Emergence

In the beginning of the year we were asked to write about the game of “Life” created by Conway. I was a complete skeptic, believing that it is near impossible to create life though a computer program due to the fact that there are so many exceptions and unpredictable actions. I still believe this but after reading about Metacat and playing around with it, I am starting to see a shit in my beliefs. Metacat puts up a good fight in convincing me that a computer could really think and account for life.
Metacat with the combination of copy cat has done a good job in representing a computer program that seems to think. With in the programs themselves there are sub-programs and rules that take in many exceptions, such as pattern clamping and temporal traces. With all of these sub-parts it seems that Metacat is indeed “thinking”. The steps that Metacat takes to come up with an answer can be somewhat parallel to the way a human brain works in thinking, the only exception being the speed at which it processes.
It’s amazing if you think about everything that goes on in our bodies without us even knowing.
If someone say to a joke like “A man walk into a bar, he should have seen it”, we as humans have the ability to hear that and understand the meaning outside of it literal contexts. But for a computer to do this is a little harder. Metacat can make analogies and process thing out of a completely literal state, but only to some degree. It will work on an analogy and come up with answers that are not complete literal answers, but if a problem is too hard it seems to default to a direct literal answer. This was shown in the abc to abd xyz to xyd. It seems that the pattern was to take the right most letter and turn it into the letter that follows it, c went to d. But with xyz example there was a snag, z has no following letter and the rules state that there is no loop in the letters. So the computer had to think and use all it sub parts to come up with another way to view the pattern and problem. Which was the right most letter changes to d.
“When humans make analogies, we not only construct mental mappings according to constraints, we also understand the meaning of the concepts connected by these mappings.”(Marshall, 5) We make analogy to connect to realms of our knowledge to strengthen our learning. But when a computer makes and analogy sometimes that transfer and strengthening of knowledge is not really there. It was cool that Metacat has the ability to know that it had done the problem before. But what I found even more amazing was the fact that it could recognize that it had done similar analogies. I did a cat goes to bat and then a sat went to bat and it recognized that it was similar to the cat to bat problem.
Metacat definitely gave me some good insight. I found myself trying to connect what I was seeing on the screen with what might be happening in my brain at the same moment. I think humans in general take for granted just how amazing our brains are. Some of my classmates comment on how they got bored while running programs. To me I think the bored comes because we are typing in problems that we already see a pattern too. Before typing in the letters I think we all feel like we know what should be the out put. Metacat is seeing the problem for the first time and is going through the whole thought process that we already did. I feel that we just get inpatient.
All I can say is that I for one am very thankful that I do not have to mechanically think about every step in a process when given a problem. I am happy that some how my brain just works.

Einstein’s brain or a brain full of little Einsteins, which one would you choose? It seems that both so good that it is hard to make a decision. There can’t really be a right answer.
To have a brain anywhere near the capacity of Einstein’s brain would be absolutely amazing. There is no argument in saying that he was on of the greatest minds ever. Having his brain would be a huge increase in brainpower for my self and many others but what if you had thousands of little Einstein brains working in your brain. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. If we replace every neuron in our minds with a brain capable of what Einstein’s was capable of it would appear that almost a perfect mind was created. His brain a lone was capable of extreme brainpower but imagine that power time thousands. The brain would be able to compute almost anything at a very high speed. If I we were to insert Einstein’s brain into my own, I just in vision everything being much more efficient. Now every time ideas are flowing in my mind, I feel they would be processed fast and better because his power was combined with my own. If I were to just have his brain, I know it would be a definite improvement, but I feel that my brain composed of thousands of his brains would be an even bigger improvement. A combination of the two allows for a calibration, it is possible that Einsteins may not know some information in my brain. This comes strictly from life experience and the fact that I know Japanese.
For me the main idea comes down to the way his brain is wired. It would seem that people, like Einstein, just have different brains then the rest of us. The way they forge connections and “learn” can’t be like an ordinary person, something up there is out of the ordinary. Maybe the neurons fire faster or the connections are made faster, but something is different. Moving back to the topic on hand, to me putting little Einsteins in within the brain would allows for this super speed and connection making to be applied over and over. In place of one neuron we would have, thousands of his neurons. In my opinion more is better.

The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
So who is Gennifer Flowers? To be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.

The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
So who is Gennifer Flowers? To be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.

The human body is an amazing piece of work. I often find myself wondering how so much can be happening within me without even knowing it. Everything just communicates and gets done, my heartbeats, my lungs breath and my feet walk. How much of what I am doing is really me, how much control do I have over my body? Often time people used phrases like, “I consciously made an effort” or “where is your conscience?” What if anything am I consciously doing? What does that really mean, it seems that 50% of the time we make a conscious effort to do something, we end of not doing it. Did we really make an extra effort, or was the decision already pre determined? I truly believe that people have choices in life and have control over their action, for some reason I can’t get myself to believe that we are just run by neurons, it just seems too black and white. If decisions were just black and white, cut and dry, wouldn’t everyone act the same? In all honesty I don’t really know, but it seems that all the confusions for me, at least, comes form not knowing where the line is drawn, where does the ability to make a decisions come from?
What for example, makes a person raise their hand? Is this ability coming from a higher level or is it just the results of lower level neurons firing. It seems scientifically, that when a question is given to a subject, the subject reads the question and automatically begins to process the information. If the information corresponds to something that they have “learned” then it seems no questions will be asked, but when even a part of the information is foreign its seems a new process starts. Most of the time when we raise our hands it is to ask a question about something we do not understand or something we are confused about. When the information is foreign to our brains, it seems that there must be some interruption in the pattern of the firing neurons. When something is not understood, I tend to think the neurons fire a signal saying “help.” This help signal tells the brain that more information is needed, so the brain must re-think it steps. It knows from a past experience (or learning) that raising the hand allows for a question to be asked. The brain then sends an output signal to the motor system, which then fires neurons to raise the hand. If we think of it this way it seems that the process of raising a hand is not a conscious decision but rather a pre-determined output for the lack of understanding. But what about those times when something is not understand but no hand is raised to ask a question?
The ability to not raise a hand when confused points to the fact that in some way there is conscious control over this ability. If a question was not understood a person could a, raise their hand or b, not raise their hand. The person makes the decision. Although the neurons may be firing as described above, some higher-level system received the information and process it to make the decision to raise the hand or not.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” Shaw seems to believe that if you imagine what you want, you can create it, a way of thinking that marketing companies go gaga over. Consciously, you imagine and then you create. If you believe, you can and will succeed. This idea of where decision comes from can never really be proven one way or another. After all who knows how much of anything we are really controlling. For example am I consciously writing this paper or, was it all pre-determined thoughts upon which I had no control over.

The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
Gennifer Flowers, to be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.
Sorry if this is not blog worthy…