“ ‘Smelling’ the green”: Interviews with Resnick conducted in May 2000 and November 1999.
“even Marvin Minsky”: Resnick, 119–20.
Then you press: Deborah Gordon observes a comparable phenomenon with her harvester ant colonies: “One lesson from the ants is that to understand a system like theirs, it is not sufficient to take the system apart. The behavior of each unit is not encapsulated inside that unit but comes from its connections with the rest of the system. To see how the components produce the response of the whole system, we have to track these connections in changing situations. You could dissect a brain into millions of separate nerve cells but would never find any dedicated to thinking about ‘nature,’ or ‘ants,’ or anything else; thoughts are made by the shifting pattern of interactions of neurons. Antibodies form in the immune system as a consequence of encounters with foreign cells. Ants are not born to do a certain task; an ant’s function changes along with the conditions it encounters, including the activities of other ants.” Gordon, 168.
Hillis’s software was: Levy, 195–200.
“It may be”: Hillis, 146.
In the short term: Ibid., 138.
“One of the”: Interview conducted with Zimmerman, February 2000.
“The new sets”: Interview conducted with Heywood, October 2000.
“The problem is”: Interview conducted with Wright, October 2000.
“Can a selectional”: Edelman, 1992, 190.
It’s the chimp: De Waal, 49.
Rizzollati called these: Alison Motluk, “Read My Mind,” The New Scientist, January 27, 2001.
They are mind: “Using a totally different test (the Smarties test), Perner, Frith, Leslie, and Leekham got the same basic result. In this test, the child is first shown a familiar Smarties container and is asked, ‘What do you think is in here?’ The child naturally replies, ‘Smarties.’ The child is then shown the tube actually contains pencils. Next the experimenter closes the tube, asks the child two belief questions. The first question is ‘When I showed you this tube [before we opened it up], what did you think was in here?’ The normal child, of course, correctly replies by referring to his earlier, now false, belief: ‘Smarties.’ The experimenter follows this up with: ‘And when the next child comes in [who hasn’t seen the tube], what will he think is inside here?’ Again, the normal child correctly replies by referring to the other child’s false belief: ‘Smarties.’ When Perner et al. gave this task to children with autism, they found that the majority of their subjects answered, ‘Pencils,’ to the two belief questions. That is, they answered by considering their own knowledge of what was in the box rather than by referring to their own previous false belief or to someone else’s current false belief. The robustness of this finding suggests that in autism there is a genuine inability to understand other people’s different beliefs.” Baron-Cohen, 70–71.
We’re conscious of: Ibid., 130.
“An absence of”: Dennett, 1991, 324.
Only when we: Ray Kurzweil refers to this as the “Consciousness Is Just a Machine Reflecting on Itself” School. “ … consciousness is not exactly an illusion, but just another logical process. It is a process responding and reacting to itself. We can build that in a machine: just build a procedure that has a model of itself, and that examines and responds to its own methods. Allow the process to reflect on itself. There, now you have consciousness. It is a set of abilities that evolved because self-reflective ways of thinking are inherently more powerful.” Kurweil, 58.
The great preponderance: Social interaction is deeply intertwined with brain chemistry: “The higher your self-esteem and social rank relative to those around you, the higher your serotonin level is. Experiments with monkeys reveal that it is the social behavior that comes first. Serotonin is richly present in dominant monkeys and much more dilute in the brains of subordinates. Cause or effect? Almost everybody assumed the chemical was at least partly the cause: it just stands to reason that the dominant behavior results from the chemical, not vice versa. It turns out to be the reverse: serotonin levels respond to the monkey’s perception of its own position in the hierarchy, not vice versa.” Ridley, 170.
Among the apes: Baron-Cohen, 15.
Orangutans live mostly: Diamond, 1997.
Pleistocene-era experts: “That there was a massive neurocognitive evolution during the Pleistocene epoch is beyond any doubt. The brain has increased threefold in size in the 3 million years since Australopithecus afarensis evolved, going from around 400 cubic centimeters to its current size of about 1350 cubic centimeters.
The increase in brain size is likely to have had many causes, but one key factor upon which many theorists agree is the need for greater social intelligence shorthand for the ability to process information about the behavior of others and to react adaptively to their behavior. It is likely that there was a need for greater social intelligence because the vast majority of nonhuman primate animals are social animals, living in groups that range from as few as two individuals to as many as two hundred.” Baron-Cohen, 13–14.
We don’t know: “… the network of the brain is created by cellular movement during development and by the extension and connection of increasing numbers of neurons. The brain is an example of a self-organizing system. And examination of this system during its development and of its most microscopic ramifications after development indicates that precise point-to-point wiring (like that in an electronic device) cannot occur. The variation is too great.” Edelman, 1992, 25.
No individual neuron: “ ‘When we hear it said that wireless valves think,’ Jefferson said, ‘we may despair of language.’ But no cybernetician had said the valves thought, no more than anyone would say that the nerve cells thought. Here lay the confusion. It was the system as a whole that ‘thought,’ in Alan Turing’s view, and it was its logical structure, not its particular physical embodiment, that made this possible.” Hodges, 405.
By following the: How “natural” these solutions are remains an open question. “Is the city a natural habitation, like a snail’s shell, or a deliberate human artifact, a specific invention that came into existence at one or more places under the influence of urban ideological convictions and economic pressures? An aboriginal predisposition toward social life, even toward group settlement, may well characterize the human species; but could such a general tendency make man everywhere produce the city as inevitably as a spider produces her web? Could the same dispositions that gave the camp or the hamlet a planetary distribution likewise account for such a many-faceted cultural complex as the city?” Mumford, 1961, 90.
A community of: These bottom-up solutions are not entirely unopposed. You can make the argument that the real battle of the next ten years on the Web is the battle between hierarchical forces (AOL Time Warner, the Chinese government) and the decentralized forces described in this book. As De Landa observes, “Although antimarket institutions had an early presence in the computer meshwork, today they are set to invade the Internet with unprecedented force. It is possible that the meshworks that have already accumulated within the Internet will prove resilient enough to survive the attack and continue to flourish. It is also possible in the next decades that hierarchies will instead accumulate, perhaps even changing the network back into a one-to-many system of information delivery. The outcome of this struggle has certainly not been settled.” De Landa, 1997, 254.
“In other words”: Interview conducted with Wright in October 2000.
Marketplaces—even those: The hierarchical nature of the modern corporation is not a new development. The historian Fernand Braudel goes so far as to describe capitalist structures as intrinsically top-down ones, opposed by lower-level, decentralized market forces. “There is a dialectic still very much alive between capitalism on the one hand, and its antithesis, the ‘noncapitalism’ of the lower level on the other… . [This] lower level, not being paralyzed by the size of its plant or organization, is the one readiest to adapt; it is the seedbed of insp
iration, improvisation, and even innovation, although its most brilliant discoveries sooner or later fall into the hands of the holders of capital. It was not the capitalists who brought about the first cotton revolution; all the new ideas came from enterprising small businesses.” Quoted in De Landa, 1997, 46.
Those qualities make: “Many organizations nowadays are consciously trying to figure out how they can use self-organizing principles without becoming either disintegrated or inert—in short, as avatars of fruitful complexity. Ecotrust lists these three requirements: (a) autonomous agents able to make independent decisions within a framework of relatively simple rules; (b) moderately dense network and web connections among the agents—that is, the organization’s parts; and (c) vigorous experimentation by agents, disciplined by responding to feedback on results.” Jacobs, 2000, 177.
The Australian software: Emergence, 46.
Klein writes, “What”: Klein.
By any measure: As always, building emergent systems doesn’t guarantee that they will turn out to be better than the old systems. You need to get the variables right. “The mere presence of an emergent meshwork does not in itself mean that we have given a segment of society a less oppressive structure. The nature of the result will depend on the character of the heterogeneous elements meshed together, as we observed of communities on the Internet: they are undoubtedly more destratified than those subjected to massification by one-to-many media, but since everyone of all political stripes—even fascists—can benefit from this destratification, the mere existence of a computer meshwork is no guarantee that a better world will develop there.” De Landa, 1997, 272.
Dorgo’s secret: Bonabeau and Thiraulaz, 73.
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