Jed Recently stated: "The laws of economics are constraints, similar to the laws that govern structural engineering. If you ignore the laws of structural engineering, your buildings will collapse. But within the constraints these laws define, you can create an enormous variety of different structures. Some structures, such as an airplane hangar, will make extraordinarily efficient use of the materials to cover the largest possible area. Other structures, such as a Victorian house, will waste a lot of materials to produce a charming effect. Some economic structures produce fantastic profits in a short time, such as WallMart superstores. Others are inefficient and wasteful, such as Japanese mom-and-pop retail stores. But these small stores take care of many people and they enliven neighborhoods and make life more pleasant."
- Jed Jed's thoughts on this matter brings to mind something I've been pondered on and off in my life for years, a concept called "Emergence." Theories of Emergent behavior help explain why dilapidated Mom-and-Pop retail stores thrive. It helps explain why certain run-down neighborhoods in our cities deserve to stay pretty much intact the way they are, as compared to being torn down and replaced with another ill thought out housing project, and with disastrous consequences. First, humor me a second while I fill in some hopefully entertaining background. On a recent family recent trip to Portland, Oregon, to deposit my father's ashes in the Pacific Ocean (his spawning grounds), we visited Powell's Books, one of the most well known used bookstores in the country. Browsing through one of the long corridors in the science section my eyes scanned past an off-color light gray-blue book. It was of an average size, not very impressive looking book at first glance. The title said "Emergence." It continued with, "The Connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software." I was intrigued. It might help to understand that in my youth I, too, had studied the social behavior of ants. A kindred spirit! During a younger and more inquisitive time in my life I maintained several full-fledged ant colonies which included the queen. I had been fascinated by the complex organizational structure these tiny creatures exhibited. How is it, I often wondered, that such seemingly mindless little creatures with brains the size of, well, the size of an! ant, were capable of organizing their living conditions into highly complex social structures as if the entire colony was behaving like a single-minded organism? I read on. "THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE MYSTERY OF WHY THE WHOLE IS SOMETIMES SMARTER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS" What did the author mean by the term "Emergence?" I happened to notice the author's name, and that's when I got the biggest surprise of all. There, in capital letters was the name: "STEVEN JOHNSON" (No relation!) Not only were the author's ideas on emergence personally compelling he possessed my name. Out of the entire bookstore how did I manage to, almost as if I was an ant, ambling endlessly through a labyrinth of bookshelves find my way to this particular isle in the science section, and how did my eyes manage to focus on this particular nondescript book out of the thousands of others littering the shelves. It was an eerie kind of synchronicity, one that I had not personally experienced to that degree of conscious awareness in decades. Of course, I bought the book. I finished it over the following days absorbing as much as my mind could take in. The characteristics of Emergence, I discovered, exists in a surprising number of seemingly unrelated manifestations. It helps explain the formation of neighborhoods, both the highly successful and not so successful ghetto habitats that have emerged from our cities. It helps explain the occasionally unpredictable idiosyncrasies of economic models, like capitalism. Emergence helps explain the surprising robust evolution and success of a high-tech phenomenon called "public domain software." It helps explain why our brains, while physically hardwired as a jumble of excruciatingly slow carbon-based biological networks can, nevertheless, easily exceed the cognitive power of the fastest silicon-based super computers currently in existence. The rules of emergence help explain why there is a surprising lack of control news networks must now contend with as they vainly try to choose what is "newsworthy". For those who might be interested in designing their own Emergent data models (and play God for a while!) I would highly recommend downloading a free public domain software package called StarLogo. You can find the package at: http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/starterpage.html Some of you old farts might remember this programming language was once called "Logo". It was one of the first programming languages developed with children in mind. The original intention was to interest tiny tykes in the joys of learning the basic rules of programming languages on personal computers. It would appear that the Logo language has evolved just a tad over the decades. I has now become a robust data modeling "parallel" programming language. It is capable of modeling anything from traffic patterns, slime mold, the spread of plagues, population growth patterns, and quantum physics. I downloaded the Starlogo programming package about two months ago and gave it a spin around the block. It has been a very entertaining and educational experience. It was fun playing God. I also discovered, it's not easy assuming the responsibilities of God! Most of my universes didn't far out so well! Lots of surprises. Lots of duds. I dare say it might be possible, assuming one is ambitious enough, to model the behavior or hydrinos as they go through their various incarnations using this programming language, just to see what might happen. However, I'll leave that assignment to others, as I already have a very full dinner plate. I have some final thoughts to share concerning my profound synchronistic-like experience of locating Steven Johnson's book on Emergence. I realize there continues to be protracted debates on whether synchronicity truly exists. In my own case, the only intelligible thing I can say is that if "God does not play with dice", as Einstein once blurted out in one of the most memorable quotes in the annals of scientific history it would seem to suggest that, at least in my universe, I occasionally experience events as a series of improbabilities. Perhaps its simply the fact that if the TAO is to be held responsible for creating all of the Emergent rules of random happenstance, it would make a form of wry sense to me to occasionally leave in a few flaws here and there in the Grand Scheme of Things - just to see what happens. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.Zazzle.com/orionworks
