Roundworld history is like biological evolution: it obeys rules, but even so, it seems to make itself up as it goes along. In fact, it seems to make up its rules as it goes along. At first sight, that seems incompatible with the existence of a dynamic, because a dynamic is a rule that takes the system from its present state to the next one, a tiny instant into the future. Nonetheless, there must be a dynamic, otherwise historians would not be able to make sense of history, even after the event. Ditto evolutionary biology.
The solution to this conundrum lies in the strange nature of the historical dynamic. It is emergent. Emergence is one of the most important, but also the most puzzling, features of complex systems. And it is important for this book, because it is the existence of emergent dynamics that leads humans to tell stories. Briefly: if the dynamic wasn't emergent, then we wouldn't need to tell stories about the system, because we'd all be able to understand the system on its own terms. But when the dynamic is emergent, a simplified but evocative story is the best description that we can hope to find ...
But now we're getting ahead of our own story, so let's back up a little and explain what we're talking about.
A conventional dynamical system has an explicit, pre-stated phase space. That is, there exists a simple, precise description of everything that the system can possibly do, and in some sense this description is known in advance. In addition, there is a fixed rule, or rules, that takes the current state of the system and transforms it into the next state. For example, if we are trying to understand the solar system, from a classical point of view, then the phase space comprises all possible positions and velocities for the planets, moons, and other bodies, and the rules are a combination of Newton's law of gravity and Newton's laws of motion.
Such a system is deterministic: in principle, the future is entirely determined by the present. The reasoning is straightforward. Start with the present state and work out what it will be one time- step into the future by applying the rules. But we can now consider that state as the new 'present'
state, and apply the rule again to find out what the system will be doing two time-steps into the future. Repeat again, and we know what will happen after three time-steps. Repeat a billion times, and the future is determined for the next billion time-steps.
This mathematical phenomenon led the eighteenth-century mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace to a vivid image of a 'vast intellect that could predict the entire future of every particle in the universe once it was furnished with an exact description of all those particle at one instant.
Laplace was aware that performing such a computation was far too difficult to be practical, and he was also aware of the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of observing the state of every particle at the same moment. Despite these problems, his image helped to create an optimistic attitude about the predictability of the universe. Or, more accurately, of small enough bits of it.
And for several centuries, science made huge inroads into making such predictions feasible.
Today, we can predict the motion of the solar system billions of years in advance, and we can even predict the weather (fairly accurately) three whole days in advance, which is amazing.
Seriously. Weather is a lot less predictable than the solar system.
Laplace's hypothetical intellect was lampooned in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as Deep Thought, the supercomputer which took five million years to calculate the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything. The answer it got was 42.
'Deep Thought' is not so far away from 'Vast Intellect', although the name originates in the pornographic movie Deep Throat, whose title was the cover-name of a clandestine source in the Watergate scandal in which the presidency of Richard Nixon self-destructed (how soon people forget ...).
One reason why Adams was able to poke fun at Laplace's dream is that about forty years ago we learned that predicting the future of the universe, or even a small part of it, requires more than just a vast intellect. It requires absolutely exact initial data, correct to infinitely many decimal places. No error, however minuscule, can be tolerated. None. No marks for trying. Thanks to the phenomenon known as 'chaos', even the smallest error in determining the initial state of the universe can blow up exponentially fast, so that the predicted future quickly becomes wildly inaccurate. In practice, though, measuring anything to an accuracy of more than one part in a trillion, 12 decimal digits, is beyond the abilities of today's science. So, for instance, although we can indeed predict the motion of the solar system billions of years in advance, we can't predict it correctly. In fact, we have very little idea where Pluto will be, a hundred million years from now.
Ten million, on the other hand, is a cinch.
Chaos is just one of the practical reasons why it's generally impossible to predict the future (and get it right). Here we'll examine a rather different one: complexity. Chaos afflicts the prediction method, but complexity afflicts the rules.. Chaos occurs because it is impossible to say in practice what the state of the system is, exactly. In a complex system, it may be impossible to say what the range of possible states of the system is, even approximately. Chaos throws a spanner in the works of the scientific prediction machine, but complexity turns that machine into a small cube of crumpled scrap metal.
We've already discussed the limitations of the Laplacian world-picture in the context of Kauffman's theory of autonomous agents expanding into the space of the adjacent possible. Now we'll take a closer look at how such expansions occur. We'll see that the Laplacian picture still has a role to play, but a less ambitious one.
A complex system consists of a number (usually large) of entities or agents, which interact with each other according to specific rules. This description makes it sound as though a complex system is just a dynamical system whose phase space has a huge number of dimensions, one or more per entity. This is correct, but the word 'just' is misleadingly dismissive. Dynamical systems with big phase spaces can do remarkable things, far more remarkable than what the solar system can do.
The new ingredient in complex systems is that the rules are 'local', stated on the level of the entities. In contrast, the interesting features of the system itself are global, stated on the level of the entire system. Even if we know the local rules for entities, it may not be possible -either in practice, or in principle -to deduce the dynamical rules of the system as a whole. The problem here is that the calculations involved may be intractable, either in the weak sense that they would take far too long to do, or in the strong sense that you can't actually do them at all.
Suppose, for example, that you wanted to use the laws of quantum mechanics to predict the behaviour of a cat. If you take the problem seriously, the way to do this is to write down the 'quantum wave-function' of every single subatomic particle in the cat. Having done this, you apply a mathematical rule known as Schrodinger's equation, which physicists tell us will predict the future state of the cat[70].
However, no sensible physicist would attempt any such thing, because the wavefunction is far too complicated. The number of subatomic particles in a cat is enormous; even if you could measure their states precisely -which of course you can't do anyway -the universe does not contain a sheet of paper big enough to list all the numbers. So the calculation can't even get started, because in practical terms the present state of the cat is indescribable in the language of quantum wavefunctions. As for plugging the wavefunction into Schrodinger's equation, well, forget it.
Agreed, this is not a sensible way to model the behaviour of a cat. But it does make it clear that the usual physicists' rhetoric about quantum mechanics being 'fundamental' is at best true in a philosophical sense. It's not fundamental to our understanding of the cat, although it might be fundamental to the cat.
Despite these difficulties, cats generally manage to behave like cats, and in particular they discover their own futures by living them. Down on the philosophical level, again, this may be because the uni
verse is a lot better at solving Schrodinger's equation than we are, and because it doesn't need a description of the quantum wavefunction of the cat: it's already got the cat, which is its own quantum wavefunction from this point of view.
Let's accept that, even though it's rather likely that the universe doesn't propagate a cat into its future by applying anything that corresponds to Schrodinger's equation. The equation is a human model, not the reality. But even if Schrodinger's equation is what the universe 'really' does -and more so if it's not -there's no way that we limited humans can follow the 'calculation' step by step. There are too many steps. What interests us about cats occurs on the system level: things like purring, catching mice, drinking milk, getting stuck in the catflap. Schrodinger's equation doesn't help us understand those phenomena.
When the logical chain that leads from an entity-level description of a complex system to system-level behaviour is far too complicated for any human being to follow it, that behaviour is said to be an emergent property of the complex system, or just to be 'emergent'. A cat drinking milk is an emergent property of Schrodinger's equation applied to the subatomic particles that make up the cat. And the milk, and the saucer ... and the kitchen floor, and ...
One way to predict the future is to cheat. This method has many advantages. It works. You can test it, so that makes it scientific. Lots of people will believe the evidence of their own eyes, unaware that eyes tell lies and you'll never catch a competent charlatan in the act of cheating.
The wizards got Shakespeare right, aside -at a late stage -from the minor matter of sex. When it comes to a baby's sex, the Grand Master of Foretelling the Future was 'Prince Monolulu'. He was a West African who wore very impressive tribal gear and haunted (in a very material sense) the markets in the East End of London in the 1950s. Prince Monolulu would accost pregnant women with the cry 'I will tell you the sex of your baby, money back guarantee!' Many ladies fell for this ploy, and paid a shilling, then about a fiftieth of one week's wages.
Level One of the trick is that random guesses would guarantee the Prince 50 per cent of the money, but he was much more cunning than that. He improved the scheme to Level Two by writing the prophecy on a note, putting it into an envelope, and getting the sucker to sign across the seal. When it turned out that the anticipated John was really Joan, or Joan was John, the few who bothered to return to reclaim their money found that, on opening their envelope, it contained a correct prediction. They didn't get their money back, because Prince Monolulu insisted that what was in the envelope was what he had originally told them; the sucker must have remembered it wrong. In reality, the envelope always contained the opposite prediction to the verbal one.
History is a complex system; its entities are people, its rules of interaction are the complicated ways in which human beings behave towards each other. We don't know enough sociology to write down effective rules at this entity level. But even if we did, the system-level phenomena, and the system-level rules that govern them, would almost certainly be emergent properties. So the rule that propagates the state of the entire system one step into the future is not something we can write down. It is an emergent dynamic.
When the system-level dynamic is emergent, then even the system itself does not 'know' where it is going. The only way to find out is to let the system run and see what happens. You have to allow the system to make up its own future as it goes along. In principle only one future is possible, but there is no short cut that lets you predict what will happen before the system itself gets there and we all find out. This behaviour is typical of complex systems with emergent dynamics. In particular, it is typical of human history and of biological evolution. And cats.
Biologists learned long ago not to trust evolutionary explanations in which the evolving organisms 'knew' what they were trying to achieve. Explanations like 'the elephant evolved a long trunk in order to suck up water without bending down'. The objectionable item here is not the reason why the elephant's trunk is long (though, of course, that can be debated): it is the phrase 'in order to'. This endows elephants with evolutionary prescience, and suggests (wrongly)
that they can somehow choose the direction in which they evolve. All this is obvious nonsense, so it's not sensible to have a theory that attributes purpose to elephant evolution.
Unfortunately, a dynamic looks remarkably like purpose. If elephant evolution follows a dynamic, then it looks as if the end result is predetermined, in which case the system 'knows' in advance what it ought to be doing. The individual elephants need not be conscious of their objective, but the system in some sense has to be. That would be a good argument against a dynamic description if the evolutionary dynamic for elephants was something we could prescribe ahead of time. However, if that dynamic is emergent, then the system itself, along with the elephants, can find out where it's headed only by going there and discovering where it gets to.
The same goes for history. Being able to put a name to a historical period only after it's happened looks remarkably like what you'd observe if there is a historical dynamic, but it is emergent.
This far into the discussion, it may seem that an emergent dynamic is no better than no dynamic at all. Our task now is to convince you that this is not so. The reason is that although an emergent dynamic cannot be deduced, in complete logical detail, from entity-level rules, it is still a dynamic. It has its own patterns and regularities, and it may be possible to work with those directly.
Exactly this is going on when a historian says something like 'Croesus the Unprepared was a rich but weak king who never maintained a sufficiently large army. It was therefore inevitable that his kingdom would be overrun by the neighbouring Pictogoths, and his treasury would be plundered'. This kind of story proposes a system-level rule, a historical pattern, which can sometimes be compelling. We can question how scientific such stories are, because it is always easy to be wise after the event. But in this case the story generalises; rich weak kings are asking to be invaded by mean, poor barbarians. And that's a prediction, wisdom before the event, and as such it is scientifically testable[71].
The stories that evolutionary biologists tell are of the same kind, and they become science when they stop being Just-So Stories, justifications after the event, and become general principles that make predictions. These predictions are of a limited kind; 'in these circumstances expect this behaviour'. They are not predictions of the type 'On Tuesday at 7.43pm the first elephant trunk will evolve'. But this is what 'prediction' means in science: saying ahead of time that under certain conditions, certain things will happen. You don't have to predict the timing of the experiment.
An evolutionary example of this kind of pattern can be found in the co-evolution of 'creodonts', big cats like sabretooth tigers, and their 'titanothere' prey -large-hoofed mammals, often with huge horns. When it comes to improving performance for the big cats, the line of least resistance is to develop bigger teeth. Faced with that, the best response for the prey is to develop thicker skins and bigger horns. An evolutionary arms race now becomes pretty much unavoidable: the cats get bigger and bigger teeth, and the prey respond with thicker and thicker skins ... to which the cats' only response is even bigger teeth ... and so it goes. An evolutionary arms race sets in, with both species trapped in a single strategy. The end result is that the cats' teeth get so enormous that the poor animals can hardly move their heads, while the titanotheres' skins, and multiple horns on nose and brow, and associated musculature, get so heavy that they find trouble dragging themselves across the plains. Both species promptly die out.
This creodont-titanothere arms race has happened at least five times in evolutionary history, taking about five million years to run its course on each occasion. It is a striking example of an emergent pattern, and the fact that it plays out in exactly the same way over and over again confirms that there really is an underlying dynamic. In all likelihood it would be happening again, now, except for the arrival of humans, who have clobbered both the big cats a
nd their slow prey.
Notice that we've been calling these system-level patterns 'stories', and so they are. They have a narrative, a consistent internal logic; they have a beginning and an end. They are stories because they cannot be 'reduced' to an entity-level description; that would be more like an interminable soap opera. 'Well, this electron bumped into that electron and the two of them got together and emitted a photon ...' repeated, with slight variations, a truly inconceivable number of times.
One of the central questions about emergent dynamics is: what would happen if we ran the system again, in slightly different circumstances? Would the same patterns emerge, or would we see something completely different? If European history in the early twentieth century was rerun, but without Adolf Hitler, would World War II have happened anyway, by a different route? Or would it all have been sweetness and light? Historically, this is a crucial question. There is no doubting that Hitler was instrumental in starting World War II; the deeper question here is whether he was a product of the politics of the time, and in his absence someone else would have done much the same, or whether it was Hitler who moulded history and created a war when otherwise nothing would have happened.
At risk of being controversial, we are inclined to the view that World War II was a pretty much inevitable consequence of the political situation in the 1930s, with Germany saddled with huge reparations for World War I, the trains not running on time ... and Hitler was merely the medium through which the national will to war was expressed. But it's not the answer that concerns us here: it is the nature of the question. It is a 'what if' question, and it is about historical phase space. It does not ask what happened; it asks what might have happened instead.
The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2 Page 32