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Letters
Letters
Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts • Get Smarter • Decoding A Decoding • A Swift Rebuttal • Basic Arithmetic • A Message on Meaning
Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts
Dear Editor: As highlighted by Jonathan Moens (‘From Birds to Brains’, PN 164), starling murmuration provides a striking example of ‘emergence’. However, emergence is not a distinct mystery in its own right, but an illustration of that remarkable power of mathematical relationships to generate close approximations to far more complex relationships. Thus, the exact behaviour of a flock of starlings at a particular instant is simply the sum of the responses of each individual starling to the changing positions of its neighbours. However, the sum turns out to approximate closely to that apparently inexhaustible repertoire of continually changing patterns that our brains extract from visual input. So it is with all emergent phenomena.
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