Willard wrote:
>Greetings and Happy New Year everyone. I have just started reading one of
>my Christmas presents, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines,
>Social Systems, and the Economic World," by Kevin Kelly the Executive
>Editor of WIRED. Without giving a book report, I gotta say that this book
>is messing up a bunch of my paradigms and unfortunately I am unable to use
>my mental prowess to dismiss them willy-nilly. I s'pose that is good news
>for me as a dose of humility every now and then is very healthy and this
>is like a mega dose that may be sufficient for years to come.
>
>I'm hoping I don't get indigestion because I think there are some powerful
>concepts in this book re: top/down vs. bottom/up control and the power of
>having distributed processing with no central process control. It
>highlights the value of having many "dumb" processors interacting
>independently making mistakes and producing great results. When you read
>the book, you'll get the sense that this is exactly how the free market
>works and how organizations ultimately operate even though there maybe an
>appearance of central control. Hmmmmmmmmm! I really don't know what I'm
>writing about but the stuff sure is intriguing.
I can't help but observe that this may be the so-called "invisible hand"
of Adam Smith. The system keeps in balance because that's how the system
works. We may also reflect that such "dumb" processors interacting is a
metaphor that is useful in understanding the functioning of the billions
of neurons that make up our brains, a functioning out of which self
awareness emerges. Awareness of the system, however, does not imbue us
with control of the system. Control is built in, and awareness possibly
affects how that control manifests itself.
-- John Woods jwoods@execpc.com