Chris Fields Research

Chris Fields Research
Caunes Minervois, France
Mesilla, NM, USA

What is observation?

What does it mean to get some information by observing something? We open our eyes and instantly get new information about what's going on around us. How? What happens when we open our eyes? What about us changes when we get new information? Photons hit our eyes, rhodopsin molecules are activated, neurons fire ... but where's the information? And what makes it about something?

What is memory?

What does it mean to record some information somewhere and then be able to find it later? When you find something in memory, how do you know it's the same information you recorded? Could you tell if it's changed? What are the reference frames we use to tell that something is a memory, not a current percept?

What are objects?

We see the world as made up of more-or-less separate things that we can manipulate individually. How does that work? What's going on when an infant figures out that the moving thing she's watching is her own hand? Suppose you pick up a coffee cup. What else happens in the world as a result? How would you go about finding out?

What is time? What is space? What is causation?

These are traditionally regarded as philosophical questions, but they have practical importance in physics, computer science, biology, cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. Time, space and causation all involve boundaries, so these questions revolve around the single question: "what is a boundary?" All of my work, including my investigation of the boundaries of scientific disciplines, attempts to understand how observers draw boundaries and what the consequences of this boundary-drawing are. I mainly work on these questions from the perspectives of physics (some background on the physics of boundaries), cognitive neuroscience (some background on the cognitive neuroscience of boundaries), and developmental biology. I've also explored this question of boundaries using visual art.

Many of my scientific ideas come to me while I'm out walking in the woods or during my meditation practice. You can read my chapter on how meditation enables creativity from my new book with my wife, Alison Tinsley, Meditation: If You're Doing It, You're Doing It Right: Conversations with Meditators.

For an interesting sample of work on objects and how we perceive them by some of my colleagues, see "How Humans Recognize Objects: Segmentation, Categorization and Individual Identification," a Research Topic ebook I recently edited for Frontiers in Perception Science.

I am a regular participant in Science and Non-Duality (SAND) conferences. Recent presentations include What is entanglement, anyway?, What are our bodies?, All science is intuitive and a dialog on the relational nature of reality with Italian psychologist Riccardo Manzotti.

Recent publications:

Durant, F., Bischof, J., Fields, C., Morokuma, J., LaPalme, J., Hoi, A. and Levin, M. (2019) The role of early bioelectric signals in the regeneration of planarian anterior/posterior polarity. Biophysical Journal 116 in press (doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2019.01.029). Interactive model associated with this paper.

Fields, C. (2019) Decoherence as a sequence of entanglement swaps. Results in Physics 12: 1888-1892 (doi: 10.1016/j.rinp.2019.02.007).

Fields, C. and Glazebrook, J. F. (2019) A mosaic of Chu spaces and Channel Theory II: Applications to object identification and mereological complexity. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 31: 237-265 (doi: 10.1080/0952813X.2018.1544285).

Fields, C. and Glazebrook, J. F. (2019) A mosaic of Chu spaces and Channel Theory I: Category-theoretic concepts and tools. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 31: 177-213 (doi: 10.1080/0952813X.2018.1544282).

2018:

Fields, C. (2018) Some consequences of the thermodynamic cost of system identification. Entropy 20: 797 (doi: 10.3390/e20100797).

Fields, C. (2018) Sciences of observation. Philosophies 3: 29 (doi: 10.3390/philosophies3040029).

Fields, C. (2018) Mind is an abstraction. Constructivist Foundations 13: 350-352.

Fields, C. and Levin, M. (2018) Are planaria individuals? What regenerative biology is telling us about the nature of multicellularity. Evolutionary Biology 45: 237-247 (doi: 10.1007/s11692-018-9448-9). Interactive model associated with this paper.

Fields, C. (2018) First-person science is third person and vice versa. Constructivist Foundations 13: 240-241.

Fields, C. and Levin, M. (2018) Multiscale memory and bioelectric error correction in the cytoplasm-cytoskeleton-membrane system. WIRES Systems Biology and Medicine 10: e1410 (doi: 10.1002/wsbm.1410).

Fields, C., Hoffman, D. D., Prakash, C. and Singh, M. (2018) Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and application to cognition. Cognitive Systems Research 47: 186-213 (doi: 10.1016/j.cogsys.2017.10.003).

2017:

Fields, C. (2017) Object permanence. In: T.K. Shackelford and V.A. Weekes-Shackelford (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, Entry 2373 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2373-1).

Fields, C., Hoffman, D. D., Prakash, C. and Prentner, R. (2017) Eigenforms, interfaces and holographic encoding: Toward an evolutionary account of objects and spacetime. Constructivist Foundations 12: 265-291 (includes commentaries by E. Dietrich, U. Kordeš, L. H. Kauffman, K. Werner and A. Marcianò plus author response).

Durant, F., Morokuma, J., Fields, C., Williams, K., Adams, D.S. and Levin, M. (2017) Long-term, stochastic editing of regenerative anatomy via targeting endogenous bioelectric gradients. Biophysical Journal 112: 2231-2243 (doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2017.04.011). Supplementary information and interactive model associated with this paper.

Fields, C. and Glazebrook, J. F. (2017) Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: A positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of ASD in early infancy. Cognitive Neurodynamics 11: 1-21 (doi: 10.1007/s11571-016-9419-8).

2016:

Fields, C. (2016) Effective dark energy from decoherence. Theoretical Physics 1: 22-29 (doi: 10.22606/tp.2016.11006).

Fields, C. (2016) Building the observer into the system: Toward a realistic description of human interaction with the world. Systems 4: 32 [29 pp.] (doi: 10.3390/systems4040032).

Fields, C. (2016) Unitary quantum theory as a formal framework for a theory of consciousness. In: P. Saran Satsangi and S. Hameroff (Eds.) Consciousness: Integrating Eastern and Western Perspectives. New Delhi: New Age Books (pp. 127-146).

Fields, C. (2016) Decompositional equivalence: A fundamental symmetry underlying quantum theory. Axiomathes 26: 279-311 (doi: 10.1007/s10516-016-9289-z).

Fields, C. (2016) Nobel numbers: Time-dependent centrality measures on co-authorship graphs. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67: 2212-2222 (doi: 10.1002/asi.23547).

Fields, C. (2016) Editorial: How Humans Recognize Objects: Segmentation, Categorization and Individual Identification. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science 7: 400 [2 pp.] (doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00400).

Fields, C. (2016) Visual re-identification of individual objects: A core problem for organisms and AI. Cognitive Processing 17: 1-13 (doi: 10.1007/s10339-015-0736-3).

2015:

Dietrich, E. and Fields, C. (2015) Science generates limit paradoxes. Axiomathes 25: 409-432 (doi: 10.1007/s10516-015-9267-x).

Fields, C. (2015) Reverse engineering the world: A commentary on Hoffman, Singh and Prakash, "The interface theory of perception". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22: 1526-1529 (doi: 10.3758/s13423-014-0742-y).

Fields, C. (2015) Co-authorship proximity of A. M. Turing Award and John von Neumann Medal winners to the disciplinary boundaries of computer science. Scientometrics 104: 809-825 (doi: 10.1007/s11192-015-1575-9).

Fields, C. (2015) Close to the edge: Co-authorship proximity of Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine, 1991 - 2010, to cross-disciplinary brokers. Scientometrics 103: 267-299 (doi: 10.1007/s11192-015-1526-5).

Chernet, B. T., Fields, C. and Levin, M. (2015) Long-range gap junctional signaling controls oncogene-mediated tumorigenesis in Xenopus laevis embryos. Frontiers in Physiology: Biophysics 5: 519 [15 pp.] (doi: 10.3389/fphys.2014.00519). Interactive model associated with this paper.

Fields, C. (2015) How small is the center of science? Short cross-disciplinary cycles in co-authorship graphs. Scientometrics 102: 1287-1306 (doi: 10.1007/s11192-014-1468-3).

2014:

Fields, C. (2014) Motion, identity and the bias toward agency. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 597 [13 pp.] (doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00597).

Fields, C. (2014) Some effects of the Human Genome Project on the Erdős collaboration graph. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics 4(2): 3-24 (doi: 10.5642/jhummath.201402.03).

Fields, C. (2014) Equivalence of the symbol grounding and quantum system identification problems. Information 5: 172-189 (doi: 10.3390/info5010172).

Fields, C. (2014) On the Ollivier-Poulin-Zurek definition of objectivity. Axiomathes 24: 137-156 (doi: 10.1007/s10516-013-9218-3).

Fields, C. (2014) A physics-based metaphysics is a metaphysics-based metaphysics. Acta Analytica 29: 131-148 (doi: 10.1007/s12136-013-0204-6).

Fields, C. (2014) Consistent quantum mechanics admits no mereotopology. Axiomathes 24: 9-18 (doi: 10.1007/s10516-012-9202-3).

Fields, C. (2014) This boundary-less world. In: D. Chopra (Ed.) Brain, Mind, Cosmos: The Nature of Our Existence and the Universe. Carlsbad, CA: Chopra Foundation. Ch. 13.

2013:

Fields, C. (2013) Review of The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Ruth Kastner (Cambridge, 2013). Disputatio V(37): 361-367.

Fields, C. (2013) How humans solve the frame problem. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 25: 441-456 (doi: 10.1080/0952813X.2012.741624).

Fields, C. (2013) On recognizing an object with a partition. Logique et Analyse 56 (224): 391-403.

Fields, C. (2013) A whole box of Pandoras: Systems, boundaries and free will in quantum theory. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (Special Issue on Paradox and Mind) 25: 291-302 (doi: 10.1080/0952813X.2013.782981).

Fields, C. (2013) Metaphorical motion in mathematical reasoning: Further evidence for pre-motor implementation of structure mapping in abstract domains. Cognitive Processing 14: 217-229 (doi: 10.1007/s10339-013-0555-3).

Fields, C. (2013) The principle of persistence, Leibniz's law, and the computational task of object re-identification. Human Development 56: 147-166 (doi: 10.1159/000350206).

Fields, C. (2013) Bell's theorem from Moore's theorem. International Journal of General Systems 42: 376-385 (doi: 10.1080/03081079.2012.751382).

2012:

Fields, C. (2012) Implementation of classical communication in a quantum world. Information 3: 809-831 (doi: 10.3390/info3040809).

Fields, C. (2012) A model-theoretic interpretation of environment-induced superselection. International Journal of General Systems 41: 847-859 (doi: 10.1080/03081079.2012.707197).

Fields, C. (2012) Do autism spectrum disorders involve a generalized object categorization and identification dysfunction? Medical Hypotheses 79: 344-351 (doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2012.05.032).

Fields, C. (2012) The very same thing: Extending the object token concept to incorporate causal constraints on individual identity. Advances in Cognitive Psychology 8: 234-247 (doi: 10.2478/v10053-008-0119-8).

Fields, C. (2012) Autonomy all the way down: Systems and dynamics in quantum Bayesianism. Physics and Philosophy 2012: 018 [27 pp.] (http://hdl.handle.net/2003/29402).

Fields, C. (2012) If physics is an information science, what is an observer? Information 3: 92-123 (doi: 10.3390/info3010092).

Fields, C. (2012) Motion as manipulation: Implementation of motion and force analogies by event-file binding and action planning. Cognitive Processing 13: 231-241 (doi: 10.1007/s10339-012-0436-1).

Fields, C. (2012) What humans can't do: A review of Derek Partridge, The Seductive Computer. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 24: 267-270 (doi: 10.1080/0952813X.2011.653101).

2011:

Fields, C. (2011) Classical system boundaries cannot be determined within quantum Darwinism. Physics Essays 24: 518-522 (doi: 10.4006/1.3644391).

Fields, C. (2011) Trajectory recognition as the basis for object individuation: A functional model of object file instantiation and object token encoding. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science 2: 49 [12 pp.] (doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00049).

de Boer, F. W. N. and Fields, C. (2011) A re-evaluation of evidence for light neutral bosons in nuclear emulsions. International Journal of Modern Physics E: Nuclear Physics 20: 1787-1803 (doi: 10.1142/S021830131101960X).

Fields, C. (2011) From "Oh, OK" to "Ah, yes" to "Aha!": Hyper-systemizing and the rewards of insight. Personality and Individual Differences 50: 1159-1167 (doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.02.010).

Fields, C. (2011) Implementation of structure mapping by event-file binding and action planning: A model of tool-improvisation analogies. Psychological Research 75: 129-142 (doi: 10.1007/s00426-010-0290-7).

2010:

Fields, C. (2010) Quantum Darwinism requires an extra-theoretical assumption of encoding redundancy. International Journal of Theoretical Physics 49: 2523-2527 (doi: 10.1007/s10773-010-0443-x).

CV and Publications, 1978 - 2018

My Erdős number is 3. Explanation, supporting data and musings about the structure of scientific disciplines.

ResearchGate Profile Loop Profile LinkedIn Profile.

Email contact: fieldsres@gmail.com

Copyright © 2010-2018 Chris Fields