X-Message-Number: 30834
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: The secret of happiness: grinning on the Internet
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:23:40 +0200

<http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080626/full/news.2008.918.html>

The secret of happiness: grinning on the Internet


How happy you are is influenced by your social links to people you've  
never heard of and never met.




Related:

<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/christakis.html>

And similarly, in social science, there is an increasing interest in  
the same kind of phenomenon. We have begun to understand human  
behavior, and we have models of rational decision-making   rational  
actor models  which have led to further innovations.  But these models  
all pertain primarily to individuals. Adam Smith talked about markets  
as a phenomenon that emerges from the action of individuals, but  
nevertheless we have primarily focused on the actions of individuals.  
How do we put all these parts back together to understand groups?   
Again, the study of social networks is part of this assembly project,  
part of this effort to understand how you can then have the emergence  
of order and the emergence of new phenomena that do not inhere in the  
individuals. We have, for example, consciousness, which cannot be  
understood by studying neurons. Consciousness is an emergent property  
of neuronal tissue. And we can imagine similarly certain kinds of  
emergent properties of social networks that do not inhere in the  
individuals   properties that arise because of the ties between  
individuals and because of the complexity of those ties.



dss

David Stodolsky    Skype: davidstodolsky

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