The Intelligent Christian
Emergence
Emergence is a fairly straightforward notion. As with Fuzzy, an example is a good way to introduce emergence. When we watch television we are 'doing' emergence. We are looking at a matrix of rapidly changing illuminated pixels. But we see a picture. The picture emerges from the physical. There's nothing here we didn't know already but by spelling it out we can understand it better.
Is there a picture if no-one is there to see it? This hearkens back to the old philosophical question of if a tree falls in the forest with no-one there, does it make a sound? Well, even with today's technology we can intuit a situation where there is some electronic audio-visual receiving equipment which will react in a programmed manner to the stimulus of the physical effects generated by a tree falling or to respond to our matrix of rapidly changing illuminated pixels. This obviously moves us in the direction of artificial intelligence and at this stage we will not go any further.
But we can now look at the possibility of mind being a phenomenon that emerges from the neural complexity of the brain. Using Self-similarity we can see intelligence as an even finer scale phenomenon emerging from mind and thereby understand a little better the intelligence of other mammals. We would think that at this point we would not be competent to go beyond mammals. Maybe someone else would?
So, if mind is an emergent phenomenon and the image of a television is an emergent phenomenon we can now think of the interaction of these two emergent phenomena and the feedback of this interaction on other systems.
As an example we might think of a young man whose life is changed by watching and listening to Martin Luther King Jr's 'I Have a Dream' speech. (King is one of my three men of the 20th Century. Mandela and Gorbachev are the others - because their lives freed people) The young man sees in King the dedication of a leader/catalyst who knew he might be killed before the dream was reified and the young man hears the methodology. Although King is long dead the speech feeds back on the universe as the young man's thinking changes and he in turn begins to work for human rights. The interaction of two fine scale phenomena in different times feeds back on the universe and generates a bifurcation in the complex system.
Emergent phenomena are therefore worth understanding.
In the physical end of things we also see emergence. Atoms are mostly empty space, yet when atoms organize together their interaction generates the emergence of what we call matter and a concrete floor becomes solid to us. We humans also are emergent, consisting mostly of empty space but as self-organizing systems we emerge as biological entities (which are mostly water) Far, far back at one proposed explanation for the origin of the universe - the Big Bang- physical 'laws' themselves emerge during the first nanoseconds.
One way to understand the increasing self-organizing complexity of emergence is by looking at a representation of a period-doubling cascade. These cascades are mathematically predictable using the Feigenbaum constant, a mathematical constant of chaos that has a status similar to that enjoyed by the age old pi. On finer and finer and more complex scales, like the finer and finer branching of a tree, phenomena from mind to magnetism emerge and feedback their influence on the overall system.
There are numerous websites where you can explore emergence. It is a mind trip well worth taking.
Feedback: King, Mandela and Gorbachev are my three men of the 20th Century. Who are the three women of the 20th Century?
Jesus is Lord
'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.'