Reddit reviews Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

That was how I learned about genetics and evolution, but the actual book that directly inspired this was Emergence.

I don't have a good answer for you. I've always found programming fascinating, and (in the early 2000s when I was doing this stuff) I had just read Emergence and it got me thinking about these kinds of problems.

I'd done lots of coding - I'd even written my own software-rasterizing 3d engines back in the 90s for fun, but to do this stuff I taught myself opengl and then read lots of papers from the 80s about stuff like Rodney Brooks' Subsumption Architecture

Then, I just started writing code and when I fucked up, I backtracked and kept trying until things worked.

It helped I was in my 20s (I'm old now, and have a familiy and responsibilities).

But here's the thing: I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not even really a programmer. I studied painting in college. I just happen to really love programming so I figure the stuff out on my own. I work professionally as a graphic designer and "interaction" programmer, which is a bullshit term for somebody who designs & codes.

But my degree is in fine arts, so, shrug.


Really, all it takes is a willingness to dive into something which you know fuck-all about headfirst and just let yourself drown until you start grokking it. I did plenty of calculus and whatnot in high school, but I never really got linear algebra until I started writing opengl and dealing with matrices and quaternions, etc etc. You just have to be willing to make yourself learn.

As humans we've got these big brains. Barring actual problems like mental handicaps, the vast majority of us are all capable of learning things we didn't expect we could learn. It's just that most of us want to watch TV or play video games.

Give yourself a hard problem you find interesting and I guarantee you can surprise yourself.

Look up some more related literature, complex systems is serious science : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/2/reviews/3.html

hey folks. been really enjoying chatting with some of you here on reddit and on slack. Slack (and here too) has really been exploding in numbers over the past few days. Watching the Western community come together and engage our ambassadors from the East reminds me of a book I read when I was younger called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

"An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence. Web pundit Steven Johnson explains what we know about this phenomenon with a rare lucidity in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Starting with the weird behavior of the semi-colonial organisms we call slime molds, Johnson details the development of increasingly complex and familiar behavior among simple components: cells, insects, and software developers all find their place in greater schemes.

Most game players, alas, live on something close to day-trader time, at least when they're in the middle of a game--thinking more about their next move than their next meal, and usually blissfully oblivious to the ten- or twenty-year trajectory of software development. No one wants to play with a toy that's going to be fun after a few decades of tinkering--the toys have to be engaging now, or kids will find other toys.

Johnson has a knack for explaining complicated and counterintuitive ideas cleverly without stealing the scene. Though we're far from fully understanding how complex behavior manifests from simple units and rules, our awareness that such emergence is possible is guiding research across disciplines. Readers unfamiliar with the sciences of complexity will find Emergence an excellent starting point, while those who were chaotic before it was cool will appreciate its updates and wider scope."



With aligned economic incentives we're building the next generation of blockchain tech together, and we all get to witness it in realtime. What a unique moment in history, a first. Sell if it's painful, we'll support you when you buy back lower (or higher lol). Hopefully we can still stay focused on the long-term payoff but the immediate goals. Whether it's Neo or not (that depends largely on us and what our emergent collective behavior is), I'm pretty confident that self-assembling organizations utilizing the blockchain is how we solve a lot of the world's pressing issues. This is how we win.

Hello DrMerkwurdigliebe,

Always nice to get into stimulating discussions, isn't it?

Re: bees. It's a fascinating subject. I did quite a bit of reading on the subject of emergent intelligence. A good summary book, with great insight into the ramifications of the theory, as well as a broad set of connecting information, would be "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" by Steven Johnson. You can find it here. Another book, which was written about 30 years ago but is still very relevant, and more pertinent to the subject of economics and politics, would be "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" by Thomas Schelling, which is available here. Schelling won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on the subject, but that was a while ago, and the neo-Keynesian flavour of economics (à la Krugman) is sadly back in vogue...

Re: anarcho-capitalism. I do often post on the anarcho-capitalist reddit, but I don't really consider myself as one, for the simple reason that I think any such "isms" imply a level of politicisation and activism that I think are neither relevant to the 21st century, nor do they do advocates for change towards individual-oriented thinking any favours.

I see the nation as a product that one can design, re-design, test, re-launch, modify into v2, v3, etc. thereby increasing its fitness for purpose, as well as the general satisfaction its users will have with it over time. Great houses are not designed by activist architects, great cars are not designed by activist car designers. Sure, there may be a corporate philosophy that informs a particular way of designing a product, but the key thing is that the product's users consume it, they have the power of buying it or not buying it, thereby voting with their consumer feedback or their dollar, and thus further improve it. If you think about how people talk to shopkeepers vs. how they talk to, say, TSA staff, you'll see straightaway that the consumer role puts them in a position of power which, in aggregate, ends up taking the market to greater and greater products.

When you combine this relationship between supplier and consumer with the leverage that capital and technology can give the private sector, its yearly improvement leads to the kind of progress statists can only dream of. For example, the fact that, after about 30 years of privatisation, telephony as a sector has managed to make viable companies like Skype (which give you FREE telephone video calls around the planet) is, to me, a perfect example of just what can be achieved when a system is set up for the free market to provide something that until recently couldn't even be conceived of as a non-state sector.

All food for thought...

All the best,

Nationcrafting

read Emergence. It will in part argue that our minds are essentially hive minds, and that an individual is also a single being in an even larger hive mind.

[6] To check if regions are still there. Because nothing hits us harder then the earth. Moving feels good. Here's a book. [8]

Actually, you are quite behind. The research of the past 10 years has made astonishing strides in deciphering the way the brain works.

For instance: The old 'we only use 10% of our brain' myth. Completely shredded. Almost our entire brain is active while we are concious, and much of it is active while we sleep.

The idea of 'this part does x, and this part does y' has been shown to be inaccurate in many cases. a lot of lower level functionality is region specific, but much of our higher order thinking process lights up MANY regions of the brain.

Basically, the thinking is that consciousness is an emergent property, (a result that is more complex than the sum of it's parts. I recommend this book as a primer on the concept.)

Each neuron makes VERY simple decisions based on it's local environment, and then executes an action, that changes the local environment of the neurons it is wired to. As these reactions happen concurrently among trillions of neurons simultaneously, the result is something far more complex than the simple decision made by any single neuron.

The principles have been applied to many fields of research and is yeilding some very interesting results.

A picture is emerging of a brain that while having certain regions specialized for various tasks, is very flexible and processes information throughout, rather than a specific area being responsible for consciousness. Certain areas are of course more important than others, but it takes a whole brain to produce a whole consciousness.

While exciting, this research has also shot down some favorite Sci-Fi ideas. For instance: the odds are EXTREMELY low that something like the Matrix, (downloading skills directly into a brain) is even remotely possible.

The brain is a highly adaptive neural network, showing extreme variability between individuals, and environments. There's some really interesting work done in the past few years indicating that certain training actually re-wires the brain. (programming or mathematics, for example.)

The general scientific consensus at this point is that there is no way for any kind of consciousness to survive after death, as consciousness requires a physically alive and functioning brain to be manifest as an emergent property.

(Side note: this research also forces us to re-consider exactly what we consider consciousness. I remember being told as a child that lower life forms, (dogs, cats, etc) do not have anything we would recognize as consciousness. The recent research shows that consciousness as we experience it is not a binary condition, (you have it or don't) but an analog condition. (a sliding scale from simple stimulus response up to experience as we know it.))

Gearheads

Mentioned in: http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768

Yeah, Adams is a deep one. That little book is deceptively simple, it's more about how we tell ourselves stories to explain the universe than actually presenting a serious theological cosmology. Read at your own risk; it will mess with your head.

You might also like this book.

As to infinite recursion; that's not actually known yet. Either everything began at some point or it's infinite; and there's evidence that leans either way. But there's certainly no need for a God there at all, infinite universes make as much sense as an infinite god. More sense even, as we have at least one example of a universe, albeit it might be finite.

All I'm saying is that emergence does not support a theistic god that is more complex than what it is creating. The opposite, in fact, if there is such a thing as a "creator" emergence points us to a force of nature like natural selection, not some glorified planner in the sky.

I agree with the other posters who suggested Dennett and Hofstadter... They also collaborated on a book called "The Mind's I"

Another suggestion would be "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software"

You might post these singly. There is a lot of room for discussion in each one.

Your last two caught my eye. I suggest, if you have not read them, two books simply named Complexity and Emergence.

Happy Cakeday.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0684868768?pc_redir=1409138398&robot_redir=1

This is a little broader than what you mentioned, but is a great reading and very enlightening: http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278710375&sr=8-1

EMERGENCE. IT'S A THING...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism

Fucking LEARN. Read a book - not a book that claims to be the divine word of a god - especially when WRITING SOMETHING DOWN CAUSES MISUNDERSTANDING.

Good - hope you do! Really changed my worldview, and made me think in the same way you seem to assume that I don't.

https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768

I noticed most of these posts are about fiction. I feel like all the books I read change my life, but the biggest ones that changed the way I look at the world have been:

Pop Science books by Steven Johnson (Emergence, Everything Bad is Good For You, Where Good Ideas Come From) and Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Tipping Point, Outliers). These books changed all of my preconceived notions, and gave me a drive to search for intelligent outside perspectives. Emergence was especially influential. I approach Emergence in an almost religious way, you can see "God" or whatever you would call it, in Emergent intelligent behavior, a more science-friendly conception of God, I feel the same way when I watch Koyaanisqaatsi.

A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber. Most people either like Ken Wilber or hate him. To me, he gives a good model of looking at religion, spirituality, science, society, myth, and the way different people think similar to Joseph Campbell. If you ever wonder why religious people think a certain way, and scientific people and postmodern philosophers think a different way, this is the book.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. I didn't even finish this book because I got to depressed. It may be pretty biased, but it is really one of the best geopolitical books out there. I learned everything I needed to know about foreign policy and the economic conflict going on around the world.

EDIT: Another great one is The Book by Alan Watts