Double Flee A

So I'm reading Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, and it's very interesting. I didn't want this blog to be about "Hey, it's ME, and here's what I am doing, and ME ME ME", and I'm not all that afraid it's what's happening, but just to be safe, you know, I bring that fear to light. [And you know what? That old comparison about fear being the shadow of a cricket dancing in front of a candle is right! The fear is gone! Yay!]
Public service announcement: Interpol is teh 4w35om3.
Anyway, to get back to ME, I'm reading this book and it's touching on lots and lots of subjects right now, making correlations between different systems and their similarities, one of them being the brain. The brain is a system with no central control. It's just a network of subsystems that govern things like breathing, sensory information, motor control, etc. It can fail smartly, meaning if a part of it fails, other parts can reroute and damage to the whole is minimal. This system exhibits a nonlinear causality field, which is typical of "emergent behavior" systems, like an ecosystem or an economy. Hence, creativity is possible. The brain is huge in terms of connectivity and it doesn't sequentially execute commands the way a computer does. I think what Kevin Kelly's going to be getting at in a chapter or two is that in order to learn God's thoughts we're going to have to turn a computer loose to learn on its own in the real world. So it's a great book.

posted by dale @ 4:30 PM