Complex adaptive Christmas
Contnuing to work through the “internet as giant complex adaptive system” theme. The great thing is that our cells are subcritical — they're not given to bursts of chain-reaction creativity. (This allows us to avoid fusing with our food.) The universe as a whole is supracritical (chain reactions feeding into chain reactions — very creative place). Communities of cells will evolve to the boundary between supra-sub, always yearning to stay whole but wanting to be connected and fused at the same time.
All of this life-creation happens spontaneously — you just need enough density of diverse chemicals and an infusion of energy, and then order emerges. It's this spontaneously-arising order on which natural selection operates (or so says Stuart Kauffman).
And we may already be seeing spontaneously arising, pluralistic order (lots of different communities of cells, vibrating at the edge of criticality) online already. All we can do is describe it; we can't predict what will happen next.
The crucial step (the causally important step) has got to be that initial fusion of energy and diversity, plus the existence of a few semi-permeable cell walls. So what's “energy” online? I think it has to be information.
And then there's Christmas.
Blogging will be (has been) slow for a few days. Here is a poem to read that someone emailed me recently.