A Brief Primer on Emergence

I’m looking at my fingers as I type this, watching them go. Clickity-clack-clack. My fingers themselves don’t really know what’s going on. They’re just composed of a bunch of skin cells, tissues, nerves and bones. The individual cells that make up this system have no knowledge that my brain even exists. They are just responding to their immediate surroundings. My eyes are equally clueless, looking at my fingers. My neck muscles merely pointed them in the direction of my hands, after which they dutifully responded to the different wavelengths of light hitting them.

At this point, most people say that, well, my brain knows what's going on. My brain is purposefully orchestrating all of the activity which is going into typing this blog. But even the neurons that are directing the show can’t really be said to “know” what’s going on. Each one is just responding to its environment, much like the nerves in my fingers did when telling my muscles to contract to type this sentence. Chemicals build up on the surface of the neuron’s synapses, triggering an electrical pulse that travels down the length of the neuron, releasing more chemicals on the other end. Pulse, pulse, clickity-clack, lungs breathe and heart beats, and off I blog!

And that, my friends, is emergence.

Each of the trillions of cells in my body, by themselves, has no consciousness whatsoever. And yet I am much more than just a collection of cells; I am a human being. The whole is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It is something completely different. This "new thing" emerges from the complexity of the interaction of the elements in the system, and not from the elements themselves. What's more, the emergent behavior is nearly impossible to predict. It's miraculous.

I'll be coming back to this theme often over the next few months, because it is my goal to at least describe some of the forces which create new emergent behaviors, both positive and negative. For, just as I've emerged from a mess of cells (I was, after all, the size of the dot on top of an 'i' when I first started out...), what we call civilization has similarly emerged from an unorganized mess of people. Time to open up our eyes to the bigger picture.