Sublime

Chris Langton’s theories about the generative power of liquid networks are developed in his essay “Life at the Edge of Chaos.”

As the Internet speeds up the connection between human minds, as our collective knowledge, memory, and sensations are shared and stored in digital form, we are weaving a new kind of technology-mediated superorganism, a global brain consisting of all connected humans. This global brain is a human-machine hybrid. The senses of that global brain are t

probabilities attach themselves to the descriptions of events and not to events themselves.

“Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.”

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy: “Information is closely associated with uncertainty.” Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information. Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies s

“small pieces loosely joined.”)

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“This is the crux of science,” he’d say with enthusiasm. “All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction.” Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?