Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

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* Book: Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. By Mitchell Resnick.

Summary

Reading notes from Michel Bauwens, 2006:

The topic of this book are self-organizing systems, that run without an organizer or coordinator. It also describes a tool, 'Starlogo', that helps children understand these important processes. It is a book about the decentralized mindset, needed to understand such realities.


Chapter 1: Foundations

This chapter explores examples of decentralization.

The centralized mindset looks for centralization and leaders even when there are none. For example, in a flock of birds, there is no 'chief bird'. The author sees his task as probing this mindset, and to to develop conceptual and computational tools, so that people may start to think in decentralized ways. Decentralized thinking is not new.

Examples are the ideas of Adam Smith, the invisible hand, and Darwin's evolution, but today there is a massive shift towards this paradigm in organization, technologies, scientific models, theories of self and mind, and theories of knowledge.

In business, vertical integration has been replaced by reliance on outside markets. CPU-based computers are being replaced by 'parallel computing'. Newtonian physics stressed cause and effect, not mutual interaction. Systems and complexity theory started to emphasize decentralized interactions and feedback loops. Cybernetics was an attempt to combine insights in different fields into a unified systems view. This evolved to the study of nonlinear dynamics which gave rise to chaos theory.

- "Self-organizing systems are the related opposite of chaotic systms: in the former, orderly patterns emerge out of low level randomness; in the latter , out of low level deterministic rules."

Artificial life is based on such bottom-up modelling and distributed control of behaviour. In mind and self theory, decentralization started with psycho-analysis and was intensified in the strand of object-relations theory (relationships with people are internalized as agents and objects, cfr Melanie Klein), which posits that the self emerges from the interactions of these internationalized objects. AI was at first centralized, but this begin to shift in the mid-80s, prompting Minsky to write his 'Society of Mind' in 1987.

In cognitive science, Daniel Dennett has proposed a 'multiple drafts model of consciousness', rejecting a single stream. Our meta-theories of knowledge have moved from faith in a central 'objective' knowledge, to a recognition that it has been constantly constructed in decentralized ways.

In literary criticism , we moved from seeing meaning as constructed by a single author, to a focus on multiple readers: "meanings are constantly reconstructed by communities of readers through their interactions with the text". (p. 18)

The trend is clearly towards epistemological pluralism.


Chapter 2: Constructions

Elements of Constructionism:

- 1) learning is an active process, in which people actively construct knowledge from their experiences with the world (derived from the constructivist theories of Piaget)

- 2) this process is more efficient when people engage in constructing meaningful products

Lego/Logo, and later Starlogo where designed as tools to achieve the second objective. Starlogo not only has many creatures ('turtles'), but an active world-environment for them.

Chapter 4 - Reflections

Focuses on the continued dominance of the centralized mindset, giving examples from biology, genetics, etc.. People generally assume that a patterns is created by lead or seed (ex: the grain of salt in the oyster is responsible for the emergence of the pearl). One of the keys for a conversion to decentralized thinking is to use the fascination which occurs when witnessing such phenomena.

Then one can start developing an understanding, using just five heuristic rules:

- 1) Positive feedback isn't always negative: a negative example is scratching a mosquite bites, which increases the itching, but the Silicon Valley dynamic has been clearly successful

- 2) Randomness helps create order: "In many self-organizing systems, seeds are created through a random fluctuation, causing patterns to emerge." (f.e.: density fluctuations create traffic jams)

- 3) A flock isn't a big bird: Interactions between birds create a flock. One must recognize the emergence of objects at a new and 'higher' level (again: cars create traffic jams)

- 4) The hills are alive: the environment is not a passive object to act upon, but a living one to interact with

- 5) A traffic jam isn't just a collection of cars: 'emergent objects'