The Enigma of Emergence
It's both totally bizarre and remarkably common
Hiya!
Right about the time we think we’ve cracked Nature’s code, discovered its laws, or can predict what it’s gonna do — Nature reminds us just how little we know. She is both eternal and omnipresent, with endless layers and complexities. Every answer we find only leads to more questions. Take something as simple as rain, for example, which is falling heavily as I write this.
When was the last time you thought about rain? Like, really thought about it. What it is? How it forms? You probably assume we know the answers. Heck, even schoolchildren learn about clouds, evaporation, and precipitation. But dig any deeper than that, and you’ll soon find the answers aren’t quite as straightforward. For instance, rain is water. But what makes water? More specifically, what makes water wet?
Emergence
Emergence is one of those phenomena that’s relatively simple to grasp in a broad sense, but attempting to understand beyond that leads you on quite a curious adventure. Let’s go back to our water example.
As you likely know, water is just a bunch of H2O molecules, which are made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This is rather elementary knowledge, yet it’s actually pretty bizarre if you think about it. After all, water is wet, but neither hydrogen nor oxygen atoms are wet on their own. It’s only when a bunch of single hydrogen atoms combine with pairs of oxygen atoms to create a bunch of H2O molecules that wetness emerges.
The more technical explanation of emergence is when a phenomenon has behaviors or properties that its parts do not have but emerge only when all its parts interact in the broader whole. The wetness of water is a simple example to grasp, but emergent phenomena and their influence are far more expansive. Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist, neurophilosopher, and author, told New Scientist:
“I don’t think emergence is some rare or magical quality, but almost stupidly common.” […] “There is a sense in which nothing in science makes sense without emergence.”
Sure enough, once you start looking for emergent phenomena, you can find them everywhere — in biology, space, chemistry, physics, and philosophy. Some even believe consciousness is potentially emergent. You could go so far as to say it is likely your very state of being and the world you and I share and experience with everyone else emerged from the microscopic world. Or as the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP), an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to learning all about emergent phenomena, so elegantly put it:
“All the smooth experiences of wind blowing, music, sound or touch are the result of these emergent laws.”
Understanding how emergence works might help us solve some of our other mega-mysteries, including how life becomes life at all. Thankfully, countless brilliant minds and organizations, like DIEP, are working away.
The Challenge
Studying emergence isn’t exactly easy, though. In fact, its very nature conflicts with scientist’s standard “reductionist” approach to learning how something works, which involves breaking large-scale systems down into their microscopic parts to determine the laws that govern them.
Using the same approach with emergent phenomenon would be fruitless, though, because it’s only when the individual parts work together that the phenomenon occurs. Otherwise, it would be like separating all the hydrogen and oxygen atoms from a bunch of water molecules and then wondering why the two piles aren’t wet. Larissa Albantakis, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains:
“We have to get a better understanding of how the interactions between more microscopic parts of a system connect with the macroscopic behaviour of the same system.”
Scientists have wanted to better understand this for a long, long time. The age-old conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity adds another layer of complexity.
The laws governing our large-scale macro world fall apart on the microscopic level, which is governed by a whole other set of laws. Finding where these two worlds connect and the rules governing the interactions would transform our understanding of… well, everything.
Still, the typical reductionist approach falls apart. So, how can experts figure out how emergent systems work? Well, Professor Jessica Flack at the Santa Fe Institute and director of SFI’s Collective Computation Group thought of a different way researchers can study emergence.
Getting Creative
If I could summarize how Nature works in three words, they would be cycles, patterns, and spectrums. Those three things are everywhere, within everything, in every shape, form, timespan, and level there is — And Flack’s approach taps into this simple Truth. She sees emergence as a spectrum and wants to characterize the various degrees of emergent phenomenon better.
For instance, some systems are “screened off,” meaning that changes at the micro-scale of a particular system have very little influence on the macro-scale, meaning the emergent behavior is low on the spectrum. So one thing scientists need to do, according to Flack, “is to start quantifying this variation in screening off.”
Doing so would allow scientists to conduct experiments that eliminate certain variables and thus enable researchers to still use reductionism to study emergent systems, just in a different way. In other words, scientists could still characterize large-scale behaviors in a way that lets them work backward to the microscopic ones by experimenting with the effects of different variables.
Flack explains that it’s kinda like studying how pressure, volume, and temperature affect various statistical properties. So, while researchers can’t identify a precise cause of emergent behavior, they can locate microscopic interactions or patterns underlying the phenomenon.
Perspective Shift
We’ve spent the last few centuries with a reductionist mindset while learning about the planet and our shared external reality. We’ve deconstructed as much as possible and created categories for every piece and part we identify, labeling them things like chemistry, physics, and biology.
But it seems it might be time to find a new method, a subsequent stage, to study how all the pieces work together. Emergence seems like the beginning of this new path.
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It may be worth asking if the combination of hydrogen and oxygen(x2) is really wet or is it just that we experience the combination as wet. Is it "wet" before we touch it? Is wet merely a phenomenon that we create?
Very cool! A better understanding of emergence could lead to paradigm-shifting levels of understanding. Could time and space be emergent? Could emergence be related in some way to our interactions/juxtaposition with another spatial dimension?
Informative and evocative article. Thanks, Katrina.