A Complexity Science Account of Humor.

A common assumption of psychological theories of humor is that experienced funniness results from an incongruity between stimuli provided by a verbal joke or visual pun, followed by a sudden, surprising resolution of incongruity. In the perspective of complexity science, this characteristic incongruity-resolution sequence is modeled by a phase transition, where an initial attractor-like script, suggested by the initial joke information, is suddenly destructed, and in the course of resolution replaced by a less probable novel script. The transition from the initial to the enforced final script was modeled as a succession of two attractors with different minimum potentials, during which free energy becomes available to the joke recipient.

Information and Self-Organization II: Steady State and Phase Transition.

This paper starts from Schrödinger's famous question "what is life" and elucidates answers that invoke, in particular, Friston's free energy principle and its relation to the method of Bayesian inference and to Synergetics 2nd foundation that utilizes Jaynes' maximum entropy principle. Our presentation reflects the shift from the emphasis on physical principles to principles of information theory and Synergetics. In view of the expected general audience of this issue, we have chosen a somewhat tutorial style that does not require special knowledge on physics but familiarizes the reader with concepts rooted in information theory and Synergetics.

Causation and chance: Detection of deterministic and stochastic ingredients in psychotherapy processes.

A novel methodology for the empirical analysis of processes in psychotherapy was developed and tested. This method is based on the Fokker-Planck equation (FPE), a probabilistic model that detects the deterministic and stochastic components of a process. The deterministic component is given by the potential function underlying the process.

A synergetic perspective on urban scaling, urban regulatory focus and their interrelations.

By means of rich data, studies on urban scaling suggested that many urban properties scale with city size in universal ways. A recent study suggested an explanation why the behaviour of citizens in small and large cities differs qualitatively, by deriving the urban agents' behaviour from an extended version of Higgins' regarding humans' motivational system. Based on several sets of laboratory experiments, this study demonstrated that urban context of large, fast-paced cities and that of small slow-paced cities encourage two distinctively different motivations and behaviours on the part of their inhabitants.

Self-organization and information in biosystems: a case study.

Eigen's original molecular evolution equations are extended in two ways. (1) By an additional nonlinear autocatalytic term leading to new stability features, their dependence on the relative size of fitness parameters and on initial conditions is discussed in detail. (2) By adding noise terms that represent the spontaneous generation of molecules by mutations of substrate molecules, these terms are taken care of by both Langevin and Fokker-Planck equations.