Are We Emergent?

As we enter the last month of the academic year, this is the final assigned blog post in English 201 (I think). Regardless, I will continue to write on this blog, including thoughts on books I read over the summer. We are still reading the book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, and our latest reading covered the 2nd and 3rd chapters. Of this latest reading, I took away from it that humans cannot have such emergent systems like ants, but that parts of our everyday lives do contain emergent, or bottom-up systems.

For starters, it is interesting how ants are able to keep a colony growing and functional when only the queen ant lives more than a year. Now, I’m confused what the purpose of the 1 day lifespan of male ants is to begin with, if the queen ant lays all the eggs, so please explain this to me if you know! But how can a 15-year colony work with only 1-year contributions from each ant? I think part of it has to be evolution, that ants simply know their roles as part of being an ant, which keeps everything going. But I think that the lack of a top-down system is very intriguing in doing this, because any examples of human activity I could think of uses the top-down system. For instance, when players graduate from a team, a team still can be good but there are coaches that remain. Or a city may have completely new people in 50 years, but there was always a government. Yet with ants, these structures do not exist and they still grow without a problem. It is the perfect illustration of a bottom-up system because it is solely low-level rules or interactions that build the complex system, so it really doesn’t matter whom the participants are, as long as they follow the rules.

Another idea, which is prominent in many places in the reading, is the idea of local interactions creating large-scale structure. To some degree this is part of the definition of emergence and is stated in the book as “local information can lead to global wisdom” (79). The book continues on in talking about city emergence, and I think that local interactions play a huge role in the structure of a city. In Madison, especially on campus, there is no group or top-level people that tell incoming freshman or ongoing students where they have to stay. But through interactions on a local level, over time there has become neighborhoods or areas on campus that have completely different ideals and characteristics. The Southeast dorms are much livelier, chaotic, and loud than the Lakeshore dorms, and from the custodial perspective I have, they are much dirtier too! I’m quite sure that the supervisor of the Southeast dorms does not recruit partiers or encourage partying, but that area of campus is now livelier as a result. And this is only one example in one city; many cities have areas that emerged out of local interactions and not a government decision.

To say that Madison is an emergent city though, I think would be incorrect. There is in fact a mayor, and numerous boards and councils that make decisions, and zoning laws prohibit certain buildings. In a way, this is a good example of how humans demonstrate emergent qualities, but I do not think is a case of humans being 100% emergent. I sort of stated that in my last blog post, and I still feel this way. The book gave an appealing reason for this, in that “we consciously make decisions...” (97). Unlike the ants, we can take into account the whole system to some degree and we do not base our opinions or decisions solely on small, local interactions. In a way, the human brain is too smart and sophisticated to allow humans to use the ideas of emergence, which is unfortunate because it seems that in principle, emergent systems are some of the best type.