The Simulated Ego: Part Two — Synergy & Emergence
A sequence of essays describing my perspective of reality, brought to you in part by psychedelic experiences
e·mer·gence:
- the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed.
- the process of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent.
Time and again, there are these attempts to explain how the subatomic can and must be unified with larger scales of physics by some grand theory. What’s more, there are great efforts to explain what consciousness is and these efforts go to great lengths, whole books of explanation, to circumvent the inconvenient fact that consciousness is a word that was invented by people to refer to something they couldn’t understand or explain. This is extremely common throughout human history, the invention of words and concepts to refer to something that is later explained in great detail and so the words become obsolete, virtually meaningless.
There is already an incredibly well understood and applied theory that describes the most consistent nature exhibited by all things individually and collectively and one distinct component of this is the observable nature of irreducible qualia or how things do not share the characteristics of what they are composed of.
A sort of laymen definition of emergence is the unpredictable phenomena whereupon components are organized synergistically and give rise to an output that is qualitatively greater than the sum of it’s parts. The emergent output is something irreducible in that the individual parts do not share or exhibit the quality produced as a result of their synergistic organization. Sub level traits, whether they be physical laws causing the self organizing behavior of molecules or the psychology behind human interaction, give rise to new, irreducible outputs such as organs, economies, molecules, experience, etc.
“Big whirls have little whirls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whirls have lesser whirls,
And so on to viscosity.”
― Lewis Fry Richardson
Emergence is accountable in every level of biology. For example, the cells, molecules, and interactions of the brain do not exhibit consciousness. If you were to take a human brain and arbitrarily rearrange it, there would just be a pile of brain matter. No experience, no observer, no self, etc. This example, alone, illustrates the significance of synergistic versus arbitrary organization. Another example; when large groups of animals join together through programmed interaction, they exhibit new characteristics and even collective psychology. Hierarchies form, herd behavior takes on a psychology of it’s own, flock formations, social structure, etc. arise.
So, it is the synergistic arrangement of components through several orders of organization, that gives rise to experience, to culture, ant colonies, ecosystems, and economies alike, right down to cells, molecules, and atoms. What is an atom? I don’t expect you to be a theoretical physicist, but surely you are aware or can at least take a moment to consider that an atom is not made of “atom stuff”. Just in case someone reading this isn’t familiar, I’ll very simply explain: An atom is like a little solar system of electrons orbiting protons and neutrons (the nucleus). Of course these little subatomic particles are more like waves or fields, but we can save those details for another time and hopefully someone more qualified to explain it. What is important here, is that you grasp this concept of “things” only ever being the emergent property of other smaller things. That is, the nature of a thing is an emergent quality or behavior. It is the quality of a subset of units which are individually, really the quality of further smaller subsets and so on. A thing isn’t really a “thing”, at all. An atom is not truly a “thing”, it is a synergistic organization of smaller things that all together, exhibit new behaviors by their organization being synergistic. Subatomic particles don’t form molecules, they form atoms and atoms, following the same fundamental behavior of self organization, form molecules, elements, etc. In other words, a set of subatomic particles will each have properties that cause interaction with other particles. This interaction becomes what we refer to as behavior. That behavior is often organization, “clumping” together, so to speak. So, we have sets made up of subsets. The atoms are a set. They join together to form larger sets, a molecule, for example.
“If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”
― Stuart Kauffman
Skin is a qualitative approximation of smaller cells and those cells are, likewise, qualitatively approximated. There’s no such thing as skin or skin cells. There is only the process of emergent characteristics that arise from synergistic organization. Your incredibly low resolution vision does not allow you to see the detail in front of you, around you, and of you. Furthermore, it’s just as well, because the brain is not presently capable of comprehending anything near the sort of core reality one would experience were their senses limitless. If you try to define anything by it’s most core component, you will arrive in an ocean of subatomic fields where there are no things, at all and all meaning is lost.
So, when you look around, what you see isn’t really reality, it is a qualitative approximation that we refer to as reality. You are seeing an incomprehensibly granular, low resolution representation of the fundamental formula. You are seeing only a macro level of emergent qualia. You simply can’t comprehend beyond that without tools of abstraction with which to realize a more detailed analysis and a point from which to reflect on your sensorial and comprehensible ignorance. You are effectively seeing a narrow bandwidth of a much broader spectrum of orders or tiers of organization. So, what you see doesn’t exist as much as it is really a common order, a specific bandwidth of organizations exhibiting emergent behavior that almost forces interaction to take place between them.
Technology is like this, too. An insightful point to this is that the popular perspective seems to be that we are enslaved to our technology, but I believe this is a fundamental miscalculation. We aren’t enslaved to technology, we are bound to behavior that becomes the recipe for technology. No individual, if left alone in the wilderness, could reproduce an exact iPhone. If you leave them with an iPhone, the battery will die, the screen will break and they could spend the rest of their life failing to make a new one from scratch. The idea that we are enslaved to something so fragile is a critical misinterpretation of what is going on.
Clearly, technology is also an example of emergence. Something irreducible to the synergistically organized, individual components from which it emerges. The total knowledge of technology is not a property of any individual, it is an unpredictable product of a large organization of people over generations. Despite our opinions, technology is not under anyone’s control and it is not anyone’s idea. It transcends generations, far beyond the capacity of any human to control.
Similarly, there is life, of which you are an unsuspecting little piece. We don’t know why we are. We don’t know what life is meant to be or do. We are only just barely aware of life on a functional level just as an ant in a colony is aware of it’s surroundings on a functional level. As we are alive, today, we get jobs, we consume, we reproduce, and we do so very aggressively. We argue over how to do it, but never why we do it, at all. It is our nature, our programming to engage, to interact, to consume, to labor, reproduce, survive, and not only survive individually, but instinctively want all life to continue and flourish.
Interestingly, humans even behave how one would expect any goal focused system to behave. Ants in a colony will change roles based on external input. If an ant comes across too few guard ant smells, it will instinctively change roles as will others, from whatever it was doing, to becoming a guard. There is a constant ebb and flow of role switching. This is but one example of individual behavior within a colony that gives rise to an overall, collective behavior labeled as a “colony”, a singular “thing”. Likewise, humans when placed in a group, say a dozen people deserted on an island, will immediately organize based on their individual characteristics and form groups as well as hierarchies. Even one who opposes the organization, all together, is a component to the algorithm. Furthermore, we can even witness systematic self correction take place immediately. Not just in the sorting algorithm of competition between predictable personalities, but if a person or more objectively speaking, a unit, begins to behave in a way that disrupts the synergy of the group, the group will quickly act to correct, quarantine, or eliminate the defective unit. Thus exhibiting, once more, the nature of all things to self organize.
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