Browsing by Subject "emergence"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Epistemic opacity: a feature not a bug: an exploration into the relationship between brains and ANNs
    (2025) Schoeman, Keldt; Nefdt, Ryan
    AI in the 21st century has come to be dominated by one school in particular, connectionism. And its successes are all around us – in the media we consume, in the music we listen to, in the cold calls we receive, etc. While this school was founded by psychologists, logicians, and philosophers with the goal of replicating human-level intelligence, the field has undergone a drastic transformation in recent years, entering a paradigm which is now dominated by engineering goals. Within this new paradigm, connectionism is no longer characterized as a field modelling the brain, but rather a mere engineering tool with incredible powers of pattern recognition. However, while the move to employ connectionist AI as a tool has led to remarkable successes in a variety of fields, it has also come with issues such as the black box problem, or epistemic opacity. Within a strictly engineering paradigm, attempts to explain the internal reasoning of these networks remain unsatisfying. Therefore, I propose recoupling connectionist networks with their roots in brain modelling, which would in turn open rich, new explanations for problems like epistemic opacity. Simply put, when we place the problem of opacity within the context of brain modelling, it appears that it may not be a problem at all, but an emergent feature of a complex system. In other words, we are beginning to have difficulty understanding modern connectionist networks in much the same manner we struggle to understand brains. Hence, it might well be feature, not a bug, that these systems should disappear into the mists of complexity.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Exploring emergence in corporate sustainability
    (2019) Maitland, Roger; Baets, Walter
    As the impacts of climate change intensify, businesses are increasingly committing to ambitious sustainable development goals, yet an enduring disconnect remains between corporate sustainability activities and declining global environment and society. This study adopts a complexity view that reductionism associated with Newtonian thinking has played a key role in creating many of the sustainability issues now faced by humanity. This dissertation departs from the premise that sustainability needs to be integrated into an organisation and uses a complexity view to argue that corporate sustainability is a co-evolutionary process of emergence. Whilst many studies have examined how sustainability can be integrated into a business, less is known about corporate sustainability as an emergent process. To address the knowledge gap, this research answered three questions: (1) How does sustainability emerge in financial institutions? (2) What is the role of coherence in the emergence of sustainability? and (3) What conditions enable the emergence of sustainability? A mixed method sequential design was used. In the initial quantitative strand of the research, a holistic business assessment survey based on integral theory was implemented in two financial services organisations in Southern Africa. The results were analysed using self-organising maps and explored in narrative interviews in the subsequent qualitative strand of the research. The study makes three contributions to our understanding of emergence in corporate sustainability. First, by proposing four modes by which corporate sustainability is enacted; these elucidate how integral domains are enacted in corporate sustainability. Second, by clarifying the process of emergence by articulating how zones of coherence emerge between embodied and embedded dimensions. Third, by explaining how the shift to corporate sustainability occurs by means of four conditions. These contributions serve to advance our understanding of corporate sustainability as a fundamental shift in the functioning of an organisation towards coevolutionary self-organisation. It is recommended that corporate sustainability is holistically cultivated to support emergence and self-organisation, rather than being integrated through a linear process of change.