Emergence

Autonomous interactions based on simple rules translate into complex, global behaviors.

The other piece of the complexity puzzle is emergence. Emergence is novel behavior that arises from the interactions between parts in a self-organizing system—it emerges as the parts interact with one another. These interactions and outcomes tend to be nonlinear and difficult, if not impossible to predict, even though the parts and the rules they use to interact tend to be very simple.

Your brain is once again an excellent example: neurons are basic cells that operate with a few simple rules. Those rules dictate how they pass electrical and chemical signals to other neurons. But when you link billions of them together, you somehow get consciousness. In other words, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain: it’s a novel set of behaviors that you can’t predict from simple rules of interaction between simple parts.

Likewise, a self-organizing natural structure like an ant colony is filled with emergent behaviors. When looking at an individual ant, they’re some of the most basic creatures imaginable. A single ant is close to worthless, so dumb and incapable that it might just run in circles until it dies of exhaustion. But when you combine large groups of ants together, you get incredible, emergent behaviors like building the colony itself, bunching together to form rafts that can cross bodies of water, and finding food by leaving pheromone trails (a fascinating process called stigmergy).

Emergence Across Domains

Emergence is not just confined to the brain or ant colonies; it is a pervasive principle in nature, where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon can be observed in various biological systems, showing how complexity arises from simplicity.

Bird Flocking and Collective Intelligence

Bird flocking is where individual birds follow simple rules like maintaining a certain distance from neighbors and aligning their direction of flight. Despite these simple rules, the flock exhibits complex behaviors like forming intricate patterns, swiftly changing directions, and efficiently navigating long migrations. This collective intelligence of the flock, an emergent property, cannot be predicted by studying an individual bird in isolation. The flock's behavior is a result of the interplay between individual birds, each contributing to the group's overall movement and decision-making process.

Ecosystems & Dynamic Balance

In larger ecological contexts, emergence plays a critical role in maintaining the dynamic balance of ecosystems. The interactions between different species—predators and prey, plants and pollinators, hosts and parasites—lead to emergent properties like ecological stability, biodiversity, and resilience. These properties are crucial for the survival and flourishing of ecosystems but are not properties of any individual species. Instead, they arise from the complex web of interactions within the ecosystem, illustrating how emergence is integral to the health and functioning of our natural world.

Social Emergence & Collective Behavior

In human societies, emergence is evident in the collective behaviors and social phenomena that arise from individual interactions. Market trends, cultural norms, and even social movements are emergent properties of the interactions among individuals. For example, the stock market's fluctuations are not just the sum of individual investment decisions but an emergent property of complex economic interactions, investor sentiments, and global events. These phenomena reflect the collective mindset and behavior of society, transcending individual actions and decisions.

Technological Emergence & Network Effects

The digital realm also showcases emergence, particularly in the context of network effects. As more individuals use a digital platform or technology, its value and utility increase, a phenomenon not inherent in the technology itself but emerging from user interactions. This emergent property can lead to rapid growth and widespread adoption, as seen in social media networks and online marketplaces. The network becomes more than just a collection of users; it transforms into a dynamic space for collaboration, innovation, and community building.

Uncomfortable Truths

Emergent and self-organizing behaviors are everywhere you look, and the fact that they’re hard (if not impossible) to predict is what makes them simultaneously valuable and maddening. Our simple brains don’t want to accept them because they seem to violate everything we trust about systemic behavior. Why can’t the world just act like a deterministic system?!

When you put this all together, you can start to see how the most important systems just don’t conform to the deterministic model.

As uncomfortable as that may make you, it’s unavoidable, because the complexity cascades out from the fact that each human is a complex adaptive system containing other complex adaptive systems! Your brain is a complex adaptive system, as is your body, as are many of the things you interact with in your environment.

When each complex adaptive system known as a person interacts with other complex adaptive systems, either in the form of other people or some other type of system in the environment, you get unpredictable, nonlinear results.

This is why nobody can predict what’s going to happen with the stock market, or understand why trends seem to pop in and out of existence at high speed. There’s simply no way to wrap your mind around how all of this works, and that remains true no matter how much knowledge you slam into your brain.

Your internal paradigm then has to shift, from this outdated, ineffective attempt at predicting and controlling everything, to positioning yourself to either create or quickly adapt to changes that cascade in nonlinear waves throughout your environment.