Scribe 9-29-09

First and foremost, everyone should participate in the blog more!

Today we discussed our assigned article about the concept of Emergence that compared humans to ants.

We looked at a few images. One was of the brain. The second was of a city that resembled the brain. The third was a diagram of Internet usage. All the layouts of the images were similar. All of the pictures were of things that were made up of corresponding parts responsible for the function and organization of one another.


Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.
It would be nice to have better ways of monitoring what we’re up to so that we could recognize change while it is occurring----Maybe computers can be used to help in this, although I rather doubt it. You can make simulation models of cities, but what you learn is that they seem to be beyond the reach of intelligent analysis….This is interesting, since a city is the most concentrated aggregation of humans, all exerting whatever influence they can bring to bear. The city seems to have a life of its own. If we cannot understand how this works, we are not likely to get very far with human society at large.
Still, you’d think there would be some way in. Joined together, the great mass of human minds around the earth seems to behave like a coherent, living system. The trouble is that the flow of information is mostly one-way. We are all obsessed by the need to fee information in, as fast as we can, but we lack sensing mechanisms for getting anything much back. I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant. Come to think of it, this might be a good place to start.
—Lewis Thomas, 1973

We watched a clip from the movie Waking Life. We discussed the nature of ants and the nature of humans. The actions and communication ants make is for survival. There is a lack of emotion attached to the participation.



We also discussed how life is systematic; however, at the same time chaotic and unpredictable. We sacrifice our own emotions and live in an orderly fashion for the greater common good. This is an "ant like" structure which has been compared to Communism.

We also discussed the Swarm Theory. There is a collective intelligence based on local signals. Simple entities operate together to form more complex behaviors. Ants and humans share similar social structures of gathering, collecting, sending signals, and receiving signals.

Cognitive Science is the study of ideas of behavior and human interaction. It looks at cause and effect of actions rather than mental or emotional motivation. Then we started to discuss computers and how their thinking relates to ours. The language of computers differs from our own mainly because of emotion. We can not hurt a computers feelings. However, there is still a structure in how to use them. We do need to communicate to computers when making websites in language they will understand. On the other hand, some people believe that humans are like machines. Humans are systematic. The difference is we are also individuals and unique.

There is an importance of local interaction and an idea of the trickling up effect. Hard work and benefits start at the bottom then trickles up to the top.