Over at FastForward, Rob has written again on the theme of emergence. This is stuff he’s been working on for a long time and I like to pay close attention to each iteration.
One of the ideas that particularly engaged me was Rob’s example of how children get hold of language. We all know the timeline, but Rob makes me see how astonishing it really is. How in a relatively short time, infants experience an explosive growth in their language skills.
What happens inside brains is dead interesting, especially if you’re attracted to metaphor of the brain as a network. It excites me because the net and what goes with it have created in a short space of time a peer-to-peer network of incredible richness and complexity. Rob’s post begs the question: what if we as a species may be about to experience a sudden and very significant explosion in our capacity to think together?
That’s just a partial response to Rob’s part one. There’s two more chunks to process as well.
