Just Finished (re?)-Reading: Emergence – The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson (FP: 2001) [234pp]

This is a possible re-read. I say ‘possible’ because I’m not entirely sure. I was moving a stack of books recently and came across another copy (a hardback this time) of this book that I have scant memory of. So, I either read it pre-Blog and essentially forgot about it or DNF’d it (again pre-Blog) and never actually finished it. Either way my re?-read didn’t produce any audible bells of recognition.

This is essentially about the (then new) science or idea of Emergence – that what look on the surface as orderly processes from a global, big-picture perspective are, at ground level, nothing of the sort. The classic case is the ant hill where everything seems ordered, regimented, under control. But looked at from the point of view of a single ant it’s nothing of the sort. For one thing it’s impossible for any one ant to conceive of the whole nest. It’s just too big, too complex and her brain (they’re all female of course apart from the occasional requirement for male ants once a new queen is hatched for simple impregnation) is just far too small and too simple to understand the totality. The Queen, at the centre of things, doesn’t give out daily orders – or indeed any orders – but spends her days laying eggs. The individual ants rely on signals from other ants to determine how to behave. They follow pheromone trails and count the number of other ants they encounter to decide if they’re needed here or need to be elsewhere doing something else. Their total instruction set is brief. But taken together, in their thousands, order emerges out of chaos and the nest endures. Like ant nests and bee hives so cities, brains and the (again at the time of publication) more advanced simulation games like SimCity. Each example has a limited set of comparatively simple rules and yet, when thousands (or millions) of actors use these rules – which individually look and indeed are chaotic, uncontrolled by any central agency and undirected for any overall purpose – a global order is spontaneously created and emerges into focused existence.

Of course thinking about it these ideas aren’t really that new. The ‘Invisible Hand’ of Adam Smith is I think drawing on this idea. You have individual actors with a primary directive to maximise their utility in preference to anything else. With millions of people doing just that you’d expect total chaos as everyone fights everyone else to maximise their take home. But, out of all those actions you get a (mostly!) functioning economy – large scale order from small scale chaos, in other words: Emergence. Despite the blank from my possible previous read this is a pretty good introduction to the idea/science of Emergence and gives you a good idea of how emergent properties come into being. Being now 20 years old it’s more than a little out of date and I imagine that there are more up to date introductions to the field out there. Even saying that it’s still worth a quick read if you can get hold of a copy. Interesting.