On emergence in music concerts & similar religious events

I find music concerts to be a beautiful example of emergence (as are also other religious events, such as sport events, movies & parades). A group of people, inspired by the same art/activity, becomes one body (in a higher level), having for a limited time period unified perception, feelings, goals & perhapse even consciousness.

(Images from a great concert of Eran Zur, Assaf Amdursky & Shlomy Shaban taken by my friend Ran Mendelson)
Why does this emergence happen? What purpose is the higher-level creature – the congregation – serving? I would like to learn/think more to answer this, but in the meantime will just continue to enjoy it.

Of course, it requires one to choose the event & group of people matching it, & of course we must be extremely careful from the daunting horrors unified groups of people can together do (too too many examples in the previous century).

Long time ago, I imagined a movie ending scene in which a train passanger suddenly takes out a violin, & starts playing the slow movement from L’estro Armonico #9 by Vivaldi. After a while, some other passangers take their violins out as well & join the playing. Eventually, all train passangers play the music, & as they go out from the train, everyone else on the street join them.

Just strange memes flowing in my mind.

 

Beauty as a memetic tool

I was thinking during a demonstration yesterday about the importance of beauty for memetic influence on people. Why do beautiful people serve as model for us, while ugly people serve as anti-model. It seems like a programming mechanism used to indicate what’s good to follow & what’s not (a visual chemical).

Advertisement uses beautiful people (models) to effect other people’s behavior, & politicians likewise. 2 weeks ago, 2 beautiful women came to demonstrate against a large anti-war demonstration in Tel-Aviv, holding a piece of paper saying: traitors. Of course the local newspapers covered only the 2 women, fully ignoring the demonstration…

Apparently, we’re designed to work by the belief: Beauty=Good=Model. However, I believe a missing part in this equation is Love, which should exist between all people, of all tribes & other variants, because when it’s missing, you can’t call the result beauty.

It becomes however very annoying when it’s missing, & the mere beauty indicator is wrong.

 

Disruptive technologies

What characterizes these technologies

• Internet
• Linux

& maybe:

• Web2.0 (such as del.icio.us & its-like)
• Grid computing
• Semantic Web

is that they’re open, free (as in freedom), bottom-up, disruptive: x-times better/faster/more powerful than the technologies that existed before them (think cars & carrieges, &c).

There’s another thing – an architecture of participation, meaning that it’s by people & for people.

 

Human tissue project

Picture:

human tissue, made of 6B humans. what makes it a tissue are connections. connections are made thru “chemicals”, manifested as feelings felt by the humans. such connections bond families, friendships, organizations, communities. other connections are done by means of social mechanisms.

the imagined outcome is a clear zoommable picture, that explains the bonds, the layers of the tissue, & the macro behavior of the tissue: what kind of animal is it, what does it do.

to get there, I can take the normal biological investigation methodology, or try a more rigid one, using description logic (OWL) & simulations (StarLogo). I can try use Wolfram’s New-Kind-Of-Science methodology, which seems to be so fruitefull.

Next task: map the chemicals. (not yet the social mechanisms)