2024.12.09
That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.
There is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity.
In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.
Emergence is when micro-level complex systems that are far from equilibrium (thus allowing for the amplification of random events) self-organize (creative, self-generated, adaptability-seeking behavior) into new structures, with new properties that previously did not exist, to form a new level of organization on the macro level.Emergence has come up again and again as a possible answer for me in my UU Science and Spirituality group.
What has become obvious to most physicists [...] is that at different levels of structure, there are different types of organization with completely different types of interactions governed by different laws, and one emerges from the other but does not emerge predictably. This is even true for something as basic as water turning to ice, as physicist Robert Laughlin has pointed out: Ice has so far been found to have eleven distinct crystalline phases, but none of them were predicted by first principles!
For instance, Jessica Flack has found evidence for the existence of monkey cops! These policing individuals are important to the cohesiveness of the social group as a whole. They not only terminate conflicts or reduce their intensity, but their presence also prevents conflicts from occurring and spreading, and it facilitates active sociopositive interactions among group members. When the policing macaques are temporarily removed, conflict increases. Just as with human societies, when the policeman is present, there are fewer barroom brawls, and speeders slow down on the freeways. Her results suggest that having a policeman around "influences large-scale social organization and facilitates levels of social cohesion and integration that might otherwise be impossible.AMCAB? Or maybe they're more like teachers...
The book mentions Leonardo, one of those MIT Robot projects, but this one flew under my radar-- kind of an uncanny valley Furbie!
I once asked Leon Festinger, one of the smartest men in the world, whether or not he ever felt inept. He replied, "Of course! That is what keeps you ept."