Networks & Conflict

[James Brody]

“With every day and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew nearer to that truth…that man is not truly one but truly two. I say two because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point…I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.” Henry Jekyll (Bob Stevenson, 1886, 62)
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“My own conscious and seemingly indivisible self was turning out far from what I had imagined….I was an ambassador ordered abroad by some fragile coalition, a bearer of conflicting orders from the uneasy masters of a divided empire.…As I write these words, even so as to be able to write them, I am pretending to a unity that, deep inside myself, I now know does not exist.” (Hamilton, 1996, 134–135)
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http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0510932103v1

Livnat A & Pippenger N (2006) An optimal brain can be composed of conflicting agents Published online before print February 21, 2006, 10.1073/pnas.0510932103

"Many behaviors have been attributed to internal conflict within the animal and human mind. However, internal conflict has not been reconciled with evolutionary principles, in that it appears maladaptive relative to a seamless decision-making process. We study this problem through a mathematical analysis of decision-making structures. We find that, under natural physiological limitations, an optimal decision-making system can involve 'selfish' agents that are in conflict with one another, even though the system is designed for a single purpose. (emph added, JB) It follows that conflict can emerge within a collective even when natural selection acts on the level of the collective only".

I couldn't resist...Carey put it up in May 2006...read it again!

And tell me, did WD copy?


JimB