Enzymind Labs

While enzymind is still in the process of taking form this site will essentially be a lab notebook for project development and general day-to-day thoughts. The big picture is to focus on unconventional approaches to understanding and utilizing creativity by studying the emergent properties of complex systems.

The intent of organizing the various content on enzymind relating to emergent behavior is to be able to use this information to conduct research into these types of processes which will allow the formulation of some generalizations with the ultimate goal of developing a better and deeper understanding of the emergent 'magic' that we all experience and frequently take for granted on a daily basis. It is really quite amazing to be alive and the motivation for creating enzymind is to have more opportunities to think about and study some of the fundamental aspects of complex system organization which governs many of the processes in the natural world.

May 2006

Peter S. Requadt
Founder, Director
Enzymind.com

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For a little more background, this is an abstract summarizing some of the ideas that we are working on here.

THE ENZYMIND PROJECT: A Prototype On-line Laboratory for the Study of Nonlinear Complex Systems.

An essential feature of creative work is that it involves making literal, conceptual, or abstract connections between systems and domains that had previously been considered unrelated. The organization of, and the quantitative basis for, the interrelationship between fields of knowledge needs to be better understood in order to realize the maximum rate at which creative advances are made whether they be scientific, technological, or artistic. This proposal outlines a strategy for using a multidisciplinary web-based research, collaboration and learning environment focused on emergence in complex systems as a vehicle to explore particular features of human creativity. The emphasis of the research is to use an interdisciplinary approach that is intended to make a wider audience aware of and involved in complexity science. Several online-research projects are: 1.) High-dimensional multimedia database indexing as a means to model abstract concept interrelation in the creative process; 2.) The study of the principles nonlinear dynamic-systems in order to model biological attractors in phase-space; and, 3.) Technical digital photography to study pattern scale invariance associated with complex systems at multiple levels of organization in the everyday natural world. Contributors to the project will either be actively involved in conducting research by using and developing the website tools or alternatively less experienced participants will be able to simply observe the interactions of those doing research. A central hypothesis for the overall scheme of the proposed work is that all nonlinear complex systems have a common structure or pattern of organization and human creativity is a type of complex system. The general intent of the proposed projects is to compress the dimensionality but retain the structure of the complex systems under study in order to understand and identify their essential and generic features. The effectiveness of the proposed projects will be evaluated and quantified by their ability to demonstrate previously unseen connections between existing areas of knowledge and the extent to which the tools and functioning of the enzymind website contributed to enabling these connections.

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