thought provoking read on self-organzing behaviors & the "bottom-up" revolution going on theories of how we connect. interesting to note that he wrote this after moving to greenwich village and then reading jane jacobs' "the death & life of great american cities" parallel w/ reading about brains. i love his magpie mind that can combine stuff on ant colonies, sidewalk culture, neuroscience, recommendation software of amazon, and social networks. "Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots."
tags: self-organizing behavior, swarm logic, clustering, feedback loops, pattern recognition, emergent software, ordered randomness, jane jacobs, theory of minds, bottom-up revolution (8.20.09) ( )

I had a lot of fun reading _Emergence_, and it inspired many ideas and lines of inquiry. It stitches together topics I've been reading about, including the emergent intelligence of ant colonies in _Goedel, Escher, Bach_, the automata of Sipser's _Introduction to the Theory of Computation_, and the patterns in programming katas like Conway's Game of Life. Among other things, I've installed StarLogo and started programming simulations of epidemics and swarms, with plans for building a software rendition of my cellular automata project.

I love books that get me thinking creatively, and _Emergence_ provided a great synergy of new ideas and connections with themes I've been thinking about, in an approachable, readable style. ( )

This is a very readable popular science book about how complex systems emerge from lower level behaviour. It covers slime mold, ants, cities, the Internet and the human brain. It was written in 2002 and the Internet section felt qite outdated, but I really enjoyed the sections about cities, and how neighbourhoods develop. I liked the idea of cities as a giant communal database for information collection, storage and retrieval. ( )

As of late, “Emergence” seems to be the hottest buzz word tossed around the crit spaces and seminar rooms of my chosen discipline. Thus it was important that I finally read something about just what the hell the term means. As usual, the unflagging Johnson never fails to enthrall. Who can deny the power of such observations as, “in the case of the Middle Ages, we can safely say that the early village residents shat themselves into full-fledged towns.”? He occasionally descends into the hackneyed territory of predictive cyber-nerd-speak, but he quickly segues into something else in his quest to uncover a consilience among ants, brains, Jane Jacobs, and the World Wide Web (apparently not invented by Albert Gore, but one Tim Berners-Lee. Coincidentally I voted for Tim in 2000).

Alas, this book seems to shore up my preconceived opinion that “emergence” will have little more than a tenuous relationship with some student’s “architecture” project for a Museum of Humanism in a previously Iron Curtainized locale. It’ll merely be used as one of those dialogic Red Herrings that make me look like the ass when I point out that the project lacks stairs… and walls. I suppose those things will emerge later on. ( )

Steven Johnson is an excellent pop culture / business writer. Emergence is up to the high standard set by his Everything Bad Is Good For you. Everything will be easier to digest for most. Everything deals with readily accessible pop culture. Johnson's fascinating thesis in Everything is we are smarter due to pop culture. Emergence is more remote concentrating on history of emergence theory in ants and bees. Johnson builds a bridge between our most massive emergent system, the web, and nature. His foundation is solid, but he demurs at the last moment for some good reasons. Turns out there are differences between nature's emergent systems and the web. As a "thought experiment" this book helps see and think of web movement differently. Johnson's abstract comparison between biological and technical systems is what makes Emergence fascinating and layered. I am working notes into a database and it is taking several days. ( )