-systems and multilevel approach. We propose a model of endosymbiosis based on reaction networks, where species of the reaction network represent either ecological species, resources, or conditions for the ecological interactions to happen, and the endosymbiotic interaction mechanisms are represented by different sequences of reactions (processes) in the reaction network. As an example, we develop a toy model of the coral endosymbiotic interaction. The model considers two reaction networks, representing biochemical traffic and cellular proliferation levels, respectively. In addition, the model incorporates top-down and bottom-up regulation mechanisms that stabilizes the endosymbiotic interaction. © 2021 Tomas Veloz and Daniela Flores.Ítem The Complexity–Stability Debate, Chemical Organization Theory, and the Identification of Non-classical Structures in Ecology(Springer, 2020-03) Veloz, TomasWe present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called chemical organization theory (COT) 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 (co-exist) 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. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V.Ítem Towards an Analytic Framework for System Resilience Based on Reaction Networks(Hindawi Limited, 2022-06) Veloz, Tomas; Maldonado, Pedro; Bussseniers, Evo; Bassi, Alejandro; Beigi, Shima; Lenartowicz, Marta; Heylighen, FrancisReaction network is a promising framework for representing complex systems of diverse and even interdisciplinary types. In this approach, complex systems appear as self-maintaining structures emerging from a multitude of interactions, similar to proposed scenarios for the origin of life out of autocatalytic networks. The formalism of chemical organization theory (COT) mathematically specifies under which conditions a reaction network is stable enough to be observed as a whole complex system. Such conditions specify the notion of organization, crucial in COT. In this paper, we show that the structure and operation of organizations can be advanced towards a formal framework of resilience in complex systems. That is, we show that there exist three fundamental types of change (state, process, and structural) defined for reaction networks, and that these perturbations not only provide a general representation of perturbations in the context of resilience but also pave the ground to formalize different forms of resilient responses. In particular, we show that decomposing the network's operational structure into dynamically decoupled modules allows to formalize what is the impact of a perturbation and to what extent any potential compensation to that perturbation will be successful. We illustrate our approach with a toy model of a farm that operates in a sustainable way producing milk, eggs, and/or grains from other resources. With the help of simulations, we analyze the different types of perturbations and responses that the farm can undergo and how that affects its sustainable operation. © 2022 Tomas Veloz et al.