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**Steven Johnson: Emergence, the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software**

**Research Material Type:**Book

**Bibliographic information:** Penguin Press, London 2001

**Keywords:** Emergence, artificial intelligence, affect, chaos theory, patterns, bodies and brains, feedback

**Summary:**Excellent pop science. A look at the development of theories of emergence in biology, computer science, urban planning and the media. How "bottom up" processes produce emergent behaviour from chaotic systems. Challenging established ideas about hierachies being necessary to produce patterns and order. Deeply interesting examples from laughing at jokes to Bill Clinton and the Gennifer Flowers affair.

**Diagrams:**

**Images:**

<image src="uploads/Images/inger30">

**Notes and Quotes:**

"...the most elemental form of complex behaviour: a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions. But it wouldn't truly be considered emergent until these local interactions resulted in some kind of discernable macrobehaviour" pg 19

"Along with many other ingenious inhibiting schemes that the brain relies on, Fatigue is a way of shorting out the reverberating circuit, keeping the brain's feeding frenzy in check" p143


From unknown Fri Feb 13 00:49:00 US/Eastern 2004
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Date: 2004/02/13 00:49 EST
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Message-ID: <20040213004951EST@zwiki.sial.rmit.edu.au>



From unknown Fri Feb 13 21:14:00 US/Eastern 2004
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Date: 2004/02/13 21:14 EST
Subject: 
Message-ID: <20040213211442EST@zwiki.sial.rmit.edu.au>