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Society Of Mind

Just received this book in the mail Aug 05 2019, didn't expect it to be in a large floppy format (I don't mean 5.25" disk from the old days, think more college lab workbook) with each chapter section taking about 1 full page on average I'd say. Reading a few of the sections I get the feeling the book can be consumed piecewise, and in any order, even the introduction says it's more a interconnected mesh of ideas than a linear path "to the top".

The few pieces I've read so far have been interesting, but I haven't run into anything groundbreaking yet. A lot of the diagrams and ideas seem to map well to the more general explorations of holarchy in Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine?, another excellent book that I've only got halfway through. AntiFragile? by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, was another good book that I read halfway and took a break for a little over a year before slurping down the rest, although the concepts don't overlap much besides maybe some of his ideas on antifragile structures for governance: small city-states in the vein of the Swiss cantons, but there wasn't much focus on the structure of communication between nodes, more that having a multiple diverse self-sufficient nodes allows the "whole" to benefit from stressful situations, even if the individual (city-state) would find the stress harmful or even fatal.

Hopefully will add more notes here as I read and think about the concepts in Society of Mind!

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Page last modified on August 26, 2019, at 06:26 pm

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