You first argue that "understanding our subjective experience is shaped . . . by information-processing and transmitting units within us" that "we don't perceive helps us think in productive ways. We realize that our views are shaped by unconscious biases, and that our thinking can be influenced by context." While this sounds good, these are hardly novel ideas--in fact, I think it would be difficult to find people who don't believe that unconscious biases and context affect human thought. So, this begs the question what value the network metaphor adds. Moreover, even if the network metaphor somehow lifts people out of the darkness and makes them aware of their unconscious biases and the importance of context, what guarantees that the the step after enlightenment will be "productive thinking." Isn't it possible that people will just confirm their unconscious biases with conscious ones and consciously use context to justify their previous beliefs?

Second, you discuss the benefits of the presumption of regularity that the network metaphor permits. But, you presume that such a presumption is beneficial or warranted. Are you suggesting that, based on our genes and memories, we act in generally predictable or inevitable ways? If so, what accounts for deviations in this predictability? And, if deviations become qualitatively or quantitatively significant, doesn't this call into question the "regularity" of individual psychology?

Finally, you argue that thinking about brains and societies using the network metaphor opens up possibilities for technology-driven (and accelerated) social change, and you cite the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring as examples. With respect to the Arab Spring, it strikes me as a gross oversimplification of complex socio-political dynamics to somehow credit Facebook or online memes with widespread social upheaval (especially when, as Moglen noted, social-media is as much a weapon of State as it is a tool of the protestor). Even if we agree that technology played a key role in facilitating the uprisings across the Arab world, I'm not sure why we need your metaphor. While it's possible the "psychological law" of thousands of people changed, it seems just as likely that technology merely provided an end-around the traditional obstacles to organizing opposition in an authoritarian state. As to the Occupy Movement, it's again unclear how the "law" changed. Indeed, there is nothing "new" about the ideas or rhetoric underpinning the Movement. Resenting the "wealthy," blaming capitalism in times of economic difficulty, villainizing corporations, failing to offer any real or feasible solutions--these are more the tired talking points of the far left than the novel arguments of a new social movement. Again, even if we agree that technology somehow "changed the law," whether meaningful social change will occur is another matter. In Egypt, there's no guarantee that Mubarak will be replaced with a liberal regime that acknowledges, much less protects, the freedoms and rights we like to think are universal. If anything, the opposite seems more likely. And, the Occupy protestors have achieved little more than antagonizing the police, inconveniencing people who work in "occupied" areas, and supplying the 24 hour news outlets with a few weeks' worth of material.

-- MatthewLadner - 11 Jan 2012

A Network of Networks: Making Social Change Happen with Bits

To use a consilient approach, we can apply this network metaphor to understand society on two interlinked levels of analysis: the micro level of an individual person (personal psychology), and the macro-level of many communicating persons (social psychology). This essay suggests that, for the purpose of generating social change, it is useful to think of a person as a network and society as a network of networks. This is a useful image because it provides a way of thinking about human freedom (on the level of personal psychology) and the role of information flows in influencing the behavior of others (on the level of social psychology).

If, as I proposed above, we agree with Lessig that code is law, and we consider that the genes and memories that comprise our personal psychological network are our source code, well-tailored memes can change the source code of many individuals rapidly and produce new combinations and unanticipated results. Communication changes not just what we know, but who we are. Our "source code" is different, and so the "rules of the game" are now different. In a sense, the law is different.

Brains as Networks, Societies as Networks: A Narrative about Making Social Change Happen with Bits

One quality of a using a network metaphor to look out at the social world is that it highlights the critical importance of information flows. Musician Ian MacKaye, talking about his childhood in Washington D.C., which involved a significant amount of skateboarding, related once that skateboarding was an important phase of his life. It trained him to look at the world as a place full of opportunities to ride a skateboard off things, not just a venue for the conduct of ordinary life. This was, on later reflection, an education in the power of looking at the structures of the world differently than most and using them in a different way - hacking, in a sense.

III. Social Psychology

Networking Brains: Making Change Happen with Bits

I. Introduction

II. Personal Psychology

II. Social Psychology

I. Intro

The "network of pipes and switches" metaphor we have used to understand the internet in this class is also useful for understanding how brains work. At a high level of abstraction, a network of pipes and switches is a system where there are two basic categories of things, things that receive, process, and transmit information ("switches"), and things that serves a conduits along which information can flow ("pipes").

To apply a consilient approach, the network model is useful for thinking about brains on two levels, personal psychology and social sociology.

II. Personal Psychology

On the level of personal psychology, to use a two-category model to describe something as complex as the brain may seem at first to be a gross oversimplification. But theoretical models can be useful for reasons other than descriptive accuracy. In fact, parsimony, the quality of having as little detail as possible, is a positive virtue for a model.

However, the primary benefit of this model is that it highlights the importance of multiple networked agencies within what we often understand as a unitary self. Our conscious mind, the stream of phenomena we experience, is at any moment, just one switch connected by pipes to many unconscious switches doing important receiving, processing, and transmitting work.

Understanding that our subjective experience is shaped decisively by information-processing and transmitting units within us the operation of which we do not perceive helps us think in productive ways. We realize that our views are shaped by unconscious biases, and that our thinking can influenced by our context. We can try to take corrective measures. Realizing that we have only partial agency helps make the smartest, best use of that agency.

Another beneficial valence of the network metaphor, which reinforces that sense of agency, is its presumption of regularity. Computer networks are incredibly complex, but we operate with the assumption that there are knowable regularities to computer networks. We can use knowledge of those regularities to engineer them.

Often in our culture the subconscious is depicted as an irrational "Wild West" (see Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, etc). It contributes to a sense of empowerment and agency, however, if we can think of it as subject to knowable regularities.

If the brain is a network, we might be puzzled by the activity of its "invisible switches," but we keep in mind that with systematic observation, we can understand something of how they work and try to improve system performance (however defined).

These knowable regularities might be thought of as emerging from the interaction of genes and experience (in the form of memories encoded in the brain). We might call that the source code of a person. If, in Larry Lessig's metaphor, software code does some of the work of law, this psychological source code also does some of the work of law. Genes may be fixed, but memories can be added to or reinterpreted, further reinforcing a sense of agency.

II. Social Psychology

Moving up a level of analysis, the network metaphor is also generative of useful insights when applied to social psychology. The principle of knowable regularities is also useful when thinking about social phenomena. This may seem trivial, but the concept of "social engineering" has received bad press in recent decades in the United States. However, optimizing a complex system is difficult, but not impossible.

More importantly, one quality of a using a network metaphor to look out at the social world is that it highlights the critical importance of information flows.

the role of information. what do we see when we look out at the social world? mackaye quote.

Memes. tailored information clusters. can change the psychological source code of many people. arab spring: exchanging info changed people from feeling isolated. information is key. bridges social psychology and personal psychology.

=

In the brain, spontaneous order appears to arise out of decentralized networks of simple units (neurons)."

. "Connectionism is a set of approaches in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. There are many forms of connectionism, but the most common forms use neural network models."

"the neural network analogy"

. does this metaphor for the brain have implications for our legal image of the internet?

network - social connection - solitary confinement - form of torture (in some countries, solitary confinement is) - why is that? psychology, understanding of psychological health, social nature of brain. laws re internet access, French strikes law

law, politics, tech

tech: the biology

law: social norms

politics: free will

. mindfulness, attention, memory

network of networks splitting neural networks hyperconnectivity, effects on the brain, politics

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11/11/1459258/how-is-technology-changing-the-brain