Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Every now and then I start reading and realize "this book is going to change how I think."

Its a little bit scary and a lot of bit exciting.

While I know--I know--I picked this up because I thought it was about disease, Emergence has proved far more interesting and satisfying than I could hope. Emergence's premise is about networks and 'organized' behavior that develops from a lower-level to a more sophisticated one. In one sense, this is a very real snapshot of the history of thinking/science captured in a book, no less pertinent for its publication date. We have been coming out of the ages of hierarchy and webs from how we explain and understand the universe, from biology to political systems. Now there is a new type of explanation. show more From looking at how disorganized individuals spring up into a larger, organized whole, he explains slime mold, ants selecting new colony sites, video games, and grassroots political revolutions.

He is one of those rare science writers that sees across disciplines and speaks intelligibly about all of them. show less

thought provoking read on self-organzing behaviors & the "bottom-up" revolution going on theories of how we connect. interesting to note that he wrote this after moving to greenwich village and then reading jane jacobs' "the death & life of great american cities" parallel w/ reading about brains. i love his magpie mind that can combine stuff on ant colonies, sidewalk culture, neuroscience, recommendation software of amazon, and social networks. "Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots."
tags: self-organizing behavior, swarm logic, clustering, feedback loops, pattern recognition, emergent software, ordered randomness, jane jacobs, theory of minds, bottom-up revolution (8.20.09)

It takes a rare talent to make a Luddite-leaning English major like myself become utterly fascinated by a) slime molds and b) computer programming. Not only that, but I understand it. Don't walk, folks. Run. (But please pay for the book first, ok?)
-- Posey

Steven Johnson is an excellent pop culture / business writer. Emergence is up to the high standard set by his Everything Bad Is Good For you. Everything will be easier to digest for most. Everything deals with readily accessible pop culture. Johnson's fascinating thesis in Everything is we are smarter due to pop culture. Emergence is more remote concentrating on history of emergence theory in ants and bees. Johnson builds a bridge between our most massive emergent system, the web, and nature. His foundation is solid, but he demurs at the last moment for some good reasons. Turns out there are differences between nature's emergent systems and the web. As a "thought experiment" this book helps see and think of web movement differently. show more Johnson's abstract comparison between biological and technical systems is what makes Emergence fascinating and layered. I am working notes into a database and it is taking several days. show less

This is really fascinating stuff, and the kind of thing I have been dipping into for a while. Though I found this book a little bit shakey to start with, it soon picks up the page-turning momentum of a good thriller.

Steven Johnson takes us on a journey through self-organising systems as different as slime moulds, businesses in medieval Florence and eBay. The unexpected emergent behaviour of systems based on simple rules is a bizarre and fascinating subject (at least to me). Emergent effects, ranging from traffic jams to human consciousness itself, affect us in all aspects of our lives.

This book shows a very different viewpoint to the way things really work. The emergent behaviours of societies and social networks is particularly show more interesting, and is demonstrated very well with examples taken from the internet, such as slashdot and eBay.

In common with chaos theory and quantum mechanics, the science of emergent systems shows that the more we discover and understand the rules and mechanisms behind the universe, the less we are actually able to predict what will happen. The world will alway be able to suprise us - I actually find that quite heartening! show less

I came across this book while browsing the stacks at my local library. Although written in 10 years ago, I found the concepts to be relevant still today. The author covered a wide range of topics from ants to city planning to game theory to music through which he wove the ideas of emergent behavior, negative feedback, distributed intelligence, patterns and rules. It was a fun and worthwhile read about topics that I find fascinating.

Of particular interest was the end of the book about consciousness. I was not familiar with the other minds theory of consciousness which essentially suggests that our ability to consider how a situation appears to another led to our self-awareness. The study with 3 and 4 year olds that drove this point home show more was particularly interesting as it underscores how the mind develops and becomes self-aware.

As a Web developer, I began to wonder if the Web could become emergent. I came to the conclusion that it's not possible in its current state. It needs more structure and is inherently disorganized due to its architecture. According to Johnson, the key missing ingredient is feedback- no web page knows what other pages are pointing to it without effort. All connections are one-way. I suspect this lack of two-way connections is why Google, and search engines in general, are so dominant. We literally could not effectively use the information on the Web without these tools today. show less

I enjoyed the first half of the book; an exploration of emergent systems, how parts can create a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts. For example, non-intelligent neurons can link together to form intelligence in the brain. This is fun in a Philosophy 101 sort of way. It remind me of when I read Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" for the first time.

The second half of this 2001 book speculates on what emergence might mean in terms of the internet and society in general. This part already seems dated and out of touch.