I can only refer to the way the brain works physiologically. The relationship between our billions of neurons is a simple one: activity (firing) in a certain combination of upstream dendritic inputs to a neuron, established by 'experience', cause the neuron itself to fire axonically downstream to the input of all the other neurons to which it is connected.
If the neuron fires rapidly in response to repeated upstream inputs, it will be inhibited by an associated inhibitory neuron. That's it, basically. But I am cheating: the real amazingness is how the dendritic connections come to be wired in over time, in the presence of 'controlling' biochemicals.
There is an answer in here somewhere. I just don't know what it is yet. ;-)
And yes, the 'free market' is self-organizing. It is also, like many aspects of nature, 'brutal' - from an anthropomorphic point of view. The extent to which we want control is the extent to which we want to avoid brutality.
You can't be me, I'm taken
gush...i love it when you take us into this territory.
reading this, i was getting the cutest little tickley feelings deep in the cranial vault, very pleasant indeed!
the search'n'archive functions in the brain make google look crass and clumsy...
i'm very interested in 'flocking', 'clouding' and similar e-phenomena, and like you, see clearly the potential for 'soft' economic activism being born, wriggling, and hauling itself up on its wobbly yittle yegs.
sympathetic resonance... the same phenomenon happens when you hang a bunch of pendulums (-a?) on a wall, all start at different times to oscillate, yet all will move in sync after a while.
the same in schools of fish who turn on a dime, like they're all listening to the same clicktrack!
the beautiful irony i find in there is that the governments can't roll back cellphones and the tubez, they make too much money from them.
these 'ere tubez are the rope unenlightened capitalism is hanging itself with, cue shakespeare's 'hoist on their own petard'. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
