Thinking Outside The Head: The Structure of DNA, And The Future Of The Social Web?

I am reading Richard Ogle’s Smart World, and I am strongly moved by his notion of idea-spaces: the premise that we rely on external systems and collections of cross-correlated ideas to help us think. In effect, Ogle argues, we can’t really think without them. We can’t think mathematically without Arabic numerals, or productively reason about most things without sophisticated, culturally embedded models that we share with others, like macro economics, French sauces, or fabricating computer chips.

He makes the case for idea-spaces, and the benefits of crossing from one to another, in a section dedicated to Watson and Crick’s discovery about the structure of DNA:

None of the other main protagonists came close to emulating Crick’s skill in weaving back and forth between the genetic and the molecular, the informational and the physical, letting each play against the other until the tin end results, code and double helix, finally emerged in a harmonious unity. Even a maverick mind like Watson’s couldn’t match Crick’s ability not only to move with ease between multiple idea-spaces — physical chemistry, biochemistry, X-ray crystallography, mathematics, and genetics — but also, on a higher level, to constantly allow the informational and physical dimensions of the problem to act as mutual frames for one another.

The odd thing is how little Crick did himself. This wasn’t just a matter of others fashioning key parts of the puzzle for him (thought in several places they did). Rather, it was that once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. […] Whole patterns of embedded intelligence engaged with one another, moving in a kind of back-and-forth dance of mutual influence, until eventually something wholly new emerged. Without taking any of ther credit away from Crick, we can truthfully say that much of the time, it was the dynamic interplay of spaces of ideas that was doing the thinking.

I think the same sort of externalization of reasoning and the use of ‘embedded intelligence’ is the key to how we will continue to be able to make sense of the torrents of information streaming past us on the web.

We will develop new idea-spaces — new metaphors and models of how information and social systems interact — and extend the notions of embedded intelligence into better tools and larger networks of people who likewise participate in the construction and use of these idea-spaces. We will think more and more outside our own heads, relying on the greater mind we are only a part of.