EMERGENCE (2008)

On Sunday, February 11, 2007 my perspective of the world changed. NPR was speaking with Steven Johnson about slime molds, ants and fireflies, about the way many low complexity agents could coalesce into a higher order. They were speaking about emergence. I had dabbled a bit into chaos theory and understood that the whole is often more than the sum of its parts, but what Steven Johnson was talking about was a revelation. It resonated and created its own syncing in my brain.
Emergence, like many other concepts, has been around forever; the innovation is rather human insight, than emergence itself. It has become a fashionable topic because it is revealing and fascinating in its implications. It challenges the traditional western view of the world as top-down, hierarchical, deistic and teleological. Instead, it presents a bottom-up egalitarian system with many possible endings, a non-deterministic view without a spiritus rector, without a dictator, benign or otherwise, who directs from above. No need for a final destination, be it paradise or hell, a view more cyclical in its thinking, more eastern in its syntax. All it needs is a large number of low-level agents such as particles, cells, small critters, humans even, which get stimulated and provide feedback to each other and en masse they transform into more complex patterns. Maybe this phenomenon of self-organization may not explain the big bang, but it can explain almost everything thereafter across many fields of science such as how water turns into ice or how superconductivity is possible (both are phase transitions involving syncing). Emergence or self-organization also explains the laser beam or how ants find food or how certain fireflies sync their lights. It is also the basis for game theory.
Emergence and its societal applications make me hopeful about the progress of mankind. A large enough number of participants is almost bound to get it right, provided positive feedback is possible and the feedback loops are not too small. This explains why a whole bunch of fairly uninformed folks making up an electorate eventually will get it right in elections. Emergence not only has incredible implications for technology, but also for management and organization. It can be applied to medicine, to traffic, and city or regional planning without need for perfected closed systems in which all eventualities are pre-calculated and programmed. Instead, there is hope for open-ended systems that find their way “on their own”, getting progressively better by self- calibration and feedback. Google and Wikipedia have become classic examples of systems that follow the algorithms of emergence. Understanding emergence can help us to emulate nature, which always seems to work with redundancy and self adjustment, thus allowing failure, death and error without collapse. Nature grows smarter from mistakes.
So much optimism, so much hope in this way of thinking!
With emergence and spontaneous order, entropy found its nemesis. Although scientists rightly frown upon quick societal analogies, the definition of emergence as a multitude of low-level agents coalescing into meaningful patterns surely invites the comparison to market economics and democracy. Obama’s election was enabled by an army of low-level agents organizing into a nationwide complex. He might become the first “open source president” in history. Sadly, human nature can also work counter to the benefits of potentially emergent systems. A relatively small group of greedy credit swap investment acrobats ignored early feedback signals (such as the first General Motors liquidity crisis in May 2005) and ran the whole world into the current financial meltdown. It remains to be seen if the principles of emergence will get the upper hand.
(Published in the Baltimore URBANITE)