Chess, Mold, Consciousness: The Mysterious Phenomenon Of Emergence

Nova's Science Now explores one of the most far reaching and fascinating topics in the sciences: emergence. Click here for a video exploring emergence, an interview with John Holland of the Santa Fe Institute (colleague of Cormac McCarthy) and a special bonus video of a brief history of emergence set to music.

The Superorganism Meme Returns (Although It Never Really Left)

E.O. Wilson's new book reignites the superorganism debate. The issue of the superorganism is particularly relevant to cybernetics (and any discussion of emergence) because superorganisms seem to: "exhibit a form of distributed intelligence–a system in which many individual agents with limited intelligence and information are able to pool resources to accomplish a goal beyond the capabilities of the individuals."

Here, Wired recounts the history of the superorganism meme:

It became a powerful meme among computer geeks, as any Google search reveals. Programmers got to work building "ant-based" search and scheduling-optimization algorithms modeled on the foraging patterns of real-world ants. Cybervisionaries saw in the superorganism an ideal way of describing the networked global brain that they were just beginning to imagine. The idea meant the singularity might be nearer than anyone thought. Wired's Kevin Kelly drew on Wilson's theories for the conceptual framework of the Hive Mind, humanity's emerging cognitive interconnectedness. Even today, Kelly is writing about the One Machine and the Technium, a neologism he defines as "a superorganism of technology."

Consequences Of Digitial Intimacy

NYtimes article by Clive Thompson uncovers some important insights about the new state of digital intimacy.

1. People often think they don't want the sort of omnipresent knowledge that comes with twitter and facebook feeds...until they sign up. Then, they find it intriguing and addictive.

2. Twitter and Facebook's scrolling wall spread trends quickly - more quickly than blogs.

3. Individual "tweets" are insignificant on their own, but when you track them over time, real understanding and intimacy with a person develops (another example of emergent property).

4. When you post updates about yourself, the process of posting forces you to view them objectively, and to contemplate them. So, "in the age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself."

Beme: The End Of Theory?

Google is conquering the online world without any use for theories about why people click where they click. Say goodbye to theories, say hello to massive amounts of data, applied mathematics, and the ability to tract behavior with unprecedented fidelity. As this Wired article contends, the trend of prediction-without-theory has the potential to permeate the sciences, replacing the time-honored scientific method.

So get ready for the United States of Google, right? Not so fast. As Philip Anderson explains in this Seed article, the nature of emergence ("which says that when a system becomes large and complex enough, its constituents self-organize into arrangements that one could never deduce a priori, even though the laws of physics are obeyed") prevents even the Google processors from cracking the most mysterious questions of science (like the emergence of consciousness). So what tools should we use when dealing with emergence? Theory and the time-honored tools of the scientific method.