November 14, 2014
By J.I. Abbot
UPDATE: THE EMERGENCE OF EMERGENCE drew a big crowd. However, if you missed this live encounter with the philosophy of science on 11/17, here’s the next best thing: a video:
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Just before I left for college many Augusts ago, I got in an argument with a relative about how intelligent birds are. He said to me, “They don’t say ‘bird brain’ for nothing…they’re just not that smart.” But my poet brain couldn’t accept this. “I see the complexity of bird formations,” I countered, frankly pissed at myself that I didn’t have the science to refute him.
“Couldn’t each of the birds function sort of like a neuron in a larger brain…and a different model of intelligence might be seen in the larger whole of the flock?”
That larger whole—the complex type of whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts—is now increasingly drawing the fascinated attention of physicists, biologists, economists, philosophers, urban planners, and many, many other thinkers who no longer can buy into the crusty Cartesian worldview in which everything in our universe is just a machine part disconnected from everything except other machine parts in its immediate vicinity.
And that’s what Peter Skiff is coming to talk about next Monday, 11/17 at 1 p.m. in 6-127/128. The phenomenon is called “Emergence.” When a system becomes complex enough, it gets impossible to predict the behavior of that system by looking at the properties of any one of its parts. Complex systems oddly seem to have “minds of their own,” as has been witnessed in everything from ant colonies to the behavior of motorists in traffic circles (which, as irritating as they can be, apparently invite far fewer accidents than intersections with traffic lights—drivers somehow don’t fall into anarchy: somehow they know what to do). Another example: for those of us trying to make sense of the economy these days, the “invisible hand” Adam Smith referred to that he thought guides the marketplace may indeed be observed on Wall Street any day of the week. There is arguably some kind of collective and connective force that we previously didn’t have the science or wisdom to study. Maybe human beings were the real bird brains.
So, if you have an interest in, I don’t know, any of the sciences, economics, business, math, sociology, psychology literature, writing, communications—you probably get the picture I’m blatantly painting: kind of anything—you and those whose lives you touch will want to be at this talk. I really think it will make a difference in your lives.
Copyright © 1902 Wilson Bentley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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