Emergence

by Steven Johnson

  As Mumford writes: Mumford, 1961, 258.

  The result is: Of course, changes in energy flows produced more than just the urban explosion of the late Middle Ages. “Indeed, urban morphogenesis has depended, from its ancient beginnings in the Fertile Crescent, on intensification of the consumption of nonhuman energy. The anthropologist Richard Newbold Adams, who sees social evolution as just another form that the self-organization of energy may take, has pointed out that the first such intensification was the cultivation of cereals. Since plants, via photosynthesis, simply convert solar energy into sugars, cultivation increased the amount of solar energy that traversed human societies. When food production was further intensified, humanity crossed the bifurcation that gave rise to urban structures. The elites that ruled those early cities in turn made other intensifications possible—by developing large irrigation systems, for example—and urban centers mutated into their imperial form. It is important to emphasize, however, that cereal cultivation was only one of several possible ways of intensifying energy flow. As several anthropologists have pointed out, the emergence of cities may have followed alternative routes to intensification, as when the emergence of urban life in Peru fed off a reservoir of fish. What matters is not agriculture per se, but the great increase in the flow of matter-energy through society, as well as the transformations in urban form that this intense flow makes possible.” De Landa, 1997, 28.

  We sometimes talk: There’s a more delicate way to express the same idea, which is that those early urbanites were collectively engaged in shortening their nutrient cycles. “By shortening food chains, human populations acquired control over nutrient cycles. For instance, cattle and certain crops went hand-in-hand: the manure of the cattle, which were raised on cereals, could be plugged back into the system as fertilizer, closing the nutrient cycle. In itself, this tightening of the cycles was good. Indeed, ecosystems spontaneously shorten their nutrient cycles as they complexify. A highly complex system such as a rain forest runs its nutrients so tightly, via elaborate microflora and microfauna in the tree roots, that the soil is largely deprived of nutrients. This is one reason why the destruction of rain forests is so wasteful: the soil left behind is largely sterile.” Ibid., 122.

  “This acceleration in”: Ibid., 29.

  Some critics, such: Wright sees “group brains” even in low-tech societies, even using the term as an alternative to “invisible hands.” “Hands aren’t very cerebral, after all; guiding any invisible hand there must be an ‘invisible brain.’ Its neurons are people. The more neurons there are in regular and easy contact, the better the brain works—the more finely it can divide economic labor, the more diverse the resulting products. And, not incidentally, the more rapidly technological innovations take shape and spread. As economists who espouse ‘new growth theory’ have stressed, it takes only one person to invent something that the whole group can then adopt (since information is a ‘non-rival’ good). So the more possible inventors—that is, the larger the group—the higher its collective rate of innovation. All told, then, the Northwest Coast Indians outproduced and outinvented the Shoshone not because they had better brains (the sort of conclusion Franz Boas worried about) but because they were a better brain.” Wright, 48.

  Turing relied on a similarly abstract notion of what a brain is in developing the modern computer: “To understand the Turing model of ‘the brain,’ it was crucial to see that it regarded physics and chemistry, including all the arguments about quantum mechanics to which Eddington had appealed, as essentially irrelevant. In his view, the physics and chemistry were relevant only in as much as they sustain the medium for the embodiment of discrete ‘states,’ ‘reading’ and ‘writing.’ Only the logical pattern of these ‘states’ could really matter. The claim was that whatever a brain did, it did by virtue of its structure as a logical system, and not because it was inside a person’s head, or because it was spongy tissue made up of a particular kind of biological cell formation. And if this were so, then its logical structure could just as well be represented in some other medium, embodied by some other physical machinery. It was a materialist view of mind, but one that did not confuse logical patterns and relations with physical substances and things, as so often people did.” Hodges, 291.

  “Not as crazy”: Wright, 302.

  “But the Internet”: From a Slate book club, February 1, 2000.

  “So the question”: Interviews with Brewster Kahle, conducted October 2000 and July 1998.

  Decades ago, in: Wiener, 35.

  Our brains got: Once again, the information-processing skills of ant colonies are instructive here: “… it is tempting to speculate about the generality of interaction patterns as a source of information in natural systems. What I like about the idea that an ant’s task decision is based on its interaction rate is that the pattern of interaction, not a signal in the interaction itself, produces the effect. Ants do not tell each other what to do by transferring messages. The signal is in the pattern of contact. Such a process might operate in brains, immune systems, or any place where the rate of flow of a certain type of unit, or the activity level of a certain type of unit, is related to the need for a change in the rate of flow. Interaction rate is the local translation of a characteristic of the whole system, rate of flow or activity, and each unit’s reaction to this local cue contributes to a predictable response by the whole system.” Gordon, 169.

  The human mind: Kurzweil, 77.

  But unlike most: Ibid., 103.

  “We then use”: Ibid., 77.

  Certainly the evidence: Turing from an interview in the late forties: “This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms.” Hodges, 406.

  What drives each: Returning us to the roots of computing and Turing’s breaking the code of the Enigma device: “The task of the analyst, correspondingly, was to determine this ring-setting which was common to all the traffic of the network… . As with the older method, the fingerprint depended upon looking at the entire traffic, and in exploiting the element of repetition in the last six of the nine indicator letters. Without a common ground-setting, there was no fixed correspondence between first and fourth, second and fifth, third and sixth letter, to analyze.” Ibid., 173.

  “She claims she”: Rosenstiel, 55–65.

  But beneath all: This is true also for the interaction between the brain and the rest of the body. “Nervous system behavior is to some extent self-generated in loops; brain activity leads to movement, which leads to further sensation and perception and still further movement. The layers and the loops between them are the most intricate of any object we know, and they are dynamic; they continually change.” Edelman, 1992, 29.

  A given circuit: “What is learning? What changes occur to nerve cells when the brain (or the abdominal ganglion) acquires a new habit or a change in its behavior? The central nervous system consists of lots of nerve cells, down each of which electrical signals travel; and synapses, which are junctions between nerve cells. When an electrical nerve signal reaches a synapse, it must transfer to chemical agent, like a train passenger catching a ferry across a sea channel, before resuming its electrical journey. Kandel’s attention quickly focused on these synapses between neurons. Learning seems to be a change in their properties. Thus when a sea slug habituates to a false alarm, the synapse between the receiving, sensory neuron and the neuron that moves the gill is somehow weakened. Conversely, when the sea slug is sensitized to the stimulus, the synapse is strengthened.” Ridley, 223.

  If each neuron: Edelman has a far more precise variation on this theme, which he calls “reentry.” “To explain how categorization may occur, we can use the workings of what I have called a ‘classification couple’
in the brain. This is a minimal unit consisting of two functionally different maps made up of neuronal groups and connected by reentry. Each map independently receives signals from other brain maps or from the world (in this example the signals come from the world). Within a certain time period, reentrant signaling strongly connects certain active combinations of neuronal groups in one map to different combinations in the other map.” Edelman, 1992, 87.

  The Flowers episode: Rosenstiel, 63.

  The feedback loops: Jacobs wrote about this in Death and Life as the tendency for successful cities to destroy themselves: “These forces, in the form that they work for ill, are: the tendency for outstandingly successful diversity in cities to destroy itself; the tendency for massive single elements in cities (many of which are necessary and otherwise desirable) to cast a deadening influence; the tendency for population instability to counter the growth of diversity; and the tendency for both public and private money either to glut or to starve development and change.” Jacobs, 1961, 242.

  In the Flowers: As we saw in the last chapter, positive feedback is also an important tool for understanding social or technological revolutions: “These meshworks of mutually supporting innovations (coal-iron-steam-cotton) are well-known to historians of technology. They existed long before the nineteenth century (e.g., the interlocking web formed by the horseshoe, the horse harness, and triennial rotation which was behind the agricultural intensification at the turn of the millennium), and they occurred afterward, as in the meshwork of oil, electricity, steel, and synthetic materials that contributed to the second industrial revolution. Nonetheless, as important as they were, autocatalytic loops of technologies were not complex enough to create a self-sustained industrial takeoff. Before the 1800s, as we noted, these intensifications often led back to depletions of resources and diminishing returns. Negative feedback eventually checked the turbulent growth generated by positive feedback.” De Landa, 1997, 77.

  But the new: As usual, Jane Jacobs was quick to adapt these new ideas to her understanding of the city: “The analogy that comes to mind is faulty feedback. The conception of electronic feedback has become familiar with the development of computers and automated machinery, where one of the end products of an act or series of acts by the machine is a signal which modifies and guides the next act. A similar feedback process, regulated chemically rather than electronically, is now believed to modify some of the behavior of cells. A report in the New York Times explains it thus:

  “ ‘The presence of an end product in the milieu of a cell causes the machinery that produces the end product to slow down or to stop. This form of cell behavior Dr. [Van R.] Potter [of the University of Wisconsin Medical School] characterized as “intelligent.” In contrast, a cell that has changed or mutated behaves like an “idiot” in that it continues without feedback regulation to produce even materials that it does not require.’

  “I think that last sentence is a fair description of the behavior of city localities where the success of diversity destroys itself.

  “Suppose we think of successful city areas, for all their extraordinary and intricate economic and social order, as faulty in this fashion. In creating city success, we human beings have created marvels, but we left out feedback. What can we do with cities to make up for this omission?” Jacobs, 1961, 251–52.

  As Wiener puts: Wiener, 7.

  Wiener gave that: “In short, our inner economy must contain an assembly of thermostats, automatic hydrogen-ion-concentration controls, governors, and the like, which would be adequate for a great chemical plant. These are what we know collectively as our homeostatic mechanism.” Ibid., 115.

  Your body is: Ecosystems too abound with feedback systems. As one of the characters in Jane Jacob’s latest book says, “Here’s a pleasing example of this category—a positive loop in a California coastal redwood forest. Mature redwoods require enormous amounts of water, about twice as much, on average, as rainfall delivers to their habitats… . A coastal redwood lives to an age of about two thousand years; quite a demonstration of successful survival. Here’s how their seemingly inadequate supply situation is overcome. With their find and luxuriant needles, the trees intercept fog and strip its moisture; in effect, they take water straight from clouds. During a dry but foggy night, each tall redwood douses the ground beneath it with as much water as if there had been a drenching rainstorm. This beneficent process works as a loop. The growth of the trees is fed in good part from the fog. Taller growth gives trees access to higher—hence additional—fog. Additional fog feeds still higher growth. And so on. Because of the height-fog loop, the trees themselves participate in keeping their environment stable. “Jacobs, 2000, 93.

  If analyzing indirect: Dean.

  Once you’ve reached: “There is already one technology that appears to generate at least one aspect of a spiritual experience. This experimental technology is called Brain Generated Music (BGM), pioneered by NeuroSonics, a small company in Baltimore, Maryland, of which I am a director. BGM is a brain-wave biofeedback system capable of evoking an experience called the Relaxation Response, which is associated with deep relaxation. The BGM user attaches three disposable leads to her head. A personal computer then monitors the user’s brain waves to determine her unique alpha wavelength. Alpha waves, which are in the range of eight to thirteen cycles per second (cps), are associated with a deep meditative state, as compared to beta waves (in the range of thirteen to twenty-eight cps), which are associated with routine conscious thought. Music is then generated by the computer, according to an algorithm that transforms the user’s own brain-wave signal. Kurzweil, 157.

  “In connection with”: Wiener, 158.

  He would have: “… one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bounded together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part.” Ibid., 24.

  But the book: “The program he proposed in 1898 was to halt the growth of London and also repopulate the countryside, where villages were declining, by building a new kind of town—the Garden City, where the city poor might again live close to nature. So they might earn their livings, industry was to be set up in the Garden City, for while Howard was not planning cities, he was not planning dormitory suburbs either. His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others who had no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.” Jacobs, 1961, 17.

  Better to build: “Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the industrial working classes would stay neatly in their class, and even at the same job within their class; that agricultural workers would stay in agriculture; that businessmen (the enemy) would hardly exist as a significant force in his Utopia; and that planners could go about their good and lofty work, unhampered by rude nay-saying from the untrained.” Ibid., 289.

  His attachment to: “Howard’s greatest contribution was less in recasting the physical form of the city than in developing the organic concepts that underlay this form; for though he was no biologist like Patrick Geddes, he nevertheless brought to the city the essential biological criteria of dynamic equilibrium and organic balance: balance as between city and country in a larger ecological pattern, and balance between the varied functions of the city: above all, balance through the positive control of growth in the limitation in area, number, and density of occupation, and the practice of reproduction (colonization) when the community was threatened by such an undue increase in size as would lead only to lapse of function.” Mumford, 1961, 516.

  “Any ecological association”:
Mumford, 1962, 148–77.

  Like many debates: Wiener had made the same connection a decade before in Cybernetics: “It has been commented on by many writers, such as D’Arcy Thompson, that each form of organization has an upper limit of size, beyond which it will not function. Thus the insect organization is limited by the length of tubing over which the spiracle method of bringing air by diffusion directly to the breathing tissues will function; a land animal cannot be so big that the legs or other portions of contact with the ground will be crushed by the weight; a tree is limited by the mechanism for transferring water and minerals from the roots to the leaves, and the products of photosynthesis from the leaves to the roots, and so on.” Wiener, 150.

  “The signal was”: Posted on the Slashdot site: www.slashdot.org.

  “As in the legal analogy”: Technically, Slashdot moderators don’t give each post a grade on the scale. Posts start out life at 0 or 1 (depending on whether their authors are registered users of the system.) Moderators can then “spend” a moderation point rating a post either up or down. A post that starts life at 1, and receives three positive points and one negative point would be at Level 3, because 1 plus 3 minus 1 equals 3.

  “He was far”: Jacobs, 2000, 154. A related idea is the pricing mechanism of market economies as an information-processing system, as described by the libertarian demigod Friedrich von Hayek. “Long before the fall of communism, Hayek identified its oft-overlooked weakness: not only did it fail to offer an incentive to work hard; it forced signals connecting supply and demand to travel a tortuous path that invited distortion.” Wright, 199.

  “Others were busy”: Interview conducted with Rob Malda, April 2000.

  A descendant of: The ways in which Resnick altered the Logo turtle model are instructive: “First, StarLogo has lots more turtles. Whereas commercial versions of Logo typically have only a few turtles, StarLogo has thousands of turtles. And StarLogo is designed as a massively parallel language—so all of the turtles can perform their actions at the same time, in parallel… . Second, StarLogo turtles have better ‘senses.’ The traditional Logo turtle was designed primarily as a ‘drawing turtle,’ for creating geometric shapes and exploring geometric ideas. But the StarLogo turtle is more of a ‘behavioral turtle.’ StarLogo turtles come equipped with ‘senses.’ They can detect (and distinguish) other turtles nearby, and they can ‘sniff’ scents in the world… . Third, StarLogo reifies the turtles’ world. In traditional versions of Logo the turtles’ world does not have many distinguishing features. The world is simply a place where the turtles draw with their pens. Each pixel of the world has a single piece of state information—its color. StarLogo attaches a much higher status to the turtles’ world. The world is divided into small square sections called patches. (The term patch is borrowed from Pauline Hogeweg [1989].) The patches have many of the same capabilities as turtles—except that they cannot move.” Resnick, 33–34.