Chapter 4 - Emergence

I remember clearly; it was a Friday afternoon in the spring. Only mathematicians would schedule classes at 3 in the afternoon, which meant we finished up around 4, way later than anyone else. I had been working on a set of problems surrounding the Suslin condition, named for Mikhail Suslin. I had proven some results and as we wound down for the afternoon they asked me to work on a problem over the weekend. I said I would and as I walked back to my dorm room I started thinking about the problem and it seemed pretty simple. I figured to have it solved before dinner. Later that night I was pacing back and forth in my room working on this problem. At the end of my pace (my room had about 6 feet of space so it was a short pace, I would spin around, click my heels and walk the other way. All the while I was listening to ear splittingly loud music (probably Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans or Fragile) which led to a knock (more of a pounding, to overcome the loud music) from the resident life coordinator who lived below. He asked if I could stop dancing, as my room was directly above is living room. After assuring him I was not dancing, but thinking, I modified my pacing, but kept on thinking. Over the weekend, I spent many hours thinking about this and came to class Monday afternoon empty handed, I couldn’t come up with a proof and expected to be told how simple the solution was if you just thought about it in a certain way. It was then that I was told that I wasn’t given just any problem, but the Suslin Problem. Not only was it deceptively simple but it had been shown to be undecideable. There was no proof! It wasn’t that I was unable to discover the proof, no proof existed! We’ll talk some more about what this means but it was the first time in my short mathematical career that I had heard that there were questions you could ask but for which there was no answer. I had expected more from mathematics – I expected every question had an answer. This idea was the germ of this chapter, many years in the making. Our discussions of hierarchy, interactions and chaos lay the foundation to talk about emergence.

An emergent property is a new level of complexity attained from combination of “lower organized” parts. Another way to say this is an emergent property is a new way of interacting. Since we’ve already said that, in physical terms, interacting is a force an emergent property is a new force. It derived from previous forces and structures, but it is a new force.

I find it best to look at examples of emergent properties.

· Gravity

· Life

· Self-awareness/Intelligence

· Language

· World economy

· Law

There are many others but I use this list to make a few points.  First off, physics has been adamant that gravity is one of the initial forces of the universe.  When physicists observed the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at a greater rate, they then ran the movie backwards to show them when the universe began.  The notion of the Big Bang came about through this analysis and is firmly part of current scientific thought.  While I had the idea that gravity emerged in 2008, my comments were met with silence.  It was completely unacceptable to think of the universe without gravity.  The fact that scientists have spent 80 years trying to merge the three quantum forces with gravity (the so-called Theory of Everything) to no success seemed unpersuasive.   I wrestled with this, convinced that based on the interactive approach to physics that gravity was indeed a new force that emerged.  In January 2010, Erik Verlinde, a string theorist from the University of Amsterdam, published a paper, “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton.”  While still controversial, his approach shows that gravity is not a basic force of the universe but one that emerges.  In a subsequent e-mail, he told me, gravity  “is not a force that has to be assumed to be present from the start.”  

The emergence of gravity came to me as I was thinking, “What’s so special about the origin of life?”  My reading and studies of biological evolution showed how focused humans were on this discussion.  The Scopes Monkey trial was a long time ago and people are still divided on the topic of biological evolution.  Looking at how human intelligence developed, I was introduced to the notion of qualia, those structures in the brain that form the basis of awareness.  It appeared to me that the development of human awareness and intelligence follows the same development arc as the origin of life.  The same disagreements and arguments hold sway.  I saw the trajectory running from the origin of life, through awareness and into emergent properties created by humans and looked backwards.  What was so special about the origin of life that it was the first emergent property?  Was there anything predating the origin of life that shared the same notion of emergence?  Tracing the development arc backwards from awareness through life indicated gravity was a candidate for an emergent property.  Ever since the discovery of the principals of quantum theory, scientists have struggled to fit gravity into the theory.  Defining gravity as a new force that emerged frees us to look at gravity in a new way and may well lead to a new cosmological evolutionary pathway.  Science has not dealt with new forces and has used the universal existence of gravity as one of its primary assumptions.  Mostly, this is assumed because as long as humans have been in existence, there has been gravity and no reason to believe it wasn’t always so.  Such is the way of some new theories; they dare to ask why an assumption needs to be true?  Just like my amazement when I found that the Suslin Problem had no proof, I remember vividly that I felt the same way when I imagined emergent gravity. Time will tell if the theory of emergent forces “has legs” but we’ll explore the ramifications of this theory and some recent support for this line of reasoning.

Going back to the list of emergent properties, the first three items on the list were formed without human assistance and the last three were created by humans. That some emergent properties arise from intelligent humans has led some people to, incorrectly, reason that all emergent properties arise from intelligence. The notion of Intelligent Design is derived from this way of thinking. It doesn’t help that we humans have not figured out how emergence works, giving fuel to the fire. The reasoning is along the lines – we haven’t figured out how it works, so the way it works is beyond our understanding. If it is beyond our understanding, some other intelligent designer knows how to make emergent properties. I do not agree with this line of reasoning and have a suggestion in a bit of a different way to approach this. We’ll get to that in a few paragraphs but first, let’s look into emergent properties a little more.

The emergent property is a new force, expressed by a new way of interaction. In my studies, they appear to come about quickly but its affects take a much longer time to work its way through its surroundings. For example, I believe that when all is said and done, we’ll find that life came about quickly. The new interaction that life brought to the Earth was the “will to live.” As far as we can tell, non-living things like rocks and inorganic compounds have no will to live. To make things a little more complicated, scientists cannot agree on a definition of life. There are things that are clearly alive (humans) and things that are clearly not alive (rocks). There are also things like viruses where it is unclear if they are alive or not. Viruses exist in a dual state between dead (when outside a living creature) and alive (when it can hijack a cell’s reproductive apparatus). If scientists cannot agree on as simple a question as “What is Life?” you should expect some surprising things. Of course, just because a question is simple to ask does not mean it has a simple answer. Just as we found out in Chapter 2 that simple interactions can lead to complex behavior.

By talking about forces as interactions and allowing new forces to emerge, we change the way the universe evolves. Science has operated under the assumption that all of the forces of the universe are derived (evolved) from the basic laws of the universe – the three quantum forces and gravity. I claim that is not the case. The universe creates new forces that are unlike the forces that came before it and cannot be derived from them. We need to see if these new forces (like gravity and life) are truly new forces or phantom forces. Phantom forces feel like a force but are easily explained by other forces. Centrifugal force and coriolis effect are two of best known phantom forces. Centrifugal force comes about when you ride on a carousel. Newton’s laws say you want to go in a straight line but the carousel takes you in a circle. We “fell” like we are being pulled away from the carousel but that feeling of force is explained by Newton’s laws. The Coriolis Effect (not called a force, since it is phantom) comes about because of the rotation of the earth. It is a spherical version of centrifugal force and is again explained by Newton’s laws. Scientist have been trying for many years to explain how gravity is a basic force of universe and even longer on the origin of life. I will explain that the reason for this isn’t that there is an extra-terrestrial explanation of emergence but I believe we’ll discover that there isn’t a science of emergence. Scientists are beginning to explore the limitations of the traditional evolutionary approach. This doesn’t mean that creationists or Intelligent Design are valid interpretations of the data. It does suggest a middle ground that may show limits to the scientific method.

In the 16 October, 2010 cover article of New Scientist, Keith Bennett, professor of late-Quatemary environmental change at Queen’s University Belfast, writes about macroevolution – “big evolutionary events such as changes in biodiversity over time.” He writes, “Macroevolution is not the simple accumulation of microevolutinoary changes but has its own processes and patterns. There can be no “laws” of evolution. We may be able to reconstruct the sequences of events leading to the evolution of any given species after the fact, but we will not be able to generalise from these to other sequence of events. From a practical point of view, this means we will be unable to predict how species will respond to projected climate changes over the next century.”

He states that the reason there is no “law” of evolution is because of the chaotic nature of macroevolutionary change. Now we see why the discussion of chaos preceded this chapter. Lack of predictability does not imply there is no a process behind the universe. Indeed, there is a simple process that drives the universe and we discussed in Chapter 2 that this simple process yields complicated interactions. Somehow the universe finds a way to take these and form new ways of interaction, which leads to a new level of hierarchy which leads to new ways of interactions.

Human language is imprecise and has lead to a lot of arguments over time. Evolution is a term loaded with many meanings that has lead to arguments and legal proceedings (the famous Scopes “monkey” trial). I’d like to go back and address the notion of evolution and propose a new way of addressing the evolutionary process to clarify things.

Emergence and Evolution

Evolution is a process that extends beyond biology but in almost every paper I read, the term evolution is used in conjunction with biological evolution. (The article from the New Scientists, quoted above, is a perfect example of this loose terminology.) We need to get away from the biological-centric use of the term evolution. Evolution is a process that extends across all levels of hierarchy. In the general sense, evolution is the process which uses a selection criterion to determine which small changes to the system survive and which become extinct. In the case of biological evolution, the changes are genetic mutations and the selection criterion is Natural Selection, which is another way of saying life. Only living things can be subject to Natural Selection, so Natural Selection is another way of saying life. It becomes clear when we look at things this way that new, emergent forces lead to a new type of evolution, hence the need to qualify what sort of evolutionary process we’re talking about. When gravity emerged, gravitational evolution led to the creation of planets, stars and galaxies. When language emerged, language evolution led to the creation of many different languages. When the economy was created, economic evolution distributed wealth according to how successful the business idea was accepted by the market. (We hear about marketforces all the time.) A selection criterion is just another name for a emergent force.

In my writings, I ensure that I add an adjective to any use of the word evolution to make it clear what type of evolution is involved. The adjective describes the selection criteria (the emergence property) that drive the outcome of the evolutionary changes. I want to make it clear that biological evolution is only one of many types of evolution. Other forms of evolution predate biological evolution and many forms of evolution followed biological evolution. There are limits to the prediction capabilities of the theory of biological evolution. The article from New Scientist suggests that any evolutionary theory fails to predict a new emergent property. Biological evolution cannot explain the origin of life because it assumes life as the selection criteria. Confusion arises because we call the selection criteria Natural Selection, but that is semantics. Natural Selection is life and life is the reason and only reason that Natural Selection exists. Current work in the origin of species leads some to think that speciation, formation of new species, might be an emergent property. Let’s looks into this a little more.

Biological evolution is the scientific theory that describes how natural selection leads to changes in the physical and functional behaviors of an organism. Charles Darwin’s seminal work, “On the Origin of Species,” laid out the theory in great detail and with an impressive array of observational evidence. Further experiments and observations have improved the theory and nothing has ever disproved it. But Darwin’s theory of evolution does not explain the origin of species. In Daniel Dennett’s definitive book on Evolution, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” he states “Controversy about the mechanism and principles of speciation still persists, in one sense neither Darwin nor any subsequent Darwinian has explained the origin of species.” [Emphasis mine] In March 2009, a New York Times article discussing the 150^th anniversary of the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species stated, “While researchers agree that many of the recent breakthroughs would have come as a huge surprise to the grand old man [Darwin], they seem to disagree about almost everything else, from what a species is to what exactly is meant by the origin of species and even whether Darwin shed any light on the process at all.” [Emphasis mine]

Evolution explains how, when a species emerges, natural selection works to create a diversity of the species – call them varieties. But according to the current writings, evolution does not explain how species originate. Evolution is the process by which an emergent property fills the new niches available to it. This is not proof that speciation is an emergent property, but perhaps, as Dr. Bennett suggest, we approach speciation in a different way.

Through the years, people have used the term evolution to include emergence and I’d like to put a stop to this. We need to make a clear differentiation between the evolutionary process and emergent force. We also need to qualify the word evolution to indicate which emergent property is acting as the selection criteria. So if we are talking about evolution and natural selection, we should always refer to biological evolution. Evolution always requires selection criteria to determine which changes are preserved and which are discarded. The term evolution should be a general term not tied to any specific selection criteria and any specific use of the term should always be qualified.

Emergent Properties, Evolution and Intelligent Design

I want to restate the relationship between evolution and emergence. The emergent property is a new way of interacting and evolution is the process that makes small changes that allow the emergent property to spread out into the world and inhabit every niche and cranny. You can’t have a little life. Once live emerged on the Earth, biological evolution spread it into every niche available. Today we find living creatures in the most unlikely places. Similarly, gravity is a candidate for an emergent property and gravitational evolution lead to the accumulation of mass into dust, planets, suns and galaxies. The evolution process works because it can make good things better. Daniel Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea calls this the Principal of Accumulated Design. Since the emergence property is only organizing the constituent parts into new forms and shapes, things can only get so bad. If a living thing dies, it returns to its constituent parts – ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This conservation property means that as new emergent properties develop, the world becomes more organized but energy/mass conservation is observed.

Emergence filled the “gap” between non-life and life and that process is not well understood at all, and subject to great disagreement between reasonable people. It is an area of active research and our current level of understanding is weak. Biological evolution took life and spread it throughout the Earth, filling in the small gaps, or niches, through mutation and the natural selection process. Reasonable people should not disagree over biological evolution and they do not. (Unreasonable people can disagree about anything. That is not my intent here to make the case for biological evolution. Many other books and papers attempt to prove to creationists that biological evolution is a fully formed theory.)

Every example of emergence we can “explain” has been created by humans. The economy and legal system are examples of new ways to interact. Since science has not yet come up with an explanation of how emergent properties form in “nature” it is makes sense to think that some sort of intelligent design is at work here. Self organization is the term some use in discussing these emergent properties that form without human intervention. To me, the term intelligent design is another way of expressing the ideas of self organization. Regardless of your assumption on the existence of an Intelligent Designer, we should continue exploring the world of self-organizing systems. We may yet come up with an explanation of emergent properties.

The Nature of the Emergence

I have come to think of the emergent properties not as a fork in the road or a gap but as a waterfall. To continue the analogy we need to talk some about white water rafting. Rivers tend to follow the pattern of alternating slow moving and fast moving portions. The fast moving portions are called drops, for obvious reasons, and the slow moving portions are called pools. People refer to white water rivers as drop-and-pool runs. You have a section of rapids followed by a relatively calm portion. These two parts of the river are directly related to the structure of the rock bed underneath. As the river initially flowed through the channel, parts of the rock were softer or more porous than others and those eroded more quickly. The flow of the river also changed as more rain caused the river flow to increase and periods of drought caused low flow. This ebb and flow of water combined with the structure of the river bed lead to the eventual configuration of drops and pools. When the drop gets to a certain stage, we call is a waterfall. Structurally, there is no difference between a rapid or a waterfall but if you are in a canoe or kayak, the difference is great,

The current literature on evolution talks about gaps in design and we’ve mentioned the term “jumping the gap.” I believe there is no gap, at least in the physical sense that it is used. There are two complementary things going on in the universe, emergence creates new ways of interaction and the evolutionary process takes those new interactions to spreads it throughout the environment. The gaps we see are partially caused by our perspective. As I mentioned, we are looking back in time which is similar to trying to paddle up white water river. When you get to a waterfall, it certainly looks like a gap – one that you can’t get across. There’s no way to paddle a canoe up a waterfall. However, if you were coming down the river, you find the waterfall as a “serious” drop. You might not want to negotiate it in your canoe or kayak, but you certainly could.

I don’t want to take the analogy too far. In a white water rapid (or waterfall) nothing emerges at the bottom. An emergent property is a new way to interact and introduces a new force into the world. I am still working on a good analogy for this but come up empty handed. Again, the idea that new forces arise is a new idea that is not part of the scientific method or scientific thought. Science does have the notion of phantom forces, like centrifugal force. When you steer your car around a corner, you feel a force that “pushes” you in an opposite direction of the curve. If you turn left, your body leans to the right. We call this centrifugal force but it isn’t a force at all, hencethe term phantom force. You body and car have been traveling in a straight line and when the car turns, your body want to continue to go in a straight line. Since you are joined to the car (through gravitational attraction in the seat) you eventually turn to the left but that change from moving in a straight line and turning left yields the centrifugal force. The coriolis force is another phantom force, caused by the rotation of the earth. Phantom forces can be explained in terms of the three elementary forces and gravity. We’re not talking about phantom forces here. We’re talking about completely new forces that emerge.

It is time to talk about the relationship between emergence and evolution.

How do forces emerge?

Just to be clear. No one has any good ideas how mew forces emerge. The history of science has been based on the assumption that all forces can be derived from the three quantum forces and gravity. I’d like to talk about some of the conditions needed for a force to emerge and some details of how a new force might emerge. Chaotic behavior is needed for a property to emerge. Nothing will ever emerge from the classical world and their attractors. A necessary condition for emergence is strange attractors. But chaotic behavior isn’t enough. There needs to be a high level of interaction in order under some constraints to obtain emergence. In fact, I’ve come to look at emergence as developing from chaotic behavior under constraint. Think of an explosion as an uncontrolled event where the energy literally blows things apart. Emergence has the level of intensity of an explosion, but instead of flying apart, it is focused inwardly and there is a transition to a new level of interaction. For example, a nuclear explosion uses the power of the strong nuclear force to generate a lot of energy that spreads out quickly. The sun uses the same strong nuclear force but, under the constraint of gravity, gradually produces energy that is released much, much more slowly. This controlled energy produces new, heavier elements from the basic building blocks of electrons, protons and neutrons. These elements are then spread out throughout the galaxy when the sun finally explodes, only to be brought together by gravity into planets where they can be used to create ever more complex properties – like life.

One physical characteristic that seems to be related to emergence is phase transitions. We all know that water comes in three phases – vapor, liquid and solid (ice). Scientists have spent a lot of time studying the process where water vapor liquefies and water freezes. It is a most complicated scenario and one that even today is not fully understood. (So it isn’t farfetched to think that since we don’t understand phase transitions that we don’t understand emergence.) The transition from solid to liquid has some of the properties of emergence, in that liquid water has different ways to interact than ice, but there is more to emergence.

We really should discuss entropy at this point, because it is related to emergence.

Entropy is a measure of organization. Larger values of entropy mean a system is more random (less organized). So your car is a highly organized piece of equipment. Someone had to put a lot of energy to build your car. A car will not organize itself out the parts all by itself. But it is how you apply the energy that makes a car “emerge” out of the individual parts. If you just took an explosive, put it into the pile of parts and lit the fuse you would certainly put energy into the system, but you would blow it apart. That same energy, applied in a directed way, can create an automobile. The car has less entropy than the parts that went into it.

Left to its own devices, your car’s entropy increases and the level of organization decreases. Eventually, you are left with a rusted pile of junk where the car used to be. Things fall apart unless you do something (which requires energy) to maintain and organize them. Even worse, the universe is put together in such a way that entropy always increases. The only way you can decrease entropy is to increase it somewhere else. We see that on Earth. The Sun is increasing its entropy by burning as a “controlled” nuclear reactor. The heat from this reaction warms the Earth and allowed life to emerge (decreasing entropy). Our gain is the Sun’s loss and it is always the case, there are winners (entropy decreases) and losers (entropy increases). In fact, if you hearken back to our discussion in Chapter 1 on hierarchy you’ll notice that as the level or organization increases in the universe, the total amount of organized material decreases. There are more quantum particles than solid matter. There is more inert matter than living matter. There is more un-intelligent life on the Earth than intelligent life. As you organize things more and more, you must leave behind more and more un-organized detritus to balance out the scale. So there is a limit to how organized physical systems can become and I suspect we’ve reached that level on Earth. The emergent process appears to have reached a physical limit in the origin of human intelligence. It isn’t because the physical part of the planet earth has stopped the emergent process, but the emergence of intelligence endowed us with the ability to create things with ideas much more quickly and free us from slowness of physical emergence.

In addition to physical entropy, entropy can also correspond to information. Once intelligent creatures created the concept of information, we were freed from physical constraints. While there is only so much physical mass in the universe, information has no limits to the things that can emerge. Information and it associated properties of language (spoken and written) free us from physical limitations. Information still follows the U-ROC, things change by interacting. Information is just something that forms that basis of interaction between intelligent objects. Technology allows us to increase the speed of information interaction (we can talk on phones where the information travels at the speed of light rather than the speed of sound) and the range of interaction (we can talk to anyone in the world now and are not limited to just talking to people near us). It is worth noting that while technology can increase the speed and range of information interactions, it has no effect on the quality of the interaction. I think this is a basic limitation of technology. Technology can improve productivity but it does not improve quality of life. Remember when people said we’d eventually have a 20 hour work week because technological advances would make us more productive and we’d have more leisure time? That didn’t happen because in a capitalistic society, you need to maximize profits so the increased productivity allowed us to produce more in the 40 hour work week, not work 20 hours. It is effects like this that make us question the definition of progress.