Emergence starts out as a field guide to the idea of emergence and how it crosses all kinds of disciplines. The cognitivist core of my heart is sad and disappointed. to which he devotes maybe 10 pages before talking for an entire chapter about Will Wright and the Sims games. The single most interesting application of the idea of emergence: that for all our sense of a unified self controlling our thoughts and actions, we are little more than a colony of neurons connected on very local scales. Johnson flirts with Hofstadter-esque notions of consciousness, again sloppily, without ever getting up the balls to propose them outright. Infinitely more could have been done in this section, and done better, if the reader is to accept the proposition that the human brain is an example of emergence. The fifth star for the half of this book that I am treating as the imaginary whole was forfeited to bad, sloppy, lazy neuroscience. Johnson explores the phenomenon of emergence on scales as diverse as ant colonies, cities over centuries, the internet, news and media corporations, media consumption trends and communities, video games, and of course, the brain. The four star rating is for that first half of the book, which I will pretend is the entire book. The other half of the book is a reiteration of clever metaphors the author uses so persistently that they cease to be clever, a lacklustre tour of the tech industry in the early 2000's (filled with the embarrassing techno-web-whatever buzzwords that permeated the scene at the time), and a set of altogether too optimistic predictions for the internet, media, and emergence "by 2005". And I owe the complete absorption of my thoughts with the idea to Johnson and his fascinating first few chapters. In my mind I've split this book into two halves: the half that is severely fascinating, opening doors for me to think about emergence on new scales and inspiring me to contemplate how I could build a model of memory with the principle at its core- memory as a decentralized, locally interconnected, self-organizing network of instances. He is one of those rare science writers that sees across disciplines and speaks intelligibly about all of them. From looking at how disorganized individuals spring up into a larger, organized whole, he explains slime mold, ants selecting new colony sites, video games, and grassroots political revolutions. We have been coming out of the ages of hierarchy and webs from how we explain and understand the universe, from biology to political systems.
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In one sense, this is a very real snapshot of the history of thinking/science captured in a book, no less pertinent for its publication date. Emergence's premise is about networks and 'organized' behavior that develops from a lower-level to a more sophisticated one. While I know-I know-I picked this up because I thought it was about disease, Emergence has proved far more interesting and satisfying than I could hope. Its a little bit scary and a lot of bit exciting. Every now and then I start reading and realize "this book is going to change how I think."