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

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A good read, but hard to get super excited about it as his thinking/writing on these topics has continued to evolved. I recommend his later books much more. ( )

In the preface, I defined emergence as simply as possible: order arising out of chaos. A more nuanced definition is higher-order complexity arising out of chaos in which novel, coherent structures coalesce through interactions among the diverse entities of a system. Emergence occurs when these interactions disrupt, causing the system to differentiate and ultimately coalesce into something novel.Key elements of this definition are chaos and novelty. Chaos is random interactions among different entities in a given context. Think of people at a cocktail party. Chaos contains no clear patterns or rules of interaction. Make that a cocktail party in which no single culture prevails, so that no one is sure how close to stand to others, whether to make eye contact, or whether to use first or last names. Emergent order arises when a novel, more complex system forms. It often happens in an unexpected, almost magical leap. The cocktail party is actually a surprise party, and everyone knows where to hide and when to sing “Happy Birthday.”

Emergence produces novel systems—coherent interactions among entities following basic principles. In his bestseller Emergence, science writer Steven Johnson puts it this way: “Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books.”1 Emergence in human systems has produced new technologies, towns, democracy, and some would say consciousness—the capacity for self-reflection. ( )

It's been quite a while since I read this, and I should probably queue it up for a re-read. But at the time I read it, it opened my mind to a lot of ideas that I was ready for, but hadn't quite known how to put together. It might even seem quaint and dated now, but this book, along with a few others like GEB, really put me on the track of investigations and readings I've been pursuing ever since. It was one of those books that I read and then closely scanned the bibliography to find out what else I should read. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. ( )

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 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. ( )