This entry is a re-post of a comment of mine in Venessa Miemis Blog: Emergent By Design, written on nov 17 2009
http://emergentbydesign.com/2009/11/17/is-twitter-a-complex-adaptive-system/#comment-79
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Twitter is just one of the last result of many communicative channels we were developing in our history. From graffiti to tweets we gained in speed and broader audience.
The peculiar characters of tweets are: immediateness, shortness, distance-independance, nomemory.
Tweets could be basic building blocks of some neuron-alike communications. Reverberating circuits are ReTweets, providing some kind of short-term memory, and when activity spreads to remote different areas of the twittersphere, it flows across paths (synapses) that we create connecting among each other.
Mid term memory is emerging in places like this: blogs, where multi-sourced-message-words precipitate in ideas building blocks.
Long term memory emerges from mailing list archives and more structured articles, linked to scientific research, properly indexed and referred.
The amazing thing is that what happens is “just happening”, and is substantially independent from a single mind will. There is no _strict_ causal connection between our individual activities and the state of the whole in a single moment. There is not a specific “place” in which reasoning happens.
Exactly Like Consciousness.
IT is an emerging epiphenomenon.
All this matches very well with some not-so-recent ideas from more classical thinking:
Gregory Bateson
Douglas Hofstadter
Daniel Dennett
Paul and Patricia Churchland
Norman Doidge
Roger Penrose
and surely hundreds if not thousands of other authors
Many thanks to everybody for this stimulating thread.
Marco
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