| Last Cereal: Message Board: posting |
| re: Frerekhan: |
| [6605] by "0magus" (adsl-63-196-7-17.dsl.snfc21.pacb) on Sat 13 Oct 2001 13:45:37 [ reply ] |
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the growth of the internet is very much like a colonial organism, such as a coral reaf. lots of small creatures go about their daily busness, but in doing so they are building something very big and complex. the individual creatures which make the coral have no idea what a coral is, or what it looks like, or anything of that sort. the coral its self is just a chunk of calcium on which lots of little organisms live, it has no sence of self. so you could say, that within the coral universe, NOTHING in the coral universe knows that a coral is.
then we coming back to the ant issue: the thing its self has no idea that it IS something, its just lots of smaller things going thought their internal opperations. we, an outside system, can come up to the coral or the ant nest and note that the sum of all the ants or all the coral organisms (i cant remember offhand what those things are called) is greater than the sum of its parts. in the same way our human society is more than the sum of its parts. nobody really understand how economys work, or how social structures evolve, or why languages all share universal trates. we are all just going through our daily cources of I/O and then being plesently surpirezed when we find evidence of something bigger that we have made, together. unlike the ant or the coral organism, we have the inteligence to notice that we must be building something bigger than ourselves. but this knowlage works in the same way we know there must be a 4th dimention: the abstract is very easy (just solve an equation of intersections with 4 variables) but the application is ludicristly beyond us. we can test inputs and output, but we cant see the engen in our minds. |