OK, this is one of those frustrating moments in life where earlier today I wrote a long and (at the time seemingly) lucid piece in response to this, only to have the Windows-hibernate demon expunge it from existance.
Now I have the combination (can't-be-arsed/it'll-never-be-as-good-again)s and so here follows the terse and salient(?) points without the florid prose of yore:
I think TankGirl's onto something here but there's an awful lot of wank published along these lines and only a handful of things I've seen that seem to hold water... Not that there's *anything* wrong with poetry, mind you, just as long as the author (and audience) recognise it as such. Personally I think there's a lot more caught up in that third paragraph than meets the eye, and would be interested in teasing out some of the issues (over time).
I also wrote a potted history of Stuart Kauffman... if you don't know him Google his name and skim Order for Free, we can debate the fine print later.
Something that really interests me here is the (potentially enormous) potential for good old fashioned human Hubris when it comes to thinking about the differences between emergent self-organising behaviours in biological (sic) verses "social" systems. There are many pieces written about the latter that seem to imply a teleological aspect that I (for one) am simply not convinced is available to us (the details of which will get hashed out if anybody bothers to respond here).
Finally I stimbled (which was a typo, but I like it - cf: poetry, above
) across
TouchGraph earlier today and found entering "www.p2p-zone.com" rather enlightening, since I happened to be deep in thought about the connectivity of social networks at the time... if anybody cares to come up with a pro-teleology argument perhaps they could illustrate the point with how p2p-zone might start socially networking itself a little more closely with it's neighbours? (or describe to me why this is naive?) Maybe this is old hat to you old-hands but hey, I'm still new here:
See you on the other side,
~d~
