Glen writes: "What mechanism is responsible for these patterns of expectation, given (what seems to me) a co-evolutionary milieu far from equilibrium? Is it simply Hebbian/reinforcement learning, an embodied type of (false) induction? I'm skeptical because of your (Steve) question about the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in modeling the world. Your mention of negentropy in this thread seems spot on."
Parents, educators, religious and political leaders and prison guards all lower the dimensionality of the space of the possible. To confront a complex world without a map or a rule book is a distraction and a drain. I doubt many people take a different route to work every day just for the fun of it. Likewise most people don't change their friends or their church every week. I could go to several different coffee shops but I really just go to one per vicinity. I could go to dozens of cultural events, some where I would blend-in and others where I would not. Let a hundred flowers blossom but I'll have my Benadryl tablets nearby. People want to believe their life and tribe is worth something. To doubt that is to doubt every thought and action. (Which they should do, but simply cannot.) Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
