|
Mailing List CryoNet@secureid.org Message #9906 | |
|---|
| ||||||
| <http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080626/full/news.2008.918.html> The secret of happiness: grinning on the Internet How happy you are is influenced by your social links to people you've never heard of and never met. Related: <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/christakis.html> And similarly, in social science, there is an increasing interest in the same kind of phenomenon. We have begun to understand human behavior, and we have models of rational decision-making rational actor models which have led to further innovations. But these models all pertain primarily to individuals. Adam Smith talked about markets as a phenomenon that emerges from the action of individuals, but nevertheless we have primarily focused on the actions of individuals. How do we put all these parts back together to understand groups? Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project, part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the individuals. We have, for example, consciousness, which cannot be understood by studying neurons. Consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue. And we can imagine similarly certain kinds of emergent properties of social networks that do not inhere in the individuals properties that arise because of the ties between individuals and because of the complexity of those ties. dss David Stodolsky davidstodolsky@mac.com Skype: davidstodolsky Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30834 |
|
|
| Subscribe (FEED) | Subscribe (DIGEST) | Subscribe (INDEX) | Unsubscribe | Mail to ListMaster |
|---|
