You know, I read that book 25 years ago ... maybe I should look at it again...
However, my point was definitely not "the hierarchical principle as the organizing principle of life"... that is a rather different point. If any example conveys my point clearly, it would be the "glocal Hopfield net", which is a toy computational model illustrating the glocality principle (and which I'll have a whole paper on, sometime). The fact that a symbolic command can trigger a large set of actions isn't *quite* the point. But a military example might work better than the one I gave. The way to give a military example might be to refer to War and Peace, where General Kutuzov proposes to just let the army self-organize into its own battle patterns, rather than providing top-down control. This is sorta large-scale guerilla warfare, right? The opposite would be something like Operation Desert Storm, which was carefully orchestrated and planned (in spite of some errors e.g. deaths by friendly fire), so that the individual actors were largely doing what the software told them to do. In Kutuzov's battle, the knowledge of the military plan was contained in the army as a whole; in Desert Storm, the knowledge was contained in the central planning software and the minds of the relevant generalized (hence localized from the view of the whole army). In a glocal approach there would be central planning *and* distributed, self-organized activity, and they would be coordinated together dynamically and effectively, which is what the military realizes it needs to achieve in future in order to combine rapid, flexible adaptivity with global coordination. ben On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Ben, > > Have you read Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine? You seem to be reaching > in your post for what he sets out there - albeit v. loosely - namely the > hierarchical principle as the organizing principle of life, both of > organisms and of societies (and perhaps one can add machines). You talk of > representation being organized in terms of a key linking to - or you could > say, "opening" - a map - a very simple unit opening up a complex set of > units; he talks in terms of triggers.- simple commands or signals releasing > complex action patterns. This underlies not just knowledge representation > and movement and all goal-directed action but also socially organized > action. Your social example confused me. It seems easier to me to think in > terms of how, in social units, the simple, typically symbolic commands of > one individual set off extremely complex action patterns by the whole social > unit or organization. A president says "invade Iraq" and a little later a > vast army of 150,000 with all its machinery is elaborating his command. > > Our machines also are designed in terms of simple switches, or key > mechanisms, setting off whole elaborate complexes of action. > > . > Ben: >> >> A semi-technical essay on the global/local (aka glocal) nature of >> memory is linked to from here >> >> http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/ >> >> I wrote this a long while ago but just got around to posting it now... >> > > > > > ------------------------------------------- > agi > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -- Sir Winston Churchill ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
