Emergent Complexity

[Hootad Binky]

What a fascinating phenomenon. Just saw a documentary about it on PBS. Sort of takes the whole fractal/mathematical thing a bit farther. Look at a huge flock of starlings. No one bird is directing the flock. Yet the flock has an obvious self-organising form, a strange and beautiful blobby thing twisting over the skyline, all because each bird obeys 3 simple rules:

• keep heading in the same direction
• don't get too close, or far away, from the next bird
• avoid predators

When each bird does this, a more complex process emerges, the twisting swarm itself.

The degree of complexity is determined by the interconnectedness of all units so imagine what billions of neurons, each one connected to 10,000 other neurons can produce? Consciousness, or:



Life

Are you an emergent phenomenon? Consider this: At any given time, some 75 trillion cells are doing their thing in your body. But they are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, such that in less than two years you won't have a single cell you have today. Yet you remain you. How is this possible?

The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Here are some interesting examples:

Bird flock
A flock of birds hundreds strong wheeling in perfect synchrony overhead is one of nature's great sights. If a single bird fell out of line, utter confusion could ensue, yet none does. Harmony reigns, spawning a behavior (flocking, with its swift motion and sudden course changes) that is not predictable from knowing all there is to know about any single bird. Flocking "emerges" from simple rules instinctively followed by each bird: keep a precise distance away from and stay aligned with your nearest neighbors, and avoid predators. The "wave" in a stadium operates along similar lines (minus the predator part).



Hurricane
Take a small atmospheric disturbance whirling around in a stretch of warm tropical ocean, at least 80°F. Make sure it's 300 miles or more from the equator so it's sufficiently stirred by the Earth's rotation. Season it with evaporating seawater, which condenses when it rises high enough into the atmosphere. Lower the atmospheric pressure near the surface. What do you get? The emergent happening known as a hurricane, with its emergent attributes (e.g., winds of at least 74 miles per hour) and its emergent behaviors (e.g., an ability to suddenly alter course).





City
Cities have a remarkable ability to self-organize as they grow. Neighborhoods of like-minded people and similar kinds of businesses establish themselves organically, from the bottom up. Thus, New York gained Chinatown and Little Italy, the Garment District and the Flower District, enclaves that appeared irregardless of such top-down forces as planning commissions and zoning laws. Such communities-within-the-community emerge on their own, lending cities their distinctive personalities.



Stock market
In the 17th century, the economist Adam Smith described an "invisible hand" that guides markets to produce just the amount and variety of goods that the public needs. The stock market has its own "invisible hand." The purely self-interested actions of thousands of buyers and sellers result in the purely blind workings of the stock market—the sudden shifts in activity and valuations, the bubbles and crashes—as well as the market's notorious properties of stupendous intricacy and frustrating unpredictability.



Chess
There's hardly a better example of emergence than chess. Out of a game with fewer than two dozen rules comes complexity to challenge the greatest minds on Earth. As the emergence expert John Holland notes, if you have a game that ends after 50 moves and offers 10 possible moves from any configuration along the way—a length of game and number of options roughly equivalent to that found in chess—you will have 1050 ways of playing the game, "a number," he says, "which substantially exceeds the number of atoms in the whole of our planet Earth."

Holy fuck!



Consciousness
For some experts, the mind is the ultimate exemplar of emergence. Your brain contains several billion neurons that perform a very simple function: relaying electrical messages across synapses to their neighbors. It's a physical action, yet out of their collective firings somehow arises a psychological phenomenon—the conscious mind. Can consciousness be reduced to the interactions of neurons? Experts have no way of knowing, because the brain is orders of magnitude more complex than any computer today, making answering that question at present difficult if not impossible. "

NOVA | scienceNOW | Emergence: Everyday Examples (non-Flash) | PBS

It's also expressed these widely varying areas:

• 5 Emergent structures in nature
  • 5.1 Non-living, physical systems
  • 5.2 Living, biological systems
• 6 Emergence in culture and engineering
  • 6.1 Economics
  • 6.2 WWW
  • 6.3 Architecture and cities
  • 6.4 Mathematics
  • 6.5 Games
  • 6.6 Fads and beliefs
• 7 Emergence in political philosophy

Hmmm.... they could be on to something here

[Sir Burr]

Using the human brain, nature is finally contemplating itself.

[El Gibbon]

I think this may be related to the idea that thousands of termites can construct perfect domes, arches etc. in their mounds with no visible or identified leader. First read in Lives of a Cell, which by the way is a very excellent book on microscopic and small life entities.

E. G.

[Spin]

in less than two years you won't have a single cell you have today.

I hope that doesn't include brain cells because I dont have many as it is

[Hootad Binky]

So it's more accurate to think of ourselves more as a wave-from, moving through space-time.

Yeah those termite domes are another perfect example, and are cited as sucjh on the wiki links. In fact wiki itself is an intentional type of emergent complexity.

[LesBonsTemps]

Great timing on this fascinating topic...National Geographic's July 2007 issue has an article on swarming:

Swarm Behavior - National Geographic Magazine

(Another good article is the cover story on malaria, with mentions of infection rates in Thailand.)

[watterinja]

So it's more accurate to think of ourselves more as a wave-from, moving through space-time.

Yeah those termite domes are another perfect example, and are cited as sucjh on the wiki links. In fact wiki itself is an intentional type of emergent complexity.

All life is governed by rules - some complex, some simple.

The human mind can, at best, manage four tasks simultaneously.

Who, or what, created the rules in the first place, considering that our bodies process billions of information transactions automatically, each day?

[Gerbil]

Are you an emergent phenomenon? Consider this: At any given time, some 75 trillion cells are doing their thing in your body. But they are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, such that in less than two years you won't have a single cell you have today. Yet you remain you. How is this possible?

Load of bollocks. If this was the case, why don't tatoos dissapear after 2 years then?

[Hootad Binky]

Actually the idea is that life is actually governed by simple, not complex, rules at small scales, and from these simple interactions various complex behaviour emerges, similar to the way frozen water molecules bind to a speck of dust results in:

[Hootad Binky]

Are you an emergent phenomenon? Consider this: At any given time, some 75 trillion cells are doing their thing in your body. But they are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, such that in less than two years you won't have a single cell you have today. Yet you remain you. How is this possible?

Load of bollocks. If this was the case, why don't tatoos dissapear after 2 years then?

Good point! Tattoos aren't cells, perhaps?

[Gerbil]

Are you an emergent phenomenon? Consider this: At any given time, some 75 trillion cells are doing their thing in your body. But they are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, such that in less than two years you won't have a single cell you have today. Yet you remain you. How is this possible?

Load of bollocks. If this was the case, why don't tatoos dissapear after 2 years then?

Good point! Tattoos aren't cells, perhaps?

So, they just hang around and reattach themselves to new bits of skin?

[Hootad Binky]

Great timing on this fascinating topic...National Geographic's July 2007 issue has an article on swarming:

Swarm Behavior - National Geographic Magazine

(Another good article is the cover story on malaria, with mentions of infection rates in Thailand.)

Cheers, good article!

[Hootad Binky]

Are you an emergent phenomenon? Consider this: At any given time, some 75 trillion cells are doing their thing in your body. But they are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, such that in less than two years you won't have a single cell you have today. Yet you remain you. How is this possible?

Load of bollocks. If this was the case, why don't tatoos dissapear after 2 years then?

Good point! Tattoos aren't cells, perhaps?

So, they just hang around and reattach themselves to new bits of skin?

This needs to be typed into Yahoo answers, or somesuch...

[Sir Burr]

And of course dead cells like bones and the enamel of our teeth don't get replaced either.

[attaboy]

Is the tatoo ink in the cells or between the cells?

[Hootad Binky]

I've posted a query at Yahoo Answers...

[watterinja]

Actually the idea is that life is actually governed by simple, not complex, rules at small scales, and from these simple interactions various complex behaviour emerges, similar to the way frozen water molecules bind to a speck of dust results in:

Understanding the rules which govern the freezing of water into complex shapes, is interesting, but how do you extrapolate this into explaining living organisms?

Complexity theory has been around for some time. Nevertheless, it is an interesting field.

[Hootad Binky]

Understanding the rules which govern the freezing of water into complex shapes, is interesting, but how do you extrapolate this into explaining living organisms?

"A broader example of emergent properties in biology is the combination of individual atoms to form molecules such as polypeptide chains, which in turn folds and refolds to form proteins. These proteins, assuming their functional status from their spatial conformation, interact together to achieve higher biological functions and eventually create - organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms. Cascade phenotypes reaction, as details in Chaos theory, may rise from individual genes mutating respective positioning. [4] In turn, all the biological communities in the world form the biosphere, where it's human participants form societies, and the complex interactions of meta-social system such as the stock market."

Emergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Hootad Binky]

Tattoo ink is injected into the dermis, and that's as fas as I've got!