I’ve been reading and thinking about Complexity since 1999 when I read Complexity by Waldrop. It was a revelation and I understood that these ideas were the necessary inverse of deconstructionism. Where one tears things down to understand them, the other examines what happens when they come together.
In reading tonight, I had an insight. The author was discussing the impossibility of deconstructing or isolating the constituent pieces that together form the basis of an emergence. And I flashed on Information Theory and Claude Shannon’s work.
Perhaps, just as you cannot express, for example, 16 different states in less than 4 bits, an emergent property cannot manifest with less than a absolute minimum set of required components. Now that I’ve written that, I see that it is trivial and obvious but I hadn’t made the possible connection before between minimal information content and minimal requirements for an emergence.
Following on in this vein, emergent properties may not typically be derived from absolute minimal sets because nature is noisy and we see, empirically, that emergent properties are generally conserved.
So might there be an analogy between the extra error correcting codes we send to make data transmissions robust in noisy environments and how a set of minimal components may be augmented to yield a more robust emergent property rather than a fragile one? You could, perhaps, stretch this analogy and suggest that the minimal components are like a (genetic?) code that corresponds to the emergence and that redundancy in this code is what improves its conservation and gives it robustness.
But this musing brings me to the central question which has always puzzled me about ‘why’ emergence happens at all. Pardon me for how lame the following will sound but I am really overextending here.
I don’t believe in mystical explanations as to why matter self organizes. So, I find myself thinking about chemical reactions and why they happen – because the products are at a lower energy level after the reaction than before, typically.
Using this analogy with respect to emergence, so far the best I can manage is to visualize matter as storing energy in the form of organization. And that when a sufficient collection of essential components have gathered in effective proximity, they will yeild an emergent property and that property will tend to be conserved because, somehow, nature is happier (i.e. at a lower energy state) when the matter is so configured than when it is not.
Comments and thoughts are encouraged….