THINKING ISSUESSoftware ecosystems

Applying resilience thinking to production ecosystems

Production ecosystems typically have a high dependence on supporting and regulating ecosystem services and while they have thus far managed to sustain production, this has often been at the cost of externalities imposed on other systems and locations. One of the largest challenges facing humanity is to secure the production of food and fiber while avoiding long-term negative impacts on ecosyste...

Concept Maps for Combining Hard and Soft System Thinking in the Management of Socio-ecosystems

Despite the huge increase in the number of quantitative modeller studies undertaken, little attention in the literature has been given to the communication process among modellers, the researchers and local stakeholders. However, such communication is necessary to ensure that this research effort becomes a useful tool in the decision-making process. The work described here is based on the syste...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

Goods-thinking vs. tree-thinking

While it has become increasingly clear that the Tree of Life hypothesis has limitations in its ability to describe the evolution of all evolving entities on the planet, there has been a marked reluctance to move away from the tree-based language. Ironically, while modifying the idea of the Tree of Life to the extent that it is only very distantly related to its original descriptions, there has ...