The human mind is not unitary. We have competing preferences, compartmentalized beliefs, contradictory thoughts, and conflicting emotions. The recognition of this dividedness is hardly new—in the Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky describes how our mental sub-agents interact to create our intelligence, and...

Exhibit A: Reductio Ad Absurdum Exhibit B: Genetic Dark Matter “A fruit fly study suggests the whole-genome approach may be the way to go.” Exhibit C: The Genome vs The Gene Exhibit D: The Proteome vs The Genome “you need to look at the things that the genes are producing, and...

There is a massive paradigm shift occurring: beliefs about the nature of scientific inquiry that have held for hundreds of years are being questioned. As laypeople, we see the symptoms all around us: climatology, economics, medicine, even fundamental physics; these domains (and more) have all become...

On Tuesday I went on Annie Duke’s internet TV show to talk with her and Jason Calacanis about Wikileaks and what the implications are for the future of privacy.  I made some radical claims: Privacy is dead: it’s only a matter of time now before we all have to face this eventuality. In a...

Once again, Japanese “lost decades” or massive exodus into virtual worlds?  Here’s the conclusion, but I highly recommend the entire post (it may be clear as mud, but you’re gonna get dirty down the rabbit hole): “Whereas we think we are talking to each other, we are all simply...

Imagine a multiverse, infinitely infinite.  There’s just infinity.  Or if you prefer, nothing.   There’s no space, no time, no matter, no energy.  There’s no structure whatsoever, and nothing “in” any of the universes that make up the multiverse.  it’s not even clear...

Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68. Kevin Kelly View more presentations from...

As careful readers of this blog will note, I’ve been obsessed with Alex Ryan’s visualization of the way new levels of organization come into being (e.g. atoms –> molecules –> cells, etc).  In an attempt to complement and extend his model, here’s a visualization of how I...

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually...

What do you know about Japan and their economy?  Their nominal GDP and stock market seem to be “losing” relative to other countries, but upon further examination you will find that the real GDP/capita has been quite reasonable throughout the period.  but what’s money got to do with it? ...

As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary...

This is a followup to Ben’s post on Human Cultural Transformation Triggered by Dense Populations.  Too many links for this to be accepted into the comments directly… In thinking about these questions, it helps me to remind myself of the difference between evolution and emergence. Evolution...

Biologically,modern humans first appeared 160,000 to 200,000 years ago. But the transition to complex human societies, with art, music, advanced tools, occurred a good deal more recently, and moreover, occured at different times in different parts of the world. An article in June’s Science magazine...

Yesterday’s puzzler was to guess the species being talked about here: One became super efficient at gobbling up its food, doing so at a rate that was about a hundred times faster than the other. The other was slower at acquiring food, but produced about three times more progeny per generation. The...

I don’t like the Republican or Libertarian parties. But I’m also no fan of the Democratic party. In fact, I dislike all political parties and think they should be done away with.  And while I’m not naive enough to think that this will happen, it makes me glad to see that the “post...

The import of this talk goes way beyond the specific and stunning work that Bassler and her team have done on quorum sensing.  In my mind, this is the prototype for good biological...

Daniel Dennett and others have called Darwin’s theory of evolution the best idea anyone has ever had.  That means that all the ideas that Socrates, Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein ever had, plus all the ideas that everyone else has ever had are also rans.  It would be impossible to really justify such...

Kevin has a few threads regarding the effect that micro behaviors have when aggregated to macro behaviors: Society According to Kevin I May Have Been Wrong About Macroeconomics But I Was Probably Right About Climate Models It occurred to me as I was reading this Huffington Post article that there is a...

[I just noticed the video links were broken in my original post, so I'm reposting this] Apparently this PBS NOVA program aired last year, but somehow I missed it.  Definitely worth watching (and looking at the examples), especially if you are mystified by all of this “emergence mumbo...

Response to Superorganism as Terminology. I was actually about to post something about terminology, so I’m glad this came up. It’s just so difficult to choose words to describe concepts that have little precedent, without going to the extreme of overloading on the one end (e.g....

This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post. Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own?  Obviously, there are many multicellular...

In a previous post I asked what you thought this was: Here is the same system at different resolutions (lowest to highest): ...

The following is a recent paper by Henry Heng published in JAMA.  I’ve linked concepts mentioned in the paper to corresponding explications from this blog. JAMA. 2008;300(13):1580-1581. The Conflict Between Complex Systems and Reductionism Henry H. Q. Heng, PhD Author Affiliations: Center for...

In this video talk by Richard Darkins he gives some good food for thought on reification when he talks about Steve Grand’s views on things like whirlpools, electromagnetic fluctuations and walking sand dunes.  The most powerful example is this one (quoting Grand): Think of an experience from your...

reify |ˈrēəˌfī| verb ( -fies, -fied) [ trans. ] formal make (something abstract) more concrete or real Imagine if an alien landed on Earth to study modern society and you were assigned the task of being its local guide.  You get to the subject of money and the alien is perplexed.  What is money?  Is...