Interesting
on swarms is being undertaken by Iain D. Couzin first with insects and animals but leading to experiments wth humans. Most intriguing to me is the following comment:
“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm."
My take on the idea of your "inner swarm" is your local family, environment or ecosystem...that all you need to act (locally or globally) comes from clues found in your most local swarms. My sense is that defining degrees of locality or closeness comes first from those in direct physical proximity - i.e. where you live (spatial intelligence) and then progressively outward with intimacy carried more broadly through other networking tools like telephones, internet etc..
Fascinating stuff!
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