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Knowledge Has Always Been Networked

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Here is a rather scathing review of David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used “medium is the message,” McLuhan’s major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems — such as the media — operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan’s primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, “McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions.”

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan’s inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher — probably the greatest of the 20th century — the most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

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Ignorance is Bliss

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Here’s an article in The Economist that my colleague, Roger Koppl, who has done terrific work in the field of forensic evidence, alerted me to. The article mentions Itiel Dror who I’ve been in correspondence with though Roger. I know Itiel’s work through his co-edited Cognition Distributed. Here is his co-authored “extended mind” chapter.

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Two versions the extended mind thesis

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Here’s a draft of a forthcoming paper I chanced across.

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Neuroswarm

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This article is really creating a buzz (sorry!!) The idea has some resonance to an aspect of Hayek’s social epistemology (see the article that I just today uploaded).

In much the same way that synapses are strengthened while unused linkages weaken and wither away, so too are paths to salient social knowledge strengthened or weakened – “social connectionism,” if you will.

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Hayek and the “Use of Knowledge in Society”

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Here is a draft of my entry for the SAGE Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences.

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E.O. Wilson

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Here’s an article in this month’s Atlantic.

Rejecting the views of classic political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that primitive humankind started out as a collection of scattered, unorganized individuals, Fukuyama writes: “Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.” Nowhere is Wilson, who pioneered this view, even mentioned.

Wilson is of course famous for his work on stigmergy:

•  Sematectonic stigmergy.

•  Sign-, cue-, or marker-based stigmergy.

Sematectonic stigmergy denotes communication via modification of a physical  environment, an elementary example being the carving out of trails. One needs only to cast an eye around any public space, a park or a college quadrangle for instance, to see the grass being worn away, revealing a dirt pathway that is a well-traveled, unplanned and thus indicates an ‘‘unofficial’’ intimation of a shortcut to some salient destination.

Marker-based stigmergy denotes communication via a signaling mechanism. A standard example is the phenomenon of pheromones laid by social insects. Pheromone imbued trails increase the likelihood of other ants following the aforementioned trails. Unlike sematectonic stigmergy  which is a response to an environmental modification , marker-based stigmergy does not  make any direct contribution to a given task.

Wilson, E. O. (1975/2000). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Don Lavoie

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Don Lavoie died on this day ten years ago. It just so happens I’m reading his National Economic Planning: What Is Left? and noticed his dates. Here is Steve Horwitz (along with Pete Boettke) marking the commemoration.

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Hayek in Mind: Editorial Introduction

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Here is an uncorrected proof (do not cite) of my introduction to Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology. Further details will be made available just as soon as the publisher has updated the webpage for this book (according to Amazon the book will be made available on December 13th). A dedicated website to the volume can be found here.

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Spatio-Temporal Dynamics on Co-Evolved Stigmergy

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Here’s a co-authored paper by one of the leading complexity theorists Vitorino Ramos.

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Smells Like Stigmergy

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Love the witty title of Dave Reeves’ blog post.

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