Slashdot Mirror
Emergence
The author makes a point that there are 3 main camps of scientific study.
- The study of simple systems - under a few dozen variables, like electromagnetism, or celestial mechanics.
- The study of stochastic systems - few million to few billion variables, like actuarial sciences and genetics.
- The study of disorganized complexity. Systems in the middle between a dozen and a few million variables, where the second order characteristics - how they interact, is of primary concern.
Deduction and induction work for the first two camps, but for the third, the interactions cause actions and reactions which are what scientists politely call counter intuitive, meaning your first thought is Huh? Or, in other words, it behaves quite differently from what your instincts and (so-called) common sense would tell you.
There are five basic principles for developing a system (or simulation of one) which can express emergent behavior:
- More is different. You get a very different behavior of the system when certain thresholds are reached.
- Ignorance is useful. Ants communicate with a vocabulary of around 20 words/ideas.
- Encourage random encounters. Much of the behavior of an ant colony comes from them just bumping into each other (or external things like food, or my foot).
- Look for patterns in the signs. Even with the limited vocabulary of ants, they can also express things based on the decay in the pheromones they deposit.
- Pay attention to your neighbors. Also described as "local information can lead to global wisdom."
One of the enduring myths we have, is that of the Ant Queen. The myth supposes that there is some central planning done in an ant colony. Instead, the queen exists only to pop eggs out. Male ants have such short lives, that in most species of ants, they have no mouths to eat with; they just don't live long enough to get hungry. The production of warriors and workers is stimulated by pheromones in the colony. Information on where to gather food is gathered through random acts of bumping into things. There is no ant which tells another to go lift that bale or tote that barge. It appears that our intelligence is a by-product of the neural interactions of our brains.
The economist Jane Jacobs had been studying things like this for years, and has been demonized by the majority of economists: they want to believe in some centralized controlling force, control that force, and you control the development of your economic system. People reading her books tend to think she worships sidewalks, instead, she values the communication that can only happen on sidewalks; people meeting each other and exchanging words. You can't say "hi" to your neighbors if you are each zipping past each other on the freeway.
One can experiment with emergent behavior with some software tools. The author explains a few, of which you are most likely to have experience with SimCity.
The main difference between chaos theory and emergent behavior theory lies in a couple important differences. A chaotic system has a number of determinable feedback loops, all of which are (usually critically) dependent upon the starting conditions. Emergent behavior has more to do with feedback loops causing totally different behavior, and when some threshold (usually population) is passed, the nature of the system drastically changes.
If you are looking for sample code to simulate things, you won't find it in this book. If, however, you want to get an overview of where this field is coming from, read this book.
You can purchase Emergence: the Connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Could someone translate this for non Gentoo users? :)
Groupthink
Michael Crichton touches on autonomous organization processes in his book Prey...however remember that Crichton is very very afraid of technology.
If you think
There goes my Christmas book budget! Another "must-have" gets added to my list.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Try also John H Holland 'Hidden Order' and 'Emergence: From Chaos to Order'.
Ok here goes:
Ants brains are very very very complex, far too complex if you can't even be arsed to read the book. The End.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
While A New Kind of Science may have lots of pretty pictures, and may be a decent survey of the field of cellular automata and its potential applications, and while Stephen Wolfram is no doubt a smart man, the quality of the book is overshadowed by his pathetically arrogant writing, wherein he pratically claims credit for CA, despite actually doing very little to even further the field. It's sad that people are beginning to think he really is a leader in the study. Please dissociate Wolfram and CA in your mind. Thanks...
Just from reading the review, this reminds me of Out of Control, which may be a bit outdated but is still a very relevant look at similar concepts.
"...using cellular automata as a means of explaining higher order behavior (like Wolfram in A New Kind of Science)."
Well, not quite sure if it can explain as high order behavior as Wolfram yet...
.. we kind of knew already that complexity can be acheived with a basic set of rules re flocking. This may be interesting, but its hardly new.
Sounds like they are rehashing old ideas into a book just in time for Xmas to get you to splash your cash.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
This is, indeed, an interesting book and the reviewer fails to point out that Emergence goes into detail concerning the karma, moderation and meta-moderation system of this here web site.
:-) Towards the end where he's talking about emergent video games I got a little bored, but definitely a book that got me thinking. Worth reading even if you are aware of the way ants behave, because you probably don't know as much about slime mold as you should.
Author seems to think taco is a genius or something, but it's still a good read
John.
I read the first two chapters or so of that book. It's totally an essay strrrreeeetched into a book. Terribly boring (in a lite-on-content sort of way). On the topic of taking recommendations from Slashdot: A poster raved about "The Non-Designers Design Book," so I bought it. It's not completely worthless for total amateurs (like me), but it's pretty much written for the purpose of teaching secretaries how to make better-looking newsletters. Lesson learned.
Monstromart: Where shopping is a baffling ordeal
and theres me thinking windows WAS a religion.
:(
Man thats 5 years of worshipping down the toilet
...but interesting, nonetheless. For two viewpoints that are more or less opposing, read Daniel Dennett and John Searle - the latter of whom is a latter-day dualist who talks a lot about emergence, aka emergent properties. Dennett thinks machines will be able to think, Searle doubts it.
I find the 3 classes of scientific study to be abritray. I would like some proof of the 20 word ant vocabulary which seems to be pulled out of a very tiny ass.
Cellular automata (Noun): A cell phone-wielding social ingrate. The automata's effective IQ is proportional to the distance between phone and ear. Usually identified by loud, annoying one-sided conversations on buses and restaurants.
I knew our collective hive mind would come in handy someday:
1. "I, for one, welcome our emergent overlords."
2. "???"
3. "Profit!"
4. "In Soviet Russia, our groupthink comes from emergent behvaior, or is it the other way around?"
5. "Who cares? Look, it's Natalie Portman!"
6. "Does Netcraft confirm it?"
7. "Yeah, but only in Korea."
8. "Netcraft does not confirm it. Old people are not quite dead yet."
9. "OK, that's the Monty Python reference out of the way. Has someone bashed China yet?"
10. "No, and we also haven't bashed Micro$oft yet, at least not until this line.
Crap. I'm only at #10 and the well's running dry. (What, you want me to yell "MEEPT!" or something?)
If you're a glass-half-empty type: we won't be as useful in the underground sugar mines as I'd previously thought. We're only capable of half as many thoughts.
If you're a glass-half-full type: or maybe we've achieved antlike emergent behavior using only ten words and ideas, making us twice as efficient as our formic emergent-behavior-exhibiting overlords!
If you're interested in emergent behaviour and like sci-fi thrillers, you must read Michael Crichton's Prey.
I know a lot of people here seems to despise Crichton but, IMHO, he writes book that are really fun (and much better than the movies they span).. so I encourage everyone to give them a try.
btw, if you like Prey you should read Andromeda Strain , also...
--krahd
mod me up, Scottie!
mod me up scottie!
was about coming to term with Gentoo, guess not.
nothing more to say
Seastead this.
but isn't this terrain Douglas Hofstadter covered about twenty-five years ago in Gödel, Escher, Bach? Does Johnson's book say much new? Has a quarter-century's "progress" in CA and AI brought us any closer to singularity? And will I ever stop posting this comment in rhetorical question form?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I actually quite enjoyed this book. The stuff in there about the emergence of communities and trading groups in cities as a result of simple motivations was really interesting, and got me thinking about this for a while. The way in which simple interactions within an ant colony result in complex higher level behaviours such as cemetries and food distribution are also quite amazing!
However, it wasn't until I read Mitch Resnick's 'Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams' that emergence and self organisation really clicked for me. Resnick basically developed a scripting language and an environment for investigating emergence in biological systems (termites, turtles, ants) and social systems such as traffic patterns and communities. The system is called StarLogo, and is well worth googling for.
brings up an interesting idea in his Ender's Game series of books. What if there were a sort of connection between all the ants, or birds, or creatures that show this sort of behavior, like there was with the buggers in his book. What if there is some sort of connection there that we with current tools cannot detect. Or as George Lucas put it, sort of like the Force. It's there, it allows birds/ants to communicate in a method that we can't detect. Is that possible?
Try http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671 872346/102-1898615-3811317?v=glance.
It's a bit dated, since complexity theory and emergence are actually not all that new. People familiar with cellular automata modeling and games like SimCity will chuckle.
But the book is fascinating, has great explanations of many of the concepts, and touches on many of the people who have made the study of complexity so fascinating. I'd definitely recommend it for a geek holiday gift.
I prefer his 2004 Book, Mind Wide Open. A very interesting read into the way the brain works. Good in conjunction with Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence, for those interested in Cortical AI.
Or atheists?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
BTW has anybody else noticed the analogies between Asimov's original Foundation series and the adoption of Open Source/Free Licensed Software. We are about heading towards the second Stallman crises : The Merchant Princes.
This was also a theme from the Matrix. The machine world was not controlled by a single overlord but was instead made up of billions of different programs. All the way down to the "wind" or the "bird" programs. Taken individually they're all rather simple and pointless, but when taken as a whole they build something much more valuable.
Digging in my book boxes to find Foundation and empire.
I think there are great chasms of logic in this.
I highly suggest also reading a Steven Pinker book such as The Blank Slate (which has goes into many aspects of this debate) before getting too deep into emergence. Then at least you will be aware of other views.
The big idea Pinker aligns himself with (as I do) is that there is structure to be understood in the organization of the smaller elements, and this structure is perhaps as important as the elements themselves. Though describing these structures, we will gain understanding of the overall behavior, and not get stuck treating it like a magic black-box.
[Apologies to all the people I mentioned if I've summarized their complicated views in an overly simplistic manner]
I quoted this excellent book and gave some future directions about using the bottom-up Emergence technique when dealing with Threat Modeling. Read the last chapter in my MSc paper Threat Modeling for Web Applications using the STRIDE model Comments welcome. Thanks
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The essential concept is that each individual is a simple agent that operates autonomously, and makes very few very simple decisions as it goes about its work. The behaviour of one individual is unremarkable, but the behaviour that emerges from a large group of the same individuals is really quite amazing.
Because the concepts are really quite logically simple, this stuff is really simple to program too. Just fire up perl or java or any language that has a similar capability to OO concepts, write a simple object - your agent - that behaves according to a simple set of rules and responds in defined ways to certain stimuli. Make a wrapper program to create the playing field, instantiate as many 'agents' as you see fit, and let them loose. Tweak, rinse, repeat.
As an aside, when I was writing a simulation to emulate the behaviour of ants foraging (more to prove that perl and java were suitable languages for the task than to demonstrate anything new with ants per se), I went off and RTFM'ed quite a bit on ants. They're very interesting little critters in their own right. I picked the eyes out of the various behaviours of a bunch of different species of ants to come up with one that made a fun simulation (refer references below).
The bare mechanical simplicity with which some of these critters operate is really quite amazing. Take, for example, the concept of trail laying. I guess it's pretty widely known that many species of ants lay trails from food sources back to the nest to guide other ants to the food. (Try: find a line of ants climbing up the wall in the kitchen or somewhere, moisten your finger, wipe straight through the line (washing off the trail). They'll be all disoriented for a little while, but they'll quickly re-establish the trail, largely by random search). Anyhoo, what's really quite cool is how one species does it. The trail is just an emission from the back end of the ant that wipes along the ground as it walks. The mechanics are such that if the ant has a full crop, it puts pressure on the digestive tract, and forces stuff out the back. If its only lightly fed, it only forces a bit out the back, if its had a big feed, it forces a lot out the back and lays a denser trail. The outcome is that the ants lay stronger trails to the better food sources. Elegant, isn't it!
I could go on forever, but I won't. Some references below. Another behaviour that is probably even more interesting than trail laying is navigation. They're absolutely amazing. Various ants use various combinations of reference to the sun, counting the amount of ground that passes underneath them as they walk *AND* remembering turns!!!, and reference to major landmarks as they travel. Did I say amazing?
Anyhoo, here's a bunch of references on ant behaviour if anyone's interesting.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If that were true, my company would be the most productive on the planet.
Is Christmas vacation here yet? :-\
Genius within http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151005516/ is similar in scope to this topic. It discusses how intelligence can arise out of a mass of smaller pieces(i.e. bacteria, lymphocytes, cytoplasm, neurons). Definitely an interesting read as well as providing some examples where and why scientific advances aren't able to keep pace with biological mechanisms.
I have long been interested in emergent systems. I picked up this book a few months ago, very excited. But one chapter in I was so frustrated I nearly stopped reading. Two chapters in I quit.
The author seems to not be able to stay on topic. The idea is presented, then a long digression into who worked with whom and how they new each other (a needless asside into Turing's life almost did me in). Then the idea is briefly recapped.
To be fair, I didn't finish the book, so my view may very well be unfounded as it pertains to the complete work. But honestly, I felt like I was wasting my time. Ideas were good, execution: poor.
The Tipping Point is a book based on similar ideas that reads like melted butter is smooth. Not as technical by any stretch, but at least comparing writing quality, The Tipping Point is an example of how it should have been done.
Kind of like the continuum going from observing at the atomic level to observing at the macroscopic level. The physics of the atomic level is VERY different then the physics of the macroscopic level. Understandably, when you get to a point where you can't use one model over the other, things can get pretty hairy.
Can you say that the atomic level CAUSES the macroscopic level, i.e. one level emerges out of the other? My feeling is, it doesn't make much of a difference. The interactions you get depend upon your level of observation- they don't necessarily depend on what the interactions are at a different level. Observing at both levels is useful for different reasons. For example, for most low-speed aerodynamics, the model of air that you use is streamlines in the flow. For this situation and it's goals, it doesn't much matter to the airplane what is going on at the atomic level. The airplane is on a macroscopic level, so what matters is the physics of the macroscopic level. You fit the model to the same level and dementions of the thing you're observing. Remember calculus and limits? The limit works because it creates a fundmental building block of experience in a relavant dimension. Ex: dt is an infinitely small measure of a direction in time. But time is relevant in the demensions of the thing you're observing (actions the real world), so it's useful for the theory about the real world you want to create.
Due to my study on how people work, and that there are fundamental principles of human interaction that apply regardless of the individual person, I think it's probable that they're are fundmental principles of the overall interactions of an ant colony (we may not know them yet, but they are there). It's just that if you observe the colony at the microscopic level, you may not find them, since you're looking in the wrong place. Chaos Theory shows that even when behavior appears random, there are principles which create the randomness.
I guess it's nice these people have their "new" science to investigate- emergence. Hey, if it creates some new thought and gets people interested, I'm all for it. But I don't think that one thing is emerging out of another: it's just observing that for this particular level of observation, traits that were appearent at other levels have a bearing on the problem.
It's all the same thing, just different levels with different rules. (For example, duality is pretty much a law in the universe. You can't really equate the things that compose the duality, you can only recognize that the duality exists.)
Zing! What a comeback. I bow to your wit, sir.
Another good book on the subject of emergent systems is After Thought by James Baily. It is a quick and enjoyable read that takes a look at the evolution of mathematical and philosophical attempts at describing our universe from the ancient Greeks to modern day scientists. Specifically, he focuses on how we attempt to model the human brain electronically, and touches on parallel computing, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, and the techniques required to allow a machine to learn.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
It's worth mentioning here that, unlike some of the other books mentioned, 'Emergence' ends up tying the concepts to modern applications. For example, it discusses Amazon.com's use of self-organizing groups.
I found the following to be surprising and useful background for the glut of writing about complexity/emergence/universality etc. Lots of historical detail from J. S. Mill onwards about the use of emergence in philosophy. Good bibliography too of which I can recommend the Kaufman books as good fun:g ent/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emer
This seems like a fascinating book. I wrote a research paper on how local information leads to global coordination, and seems very relevant to the topics covered in the book. The idea is to take an array of nodes which are in one of two states. Each node can tell the state of only a few neighbors on either side. The idea is to find a cellular automata rule so that all states in the array converge to one state (this is known as the density classification task). This is the "local information can lead to global wisom" idea as stated in the review and is relevent to a score of biological and economic decentralized systems. I used genetic algorithms to solve this problem. I was a semi-finalist in the Siemens-Westinghouse contest and submitted the paper to the Intel Talent Search (yet to be judged). A pdf can be found at http://www.chem-phys.com/intel/alex.pdf
Coalescent, by Stephen Baxter.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/aristotle.soul .html
The thing though, even when technology *isn't* evil in Crichton's books (as in Congo) the books are still about how some discovery could change the world but doesn't (semi-intelligent apes, cloned dinosaurs, time travel, etc) -- in the end *always* the discovery gets lost and the world is no different than before. Wouldn't it be more interesting to read about how time travel or cloned dinosaurs would change society?
wasn't this already written by Isaac Asimov?
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
In what other country is it common to refer to foreigners as "white devils" or "black devils" or just "foreign devils".
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
Flamebait mods be ready...Truth hurts.
This book was reviewed by Wired Magazine in 2002 when it came out. I read the book and liked it; it was insightful but redundant.
Is it possible that there is nothing important in the world of Technetium so the front page of the hallowed Slashdot has to use two year old commercial buzz from Wired?
Who mediates your information?
I'm surprised about the statement regarding economists supporting centralized planning of economies. Good economists understand that the free market is an emergent system, and planned centralized economies have a long history of failure.
Of course a lot of socialist economists get the press, because there are so many liberal leftists in academia.
Why people who believe in evolution and not in creationism yet don't believe in the emergent free market but instead believe in central socialist planning is beyond me.
It's worth pointing out that, within metaphysics (the subdiscipline of philosophy, not the witches-and-crystals nonsense in the metaphysics section of the bookstore), 'emergence' has a stronger meaning. This comes out in some of the writings on the mind-body problem (see Tim O'Connor's writings for an example). This stronger idea is the idea that, once an appropriate aggregation of low-level bits is created, new laws come into play. What's beautiful about the normal, weaker form of emergence is that simple rules determining the low-level stuff give you 'unpredictable' high-level behavior for free. But it isn't literally unpredictable--perfect knowledge and unlimited processing power would give you the ability to predict it perfectly--it's just unpredictable from any normal human perspective. The stronger form of emergence is such that even with all this knowledge, the high-level behavior would still be unpredictable; it overrides normal physics.
Slashdot is a practical enough place that few readers probably care about strong emergence, but it's possible that someone might have ended up becoming confused as a result of this distinction. Neither Searle nor Dennett are particularly serious metaphysicians, so they (like Andy Clark) are principally interested in the weak form.
It would be really interesting to try to study and correlate some apparently phenomona in animal behavior and sociology.
For example, swarming of locusts is one such phenomenon. It does not happen every year. It does not happen everywhere. Yet, when it happens it takes the shape of enormous disasters, such as what has been happening in Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Even Cyprus and the Canary Islands are affected!
Also, look at how some teens hanging out or at a bar would be under peer pressure and herd mentality and do something stupid like doing cat calls to passing females, or beating up someone of a different ethnicity, or just doing cat calls.
Or look at demonstrations that go out of control, such as the ones against the WTO in Seattle and in other places. Things can get out of control and you have damaged shops and cars.
All this has nothing to do with software. But it is very interesting to see what factors are at play when an individual decides to go with the flow against his better judgement, causing damage to others.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
But the world changed while he was writing Out of Control largely due to the exaggerated importance placed on Mitchell, Hraber and Crutchfield's 1993 paper which cast aspersions on Langton's lambda and implicitly on the whole notion of "border of order--edge of chaos".
Wolfram's reunification of his own old Class 3 and Class 4 under his more recent Principle of Computational Equivalence goes even further in a direction I'd rather see us retreat from.
I actually read the book by Johnson reviewed here for contrast while I was wading through Wolfram's tome. Emergence now sits among a very small pile of books I keep on my desk in case I need to refer to them. A New Kind of Science also sits on my desk, but mainly to elevate my iBook, especially since Wolfram made the whole book I available online. I had to grab Out of Control off the living room bookshelf, but it still ranks as my favourite from the '90s.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
observations
Theres some interesting observational research, Oscillations and Chaos in Ant Societies, R.V. Sole, O. Miramontes, and B.C. Goodwin, J. Theor. Biol. 161, pp.343-357, 1993.
In David Suzuki's, The Sacred Balance, Brian Goodwin (author also of, HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS) made some interesting observational discoveries with ants. Synchronous emergent behaviour arose when individual *chaotic* ants reached a certain density. Goodwin concluded that ...
simulation
You can see a simulation of the ants behaviour begin modeled here. You can find more about cellular automata and ants by Akira Kageyama. The source code (java) is here.
limitations
But there are limitations in trying to model living systems with computers. Some things just happen in nature that cannot be modelled. I remember reading Bart Kosko (Fuzzy thinking) and in it he describes how modelling animals nature for example doesn't take into account things like breaking bones. Sure you could assign probability of a bone breaking, describe the forces on the bone when it breaks. But in nature it just happens.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I took a Philosophy course in the early 90's, 'Mind and Machine', which focused primarily on Dennett's book, 'Consciousness Explained'. I was obtaining my BS in Computer Science, and already had a BA in Psychology, but this unrequired elective was my favorite class of all time. On page 440, after discussing Searle, Dennett says 'Complexity does matter'. Human behaviour is complex, but valid generalizations can be made when analyzing the group (hence, Sociology). But a group is composed of multiple individuals, so which is more complex, the group or a single person? Or is there a threshold...? As computers gain power, chaos and intricacy are less daunting. Today there is a stronger argument for Determinism: just put all the facts in a big computer and you can predict any outcome (or the odds of possible outcomes, with a quantum approach). As a human being, I prefer to feel that as long as I am alive, I have some actual control over my existance, and my outlook is instinctually Cartesian (sorry, Daniel). Back in the 70's, my Sociology professor criticized me of over-generalizing. I told him that that is how I think. He accepted my defense. As a programmer, databases, data, stored procedures, optimization, reports, queries, troubleshooting, etc, come naturally to me. I was inspired by my numerical analysis class, but have yet to utilize that training. I really like to analyze data, and enjoy predictibility (generalization) and exceptions. Records from sources such as the Food Lion MVP cards would be fascinating to correlate with other collected data related to those persons. But it concerns me ethically. I don't want to enable a future that will restrict peoples' options based on statistically validated probabilities, at the expense of the individual, even though I think it will happen anyway. In some ways, this has always been true. A PHD used to ensure a lucrative future. But it seems now that more often, test scores, proven ability, and credentials carry less weight than perception. I just ordered Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.
That is "Right" with a capital "R". I'm in the final chapter of The Blank Slate which has been my train reading over quite a few weekends. It's a couple of years since I read Johnson and Wolfram.
Pinker says some useful stuff, especially the notion that we are each the product of the dynamics of our youthful peer groups much more than of anything else apart from our genes. But he also sometimes goes beyond reason to defend some very temporary fashions of the new Right when a real grasp of the deeper implications of emergence might have helped him think more clearly.
The real argument is discrete versus continuous and the real answer which neither side wants to hear is "both", as it is to the parent poster's attempt to set up an opposition between elemental emergence and functionsl structure.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I'm not sure the words "good" and "economist" should be used in the same sentence, and I say this as a business major of sorts. "Well meaning" and "economist" are a much better match.
Not that I'm a great proponant of centralized economies, wether government or corporate run, but there is an emergent rational for defending them. Especially if your background leads to the "free thinking science type" as opposed to the "free thinking religious type". Although, to a degree, the free market does create alot of random interactions, great for emergence, but it also has a lot of very complicated interactions, not great for emergence. Remember, simplicity is best.
In my neighborhood there are about three predatory loaning facilities and when they close their doors around five o'clock their storefronts are home to the teens and twentysomethings selling marijuanna, crack, etc. A few storefronts down is a nice coffee shop, a bar (with great bands and no cover), a video store, and some clothing shops, all independantly owned. YEAH! Free market! whooo!
Anyway, here we have various emergent economic clusters forming around the markets for quick loans (aimed at my black and appalachian neighbors), drugs (aimed at... well everyone really), and typical alterno-comerce (aimed at me).My neighborhood, as an emergent intelligence, deciding wether it will be known as the place to go see music and buy clothes, or a place to buy drugs. These three clusters do not reinforce eachothers markets in some great and grand capitalist emergence. In fact, the drug dealers reduce the rate of street flow, by appearing and acting intimidating, hoping to make an impression on their costumers and competitors. The predetory lending facilities reduce the flow of commerce since a byproduct of their short run business plan is less cash for families (and less cash for my neighborhood), and the business council of alterno-peeps want to clean up the neighborhood, knocking out major markets in both drug dealing and predatory lending. Yeah, competition!
Most, "lefty" or even "moderate science types" are interested in creating a simple atmosphere where topics can be well researched. Where they can dialogue nicely, and come to collective conclusions about the viscocity of mice urine, or whatever. The more this atmosphere is subject to interruption; gun fire from rival gangs of drug dealing, loud rock and roll from the punk bar, etc. the less this group reaches higher conclusions. The less sophisticated their smaller emergent community can become.
Socialism, and again, I'm not a big proponant, makes a very simple system (good for emergence): You have no money, you gave it all to the government, and now with your weekly coffee voucher you can go talk mice urine with your cronies. It all depends on what you want out of society. If you want a wide variety of activities from which to choose from the, well then, the free-er the market the wider the variety (including goat prostitution, and random acts of explosions). If you want to concentrate your efforts on a single subject, or a very few, then the more your external market is controlled, then the better off you are.
We all, no matter how rugged an individual we think we are, want our excitingly random world to be controlled and predictable to some degree. No one wants to wrestle a brown bear off their computer so they can get on line. The market, is not as unsympathetic as nature, being a product of mankind. But it does not provide shelter, food, etc. just simply by exhisting. And these kinds of quallities, along with education and other lefty socialist niceities, can only improve emergence.
I found the book thin on substance. It presents a few really neat ideas, which the reviewer pretty well summarizes in the review: good stuff for stimulating thinking, no question, but not treated with great depth or nuance. It was the same few points repeated over and over.
Incidentally, the book review above seemed not to be a review at all. It summarized some of the ideas of the book while offering no comment whatsoever on, say, the quality of writing, or how this book compares to others in the genre -- things I would look for in a review.
also see collection of philosophy papers on emergence
I have, and I need to re-read it (once isn't enough) - but one thing I do remember, quite clearly (and annoyingly), is that it seemed that on every other page, he consistently writes how he wasn't the first person to come up with this, or that - how he was merely bringing various ideas together, ideas that existed from others (and himself) from before, into a cohesive whole. He plainly writes, many, many times, how he is merely standing on shoulders of giants.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
However I have had first hand observation of this "phenomenon". While in USMC boot camp there were times when we were all tired and not really wanting to be there. After a time, I would "switch" my additude, and focus, and think, fuggit... I'll do what he [drill instructor] really wants. And soon every member of the platoon was focused, cooperating, and ultimately performing how the drill instructor desired.
I do not perceive to be a super-hero, however, I have many times wondered since then how a single individuals' attitude could add to a group's performance.
or maybe that was Richard Dawkins in Climbing Mount Improbable. Both are worthy reads on emergent modelling.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Several years ago, I read of an ant parasite whose life cycle includes sheep. When one of these parasites matures in the body of an ant, it causes the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass. There, it can be eaten by a sheep to continue the parasite's life cycle.
We had an extememly weird happening in Metro Phoenix within that last week or so. An expensive car, Porsche or something like that, hit another vehicle from behind. No one was in the Porsche. Police began checking backward from the scene of the accident. Two blocks back, they found the body of the man who had been driving the vehicle. Witnesses who had seen the accident develop said the driver had climbed through the roof onto the top of the car. From there, he either fell or jumped to his death.
Hi family later claimed that some parasite had infected his brain during a trip to Mexico. The supposition was that the man's frontal cortex, which consequences can be worked out, had been damaged by the parasite.
Anyone wonder why the image of an ant climbing to the tip of a blade of grass came to my mind?
The Jeff Goldblum character in "Jurassic Park" did a lot of preaching about the Park being so complex that it could not really be controlled.
Yet, when the disaster unrolled, it was not in any way the result of complexity. Rather, the disaster was the result of deliberate sabotage by a trusted insider.
That's a Crichton habit which bugs be severely.
This post has too many grammar and spelling errors. Heck, it's practically unreadable!
It's good for a short coffee shop read.
Much more interesting books on the subject are "Complexity" by Waldrop and "Swarm Intelligence," by I forget whom.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
A small quibble about the top level blurb introducing this book.
Whilst there is no single gene that determines the behaviour of an ant colony it would be inaccurate to say that there are not genes which control the behaviour. There are multiple genes which control the low-level behaviours from which the gross behaviour emerges.
Maybe I am just being pedantic.
Some of the most fascinating emergent behaviour in cellular automata are self replicating automata and self repairing automata, or perhaps more strictly large scale features embedded within automata that exhibit these properties. Other fascinating areas are the ability to simulate a generic computer using a cellular automata. Whilst this may not sound very exciting it opens the possibility of building new computing architectures using small units with only local communication. If this is teamed with the ability to replicate and repair systems which can reconfigure themselves or are remarkably fault tolerant are possible, again allowing what might be otherwise apparently unsuitable low level computing surfaces to be used. Ultimately this may prove useful for computing in hostile environments such as in space vehicles which may require systems which are resilient to cosmic rays over multiple decades for deep space probes. Small units like adders, gates, and so on, are very possible to design using automata. For my masters I worked on efficient methods of simulating cellular automata with large rule sets and the ability to learn the rule sets from a series of desired examples of state progression using neural networks underlying the mechanism. The motivation was that given a required set of states (essentially a series of snap shots of data processing or self repair) a CA could learn the rules required which could then be studied in detail after rule extraction from the neural network. Sadly I ran out of time to examine the area in as much detail as I would have liked.
> Today there is a stronger argument for Determinism: just put all the facts in
> a big computer and you can predict any outcome (or the odds of possible
> outcomes, with a quantum approach).
The same laws that make the quantum computing heuristic possible are a great argument against determinism a la reductionism. Predictability has well-defined limits in terms of position and state once you arrive at a quantum scale.
> which is more complex, the group or a single person? Or is there a threshold
What if it's like quantum uncertainty - the more you have a localized self, the less you see of the social hierarchy. Self determination is high, social determination is low. The more you give your self up to other roles, the less your concept of self is defined, but your knowledge of the social hierarchy is greater. Social determination is high, self determination is low.
What you call "historical memory" is quite simply another way of viewing the concept of cultural baggage.
My country experienced a lot of poverty. Today we are rich. Nevertheless the majority still live a very modest lifestyle, "below our means" to twist the expression. That is what culture is, how history shapes it.
Westerners are different.
My first thought was, "Wait, didn't that come out 20 years ago? Is there a reprint? Can I get another copy? Yay!"
David Palmer's Emergence was a really good sf book from the long-ago. Too bad he didn't write anything else. (And no, I don't count Threshold. I am in fact still trying to forget it, twenty years later.)
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
Modded the offtopic mod as unfair. Next time someone wants to mod something offtopic that is a reply to a parent, mod the parent post instead to close the entire thread and stop further posts.
Westerners are different in that they really hate passing along bigotry, but will begrudgingly do so??? I mean, your statement in itself is rife with bigotry.