Global Brain

Collective Intelligence and its Discontents: the rebirth of the autodidact tradition

Collective Intelligence is a relatively new and loose term, which has been used to mean various things. A first attempt at defining it could go something like this: Collective Intelligence is an emergent property in groups of individuals acting both intelligently and collectively, which produces something inherently different from what would have been produced if each individual’s intelligence acted in isolation. There are many problems with how one defines intelligence […]

Continue Reading →

The Novel as a Bayesian Inference Machine

A novel, or a story, can’t be anything of the sort. It can’t be a machine, or a process, whether this is doing Bayesian inference or not. The novel itself is not dynamic and it doesn’t take an input, doesn’t produce an output. But of course when the book is picked up and read by someone else, other than its writer, something dynamic does begin to take place. The story’s […]

Continue Reading →