[MD] Say what?

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Ian]
Just don't see the argument ...

There are "giants" AND there are individuals. Both aspects of consciousnessness
and intellect are emergent realities, neither is exclusive of the other.What is
there to argue about, unless pigeonholing people in opposing boxes for some
reason.

Oh, for the excluded middle. I can dream.

[Arlo]
You and me both, amigo.

This paragraph describing "emergence" from Wikipedia works nicely to illustrate
this point.

"An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple
entities (agents) [read "individuals"] operate in an environment, forming more
complex behaviours as a collective [read "collective" :-)]. If emergence
happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal
relation across different scales. In other words there is often a form of
top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. These are two of the
major reasons why emergent behaviour occurs: intricated causal relations across
different scales and feedback. The property itself is often unpredictable and
unprecedented, and may represent a new level of the system's evolution [can you
say "MOQ"?]. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any
single such entity [read "any one 'individual' on the lower level"], nor can
they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities:
they are irreducible."

The entire entry is worth reading, as it explains the MOQ quite nicely. Indeed,
it is the central premise described by Pirsig in talking about the
software-hardware-programming metaphor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Mayhap the Plattman will appreciate this passage.

"The stock market is an example of emergence on a grand scale. As a whole it
precisely regulates the relative prices of companies across the world, yet it
has no leader; there is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire
market. Agents, or investors, have knowledge of only a limited number of
companies within their portfolio, and must follow the regulatory rules of the
market. Through the interactions of individual investors the complexity of the
stock market as a whole emerges."

And if you need more on "the Giant", the article continues.

"Emergent structures appear at many different levels of organization or as
spontaneous order. Emergent self-organization appears frequently in cities
where no planning or zoning entity predetermined the layout of the city."

Can you say "the Giant of his dreams"?

And Ian, one sees "memes" very strongly in this passage.

"[M]erely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to
guarantee emergent behaviour; many of the interactions may be negligible or
irrelevant, or may cancel each other out. In some cases, a large number of
interactions can in fact work against the emergence of interesting behaviour,
by creating a lot of "noise" to drown out any emerging "signal" [read "meme",
no?]; the emergent behaviour may need to be temporarily isolated from other
interactions before it reaches enough critical mass to be self-supporting."