This point is fundamentally correct (and should be closely read by people talking about social learning): "Almost by definition, if you have the kind of self- and group-awareness that is usually entailed when we use the word 'learning', you can’t have emergence. You can say that a colony of ants 'learns' what the best foraging strategy is, but it is the colony as a whole that 'learns,' not the individuals." And I like his take on the intuitive difficulty behind emergence. "The idea of a system exhibiting judgment when its components are dumb just seems...weird." Good stuff; have a look at the e-Literate blog as a whole, especially the post on informational cascades. I will have more on all of this in the future.
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