Foreword. <p>Preface.</p> <p>Acknowledgments.</p> <p>Prologue.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 1</b> THE WEB AND LIFE<i>.</i></p> <p>Introduction.</p> <p>Almost None of This Is New.</p> <p>Where to Begin?—Web Misconceptions and Folklore.</p> <p>Our Understandings of the Web.</p> <p>Power of the People.</p> <p>The Dark Side of the Force.</p> <p>What Would a Web Be Without the Holes?</p> <p>Structure Abounds.</p> <p>Four Dimensions Are Not Enough.</p> <p>Our Understandings of Life.</p> <p>Life’s Playground—A Universe of Infinite Possibilities.</p> <p>Enquiries into the Definition of Life.</p> <p>More Contemporary Viewpoints on Life.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 2</b> THE SPECTRUM OF COMPLEXITY.</p> <p>A Complex Web.</p> <p>The Natural Mix of Order and Disorder.</p> <p>Emergence—The Complexity Sweet Spot.</p> <p>Mankind, Complexity, and Our Attempts to Understand the Unreal.</p> <p>Could You Repeat That Please?</p> <p>Self-Similarity and Recursion.</p> <p>Back to Measures of Complexity.</p> <p>The Theory of Complexity.</p> <p>The Crossover Between Orderly and Chaotic Systems.</p> <p>Onwards to Chaos.</p> <p>Modern-Day Approaches to Complexity.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 3</b> THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCRETENESS AND SYMMETRY IN SYSTEMS<i>.</i></p> <p>Let’s Be Discrete.</p> <p>A Brief Word of Warning.</p> <p>Boiling the Numbers Out of Computing.</p> <p>The Power of Two.</p> <p>Let’s Split the Difference.</p> <p>Symmetry in Systems.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 4</b> NATURAL STRUCTURES FOR MAN-MADE MACHINES— CURVATURE IN INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION<i>.</i></p> <p>Engineering Problems.</p> <p>Arrows Everywhere—Graph Theory and Feynman-Like Diagrams.</p> <p>Relays and Switches by Any Other Name.</p> <p>Differentiation Through Divergence.</p> <p>Relationships and Twisting Sequences.</p> <p>Growth Spirals, Fibonacci Progressions, and Other Sequential Patterns.</p> <p>L-Systems.</p> <p>Information Compression and Maximization in Biological Systems.</p> <p>Degrees of Freedom and Information Representation in Biological Systems.</p> <p>A More Detailed Account of DNA’s Structure.</p> <p>More Evidence of Efficiency at Play in DNA and Higher Levels of Physiology.</p> <p>Books, Bytes, Computers, and Biological Systems—An Analogy.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 5</b> POSITIONAL INFORMATION AND SCALE-FREE NETWORKS.</p> <p>A Right Place for Everything.</p> <p>What Is Information Anyway?</p> <p>A Bow to Tie Coincidence Together.</p> <p>Why Is Kevin Bacon so Important?</p> <p>Scale-Free Networks.</p> <p>The Web’s Body Mass.</p> <p>DNA as an Ontogenetic Database.</p> <p>Back to Gödel—Compression, Keys, Catalysts, and Restrictors.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 6</b> EVOLUTION THROUGH ENGINEERING.</p> <p>Some Key Questions Still Remain.</p> <p>Memes and Universal Darwinism.</p> <p>Boolean Logic, Regulatory Networks, and New Forms of Life.</p> <p>Binary Biological Machines.</p> <p>nK Networks.</p> <p>“X” as a Canonical Super Pattern.</p> <p>Autocatalytic Sets.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 7</b> A LESS-THAN-SIMPLE MATTER OF BOUNDLESS ORGANICS.</p> <p>Open Worlds, Feedback, and Critical Self-Organization.</p> <p>Gödel, Incompleteness, and Maintenance Through Changing Boundaries.</p> <p>An Abstractionless Universe.</p> <p>Self-Sustaining, Self-Organizing Systems.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 8</b> EMERGENT INTELLIGENCE AND POSTHUMAN CONCEPTS.</p> <p>Why on the Web?</p> <p>Technology Lock-In.</p> <p>Swarm Behavior.</p> <p>Artificial Life.</p> <p>The Swarm Being that Is the Web.</p> <p>The Web’s Core Memory and Its Place in Information Value.</p> <p>The Apparent Failure of Artificial Intelligence.</p> <p>Posthuman Philosophies and Collective Consciousness.</p> <p>The Penrose Paradox.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 9</b> THE PHYSICS OF INFORMATION AND COMPUTING<i>.</i></p> <p>The Attraction of “Why” and the Ubiquity of Complexity as a Metaproperty.</p> <p>Spin Glass.</p> <p>Quantum Comparisons.</p> <p>More about Dimensions.</p> <p>Strange Loops, Spin Networks, and Problems with the Web’s Constitution.</p> <p>Computational Duality.</p> <p>The Web’s Superposition.</p> <p>Could Penrose Be Right After All?</p> <p>Quantum Brains.</p> <p>One Big Spiny String Thing.</p> <p>Quantum Darwinism.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 10</b> COUNTER ARGUMENTS<i>.</i></p> <p>All Those Against.</p> <p>Computing the Incomputable.</p> <p>Observation and Practicality in Computation.</p> <p>Spaceships Can Come in Handy.</p> <p>When Is a Curve not a Curve, When Is a Brain not a Brain?</p> <p>A Matter of What, not How.</p> <p><b>CHAPTER 11</b> OBJECTIVE OPINIONS<i>.</i></p> <p>Opinions of the Uber-Geeks.</p> <p>Are We Right to Talk about a Global “Brain”?</p> <p>Over the Horizon.</p> <p>A Final Sprinkle of Philosophy.</p> <p><b>APPENDIX <i>A</i></b> AN OUTLINE OF THE SEMANTIC WEB AND ITS POTENTIAL FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.</p> <p>Blue Chips.</p> <p>Semantic Web Technologies Make the Web’s Meaning Much More Specific.</p> <p>Autonomic Systems and Software Engineering.</p> <p>The Future of Software Engineering Lies with Discovery.</p> <p>Smushing.</p> <p>Runtime Autonomic Semantic Applications.</p> <p>StumbleUpon.</p> <p><b>APPENDIX B</b> BEYOND THE SEMANTIC WEB<i>.</i></p> <p>Overlaps.</p> <p>A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Practitioners.</p> <p>References.</p> <p>Index.</p> <p>About the Author.</p>