Out Of Control: The New Biology Of Machines, Social Systems, And The Economic World

by Kevin Kelly

Some students of the human mind make a strong argument that thinking is a type of evolution of ideas within the brain. According to this argument, all created things are evolved. As I write these words, I have to agree. I began this book not with a sentence formed in my mind but with an arbitrarily chosen phrase, “I am.” Then in unconsciously rapid succession I evaluated a headful of possible next words. I picked one that seemed esthetically fit, “sealed.” After “I am sealed,” I went on to the next word, choosing from among 100,000s of possible ones. Each selected word bred the choices for the next until I had evolved almost a sentence of words. Toward the end of the sentence my choices were constrained somewhat by the words I had already chosen at the beginning, so learning helped the breeding go more quickly. But the first word of the next sentence could have been any word. The end of my book, 150,000 choices away, looked as distant and improbable as the end of the galaxy. A book is improbable. Out of all the books written or to be written in the world, only this book, for instance, would have found the preceding two sentences in a row. Now that I’m in the middle of the book, I’m still evolving the text. What will the next words be that I write in this chapter? In a real sense I don’t know. There are probably billions of possibilities of what they might be, even taking into account the restriction that they must logically follow from the last sentence. Did you guess this...