Many many years ago, my friend Richard Metzger went to interview Howard Bloom about his then current book The Lucifer Project and came back with his mind blown. Ever since, he has been telling me (and presumably everybody else) to read this man’s work. With the recent release of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, I finally took the plunge. As usual, Metzger was on to something big. This is an “intelligent design” theory that they won’t be teaching in Kansas any time soon.

According to Bloom, we are all part of an evolving intelligent system that started at the big bang. I “got it” around the second chapter and, for a moment I wondered why I would want to read the rest of the book. But I pressed on. Bloom beautifully evokes the collective minds of everything from trilobites to bees to human societies. His writing style is rich, scholarly, and expository; playful and convincing.

NeoFiles

I seek to define rigorously the concept of an emergent phenomenon in a complex system, together with its implications for explanation, understanding and prediction in such systems. I argue that in a certain fundamental sense, emergent systems are those in which even perfect knowledge and understanding may give us no predictive information. In them the optimal means of prediction is simulation. I investigate the consequences of this for certain decidability and complexity issues, and then explain why these limitations do not preclude all means of doing interesting science in such systems. I touch upon some recent incorporation of this work into the investigation of self-organised criticalities.

Here via Vortex Egg

We present the formal definition of meme in the sense of the equivalence between memetics and the theory of cultural evolution. From the formal definition we find that culture can be seen analytically and persuade that memetic gives important role in the exploration of sociological theory, especially in the cultural studies. We show that we are not allowed to assume meme as smallest information unit in cultural evolution in general, but it is the smallest information we use on explaining cultural evolution. We construct a computational model and do simulation in advance presenting the selfish meme powerlaw distributed. The simulation result shows that the contagion of meme as well as cultural evolution is a complex adaptive system. Memetics is the system and art of importing genetics to social sciences.

PDF via Vortex Egg

Abstract
There are effectively two classes of explanations for how we come to be conscious, particularly in the sense of having a ?mental world? or apprehending and comprehending phenomenal experience of both the material world in which we are present, and the worlds of our imagination. These, of course, are the physicalistic explanations in which consciousness somehow is a product of the brain?s activity in the physical world, and the mentalistic (usually dualist) explanations in which some non-physical ?stuff? carries our mental worlds and phenomenal experiences. Ultimately, even if the mental stuff hypothesis is proven to be the case, we will still have to produce an explanation for how there can be a causally efficacious connection between that mental stuff and the physical world.

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