"80 I Believe that the ur-Subject of the Romantic was Nature, the ur-subject of the Victorian was culture, the ur-subject of modernity was urbanity, the ur-subject of post-modernity was media, and the ur-subject of digitality is emergence."
(from http://www.bopnews.com/archives/003834.html)
Emergence, eh? That's terrifically exciting. And makes sense, given what it seems like is in the air. It seems to me that various branches of knowledge are increasingly realizing that complexity comes from large numbers of simple, interrelated processes, reactions, or actions.
Just before school got out, I had a conversation with Michael about how cities and brains were alike, using Hofstadter's metaphor of the anthill (in /Godel, Escher, Bach/), to talk about the way that particular forms of complexity emerge from simple patterns:
A new coffeeshop opens; it changes the way that you and I and many others walk to work; a nearby store starts doing better business and renovates; other stores open up; rents go up; people move in and move out; the character of the neighborhood changes; different politicians are elected; different institutions prosper. Each step is the logical result of lots and lots of small independent actions, but the net result is unpredictable and complicated and interesting.
A week later, Michael saw a book on computers, brains, and cities.
I can't help but thinking that most ideas are simply mutations and recombinations of existing ideas. I suppose that's just a repeating of memetics, but I've never felt so clearly that key ideas are pre-determined by the sum of currently relevant existing knowledge. (Which is, of course, a similar process of local joke-telling and story-relating and idea-delivering made many times more complicated by webs of reading and commenting and responding.) I keep thinking of Hegel's idea of the World Spirit becoming cognizant of itself...
Of course, I've never read any Hegel.
A related idea: emergence has something to do with the relationship between analog and digital. Must think more.
