Emergeneers,

An interesting article on the statistics of "blogging" (web logs):

"Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality"

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

-Doug
******************

Interesting indeed. Anne and I had quick go at this in conversation this morning, would be worth more talking through collectively ...

Question, in essence, is what "power law" behavior of complex systems might mean in social/cultural realm. Parenthetically, its noteworthy (for language group?) that technical term for nature of distribution of perturbation sizes in complex systems (most/all?) resonates for some people with social issue of "power' and its distribution, in sense of inequity.

General argument of paper, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that thinking of social organization as complex system implies that almost any characteristic of individuals (wealth, popularity, "power") will be distributed as a power law, implying the inevitability of substantial "inequity". Furthermore, the range of distribution ("amount of inequity") will necessarily increase as the population size increases.

On the face of it, this has a "fatalistic" character to it, and it is, at a minimum, an argument for keeping social systems small (an inference that one might well reach for other reasons, cf. Small is Beautiful). But ...

1- The analysis presumes that one WANTS to be wealthiest, or most popular, or most powerful. Many people (myself included) don't, for quite coherent reasons (the costs of being any of the above, among other things what my son calls the "budweiser effect").

2- The analysis presumes that a social "objective" is to eliminate "inequity". For me at least the objective isn't necessarily to eliminate inequity but rather to assure that distributions remain fluid so that individuals are not locked into particular places in them.

3- The analysis strongly depends on the presumption that interactions among individuals are such that particular choices made by some individuals bias other individuals to make the same choice (the "PC effect"). This is akin to ant stigmergy, noticing high concentrations of pheromones inclines ants to move along the same path. In fact, some people noticing a prevalence of individual choices to go in one direction use that as a cue to move in some other direction (yours truly?).

Bottom line:

I don't think fixed inequities are an inevitable outcome of complex systems in the social realm. On the other hand, the analysis does suggest the value of encouraging people to recognize in themselves inherent (?) biases toward following the stories of other people and do more striking out on their own.

The interactivity of the Web is perhaps its most important characteristic. For the first time in human history, it is becoming possible for all humans to play an active role in world-wide cultural and intellectual interchange.

See also The Place of the US in the World Community, a Serendip forum area:

... to tell and listen to each others' stories, to commit ourselves anew to finding new ways to tell our collective human story in a way from which no one feels estranged

"Social theorists have a name for these types of decentralized networks: heterarchies. In contrast to hierarchies, with top-down structures, heterarchies are made up of previously isolated groups that can connect to one another and coordinate. "

Yours in the (emerging) struggle,
Anne

Hi folks,

I mentioned at the end of my talk that Matthew Cook recently proved that RULE 110 is computationally universal. I just obtained a copy of his proof. Now that Wolfram's book is published, he's allowing Cook (who formerly worked for Wolfram and is currently a grad student at UCLA) to distribute his proof. Cook's theorem is ground breaking, and is the core fact supporting the philosophy that Wolfram develops in his text.

Would anyone like a copy? It's 40 pages, and seems to be very carefully written with lots of background and motivational explanations and pictures. Would anyone like to work though the proof together? I think that, if we're willing to skip some of the messier details, it would be a reasonable project. Perhaps it would be a good project to involve students in, with the goal of hiring a group of students to do a summer project deciding whether rule 30 is universal. Maybe this question is too large to solve in a single summer, but we could ask the experts their opinion on this.

Please let me know your level of interest,

Kris

An urge to organize
As individuals, army ants have almost no brain to speak of, just a clump of neurons inside their tiny heads. Working as a group, however, they rule the Amazon jungles, marching in formation over acres of land and flushing out thousands of insects, even scorpions, that are their prey. The ants move out and then file back in orderly lines, with the returning parties efficiently forming lanes inside the outgoing ants.
The full article will be available on the Web for a limited time:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/health/5409380.htm

(c) 2003 Philadelphia Inquirer and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

If real plants don't compute, then I don't know what computing is. I'd say the opposite: computing is the one thing that is being selected for, and adapted. I think we need to discuss what is "computing". Computers are the ones that don't do it very well, and don't do it very naturally.

Paul has agreed to lead a discussion on "information" in the Emergent Phenomena group. Maybe we can discuss this issue here and there.

-Doug

• Is VERY interesting idea that one can trace threads of history of emergent thinking to Adam Smith, a century before Darwin. Possible still earlier thread coming out of post discussion conversation with Anne: Ovid's Metamorphosis?
  
• There is wonderful resonance to a talk by Ted in the brown bag series last semester on modelling, what it can/cannot do. Bottom line, from today, one can ALWAYS create a model that will emulate a given phenomenon of interest. In fact one can always create multiple such models. Conclusion: models are not useful simply because they emulate a given phenomenon, nor challengeable on the grounds that they don't reflect "reality" nor adequately account for all the variables in reality. What they are useful for is to show that a given phenomenon COULD be accounted for is some surprisingly "simple" way.
  
• The micro/macro distinction in economics is a mirror of reductionist/wholist arguments in a whole variety of fields.
  

http://emergent.brynmawr.edu/wiki/index.cgi/EmergenceReadingList

Please feel free to help create/edit/organize that list. Panama has added many nice annotations to the list, so it is already a nice resource.

Early writers on the ideas of emergence include: Hume, Smith, and of course Darwin.

As a cognitive scientist, I always think of intelligence when I think of modeling. Whether or not we can even model that, though, is an open question. Maybe one would want to claim that predicate logic with a database of facts is a model, although it doesn't capture too much of the essence of intelligence, to me. But if we do model intelligence, I'd want to say that is more than a model: the system would have intelligence.

It seems that in many fields when they come to make a micro/macro distinction that it spawns a new field. It is interesting that economics decided to keep both levels in one. My advice to the economists: spawn, baby, spawn!

-Doug

Okay, I'll bite.
WAY before Adam Smith, WAY before Darwin, there was
Ovid. Metamorphosis (1-8 A.C.E.):

...In all creation
Nothing endures, all is in endless flux....
Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old
Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly
Contrives. In all creation, be assured,
There is no death--no death, but only change
And innovation....
...the earth and all therein, the sky
And all thereunder change and change again,
We too ourselves, who of this world are part,
Not only flesh and blood but pilgrim souls....

Surely prescient to/for (for instance)
Loren Eiseley, "The Star Thrower" (1978):

"We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process..In modern terms, the dance of contingency, of the interdeminable, outwits us all.....Instability lies at the heart of the world...form is an illusion of the time dimension...the eternal struggle of the immediate species against its dissolution into something other...The power to change is both creative and destructive--a sinister gift which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature....The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demoniacal stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations...But out of such desolation emerges the awsome freedom to choose--to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being. In that widening ring of human choice, chaos and order renew their symbolic struggle.....

Last fall, Sharon Burgmayer, Andrea Friedman and I did a workshop on this topic: the delicate balance between stability and change, between safety and risk-taking, between security and novelty.

AND? while I'm trolling...
Paul's observation that "The micro/macro distinction in economics is a mirror of reductionist/wholist arguments in a whole variety of fields" also resonates for me in this--as well as in a range of other--contexts. It reminds me, for instance, of Ted Wong's discussion of Metaphor and Metonymy in the Brown Bags last semester, as well as a discussion this afternoon in the Language group, where we are now reading Jerome Bruner's Acts of Meaning. Bruner evokes C.S. Pierce's distinctions among "icon, index and symbol, the icon bearing 'resemblance' relationships to its referent as with a picture, the index a contingent one as in the relation between smoke and fire, the symbol depending upon a system of signs..." Icon is to index as metaphor is to metonymy as reductionism is to wholism as micro is to macro (as change is to stability...?)

Thank you, Mark, for teaching me "something about economics," by showing me how it re-plays patterns I recognize elsewhere.

Music of the Swarms: Who needs musicians when computers can think like bees? http://www.discover.com/mar_03/feattech.html

What might it take to create art? Can a flock of seagulls do it? Or does it take a soul, all that is human?

-Doug

There is clearly something that WORKS, in very satisfying and productive ways, in this working group. And something which, I think, is reflexively relevant to the explorations the group is engaged in. Looking inward, its worth noticing that the group itself is functioning as an emergent system, and trying to figure out what makes the group successful in this regard. My speculation:

• Each element brings to the group something different
  
• Each element in the group is open to being altered by all other elements in the group
  
• All elements in the group are simultaneously committed to the continuing elaboration of their own story and to the continuing elaboration of a collective story
  
• The group evolves collectively, in the absence of a leader or architect, because of an environment which encourages/supports the three previous items.
  

And looking outward: it is noteworthy that there is a sense of pleased "surprise" in many peoples' reactions (including mine) to what we're doing together. That suggests that the activity of collectively evolving stories which are satisfying/productive both individually and collectively is less common in academic life than it should perhaps be. That, of course, suggests that our activities could, beyond their local goals, play a useful role as well in suggesting/contributing to productive changes in the academic community at large. And that they could contribute to thinking about classroom environments/practices as well. Beyond this, my sense is that the lessons we're evolving are quite relevant to critical issues of finding better ways to conceive of national and world communities, and the relations among them.

I've heard about this project from time to time, but I didn't realize that anyone could participate. Maybe you already know about it? Anyway, it came up in a talk last week and I thought I would pass it along in case any of you are interested.

http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/

I've attached an excerpt from the front page, below.

Best,
Panama

"In 1967, the Harvard Social Psychologist Stanley Milgram sent roughly 300 letters to randomly selected people in Omaha, Nebraska with the instruction to get the letter to a single "target" person in Boston using only personal contacts.

Milgram gave each "sender" some information about the target including name, location, and occupation, so that if the sender did not know the target (and it was extremely unlikely that they would), they could send the letter to someone they did know who they thought would be "closer" to the target. Thus began a chain of senders, each member of the chain attempting to zero in on the target by sending the letter to someone else: a friend, family member, business associate, or casual acquaintance.

Milgram's surprising finding was that for the 60 chains that eventually reached the target, the average number of steps in a chain was around six, a result that has entered folklore as the phrase "Six degrees of separation."

But is it really true? While Milgram's first experiment suggests it is, other experiments have been less conclusive, and no experiment has been done to test the theory on a global scale.

This is what we are trying to do and we need your help."

Among other things, it means that "emergence" is NOT a perspective which should be seen as discouraging "individual social action" (the issue came up several months ago in a grad idea working group discussion (which includes social work students) based on reading of Johnson's Emergence and earlier of Pinker's The Blank Slate; see http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/grad/ideaforum/8oct02.html and http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/forum/newforum/gradideaforum02-read.html#3798)). The actions of an individual are in general NOT able to bring about arbitrary (wished for?) changes in collective properties, but they are also not, by the same token, irrelevant for such changes.

To put it differently, if individuals see themselves as contributing parts of social/cultural phenomena, then they will in fact be so. If they do not see themselves that way, they will continue to be so but will be less effective/"meaningful" contributors in terms of their own distinctive aspirations/desires. There are of course, as I suggested, immediate political significances to this conclusion (see The Place of the US in the World Community for an example of an effort to facilitate individually-influenced stigmergy and a modest proposal for an example of the possibilities and limitations of individual action).

And now returning, armed with the practical, to the theoretical ... Agency, in the sense of an agent being both influenced by and influencer of global properties, is a property of agents in any emergent system having stigmergic elements. It does NOT depend on either consciousness or free will. What DOES depend on those (and hence is a unique requirement for the internal instruction sets in the case of human interactions, and probably those of some other animals) is the existence of a "choice" as to whether to regard oneself as having agency. In THIS sense, agency is an emergent property (of evolution) and one which in turn makes possible (but not inevitable) the emergence of new phenomena (kinds of social organization) which were not previously possible (cf Free Will? and Variability in Brain Function and Behavior and The Brain's Images: Co-Constructing Reality and the Self and Getting It Less Wrong the Brain's Way: Science, Pragmatism, and Multiplism).

PS. What this makes me think of is a possible modification of the "segregated neighborhood" model which would evolve a solution to creating integrated neighborhoods. I THINK its doable, and if so would help to sharpen the question of what is/is not necessary for individual agency in the "free will" sense. Anyhow, thanks again to all for the stimulation, and I hope all this is stigmergically useful to someone.

For Mark, who (like me) is still trying to get a handle on this word, and (to do that) needs a short definition:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (where I go for direction, whenever I am lost) stigmergy is "The process by which the results of an insect's activity act as a stimulus to further activity"; it was first used in 1959, in book called Insectes Sociaux: "The stimulation of the workers by the very performances they have achieved is a significant one inducing accurate and adaptable response, and has been named stigmergy." I can't reproduce the etymology of the word here in Greek, but loosely translated its roots mean "pricking" (stigma) + "ergon" (work). Mark was right--the root is the same as that for "stimga" (=the result of a mark; tatooed)--but w/out attaching any "stigma" (if you get my drift).

Which leads me (sort of!) to MY question of the week:

I want to separate what was put together far too casually for my taste during one moment of this morning's conversation, when identity was defined/identified w/ "following a certain rule set," and it was proposed that, in an emergent system, although behavior changes, those rules do not. My red flags went up. Like Karen, I'm ready to get beyond models now. I want to keep free will into the conversation--the will of thinking, self-reflective agents, and see if emergence, stigmergy, synergy are still useful ideas. I'm tired of talking about "stupid" agents (including the several instances of self-attribution that occured today).

Smartly yours,

A.

Taking a step back: why are we interested in stigmergy? Because we are looking for the mechanisms that explain how simple interacting agents can do far more as an interacting group than they can as a set of individuals. We are looking for the mechanisms that cause ants (for example) to do what they do, and also wondering in what ways we (for example) can affect our larger group/level/society.

But maybe the basic notions of cause and effect are too rooted in a reductionist world. Not that I'm advocating abandoning them completely, but merely suggesting that the way we normally think about cause/effect doesn't fit very well in describing an emergent phenomena.

Steve Grand has a sometimes-clever book, "Creation: Life and how to make it". In it he describes "the web of causality" which seems to be a better idea. The idea is that it is very difficult in an interconnected system to ascribe a particular cause to any particular effect. Agents can affect themselves. The experiences (historicity) of an agent affects its behavior. The environment affects its behavior. Social interactions affect its behavior. Newspapers can affect its behavior. The sum total of everything (locally accessable) potentially contributes something to the behavior of an agent.

If we give up on the simplistic notions of cause and effect, then we also will be left with very different "explanations" of a phenomena. In short, any abstract explanation will gloss over the details, and therefore miss the very core attributes that makes a complex system tick; it won't be an explanation at all! They will just be first-order approximations that don't have anything to do with how a system really works.

This may sound like I'm pessimistic on the future of science. But I'm not. I think that models are the key. Actual models don't just instantiate some abstract theory (if they did they wouldn't do anything interesting); they are the explanation.

So, I guess I'm wary of thinking about "stigmergy" as a tool that agents use to organize collective thoughts. Really, it is just us trying to abstract away from the gory details of a part of the web of causality. But the devil is in the details. Or, more optimisticly, god is in the details.

-Doug

http://www.mrwong.de/myhouse/index.htm

Well, I don't seem to have the right plug-in to add a floor to Mr. Wong's Soup'partments (emergence blocked by inadequate technology; access to said technology blocked by own stupidity), BUT Ted's invitation into that sort of "collaborative creativity" put me strongly in mind of two more architectural spaces in which you can play @ being the exploring ant, seeing if you can best find your way by re-tracing the path you yourself have just laid down or by finding a novel one (I AM going to keep free will--@ least in its "weak" sense as choice -- in this conversation!)

Try out both Serendip's House and Transformation . The latter site has one particular image "Inverting Power Games," which strikes me as a particularly wonderful example of stigmergy (and which Sharon Burgmayer, the artist, actually glossed over a year ago as "What might result if the power localized in a few players...was conjoined to involve all"). That god might be in THOSE details has already been imaged, too, @ Science and Spirit .

Wonder if ANY of this will have ANY relationship to the "emergent art" Tim will be talking about next week?
Eager to see,
pictorially yours,
A.

"Self-organization in social insects oftern requires interactions among insects: such interactions can be direct or indirect. Direct interactions are the "obvious" interactions: antennation, trophallaxis (food or liquid exchange), mandibular contact, visual contact, chemical contact (the ordor of nearby nestmates), etc. Indirect interactions are more subtle: two individuals interact indirectly when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy. In addition to, or in combination with, self-organiztion, stigmergy is the other most important theoretical concept of this book. Grasse [157, 158] introduced stigmergy (from the Greek stigma: sting, and ergon: work) to explain task coordination and regulation in the context of nest reconstruction in termites of the genus Macrotermes. Grasse showed that the coordination and regulation of building activities do not depend on the workers themselves but are mainly achieved by the nest structure: a stimulating configuration into another confirguration that may trigger in turn another (possible different) action performed by the same termite or any other worker in the colony. Nest reconstruction consists of first building strips and pillars and finally the interpillar space is filled to make walls.... "

"Stigmergy is easily overlooked, as it does not explain the detailed mechanisms by which individuals coordinate their activities. However, it does provide a geral mechanism that relates individual and colony-level behaviors: individual behavior modifies the environment, which in turn modifies the behavior of other individuals."

[157] Grasse, P.-P. "La Reconstruction du nid et les Coordinations Inter-Individuelles chez Bellicositermes Natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La theorie de la Stigmergie: Essai d'interpretation du Comportment des Termites Constructeurs." Insect. Soc. 6 (1959): 41-80.

[158] Grasse, P.-P. "Termitologia, Tome II." Fondation des Societes. Construction. Paris: Masson, 1984.

Are two agents of the same kind because they share a rule set? I might be fine with this test, depending on how we define having the same rule set. I'm completely willing to say that the rule set for one cell in Conway's Game of Life is the same as the rule set for another cell, even if the two cells have different environments and therefore give rise to different behaviors. That's the whole point, after all. But I worry about the case of two different rule sets being tacked together into some big conditional. Like: follow rule-table A if timestep < 50; else follow rule-table B.

And like Karen and Anne, I want to think about this in terms of examples from nature. here are the examples I gravitate to. Ant-colony behavior. Harvester ants in the Arizona desert live in colonies which can get as old as fifteen years, even though individual ants don't live longer than one year. There is ant-level behavior (e.g., doing tasks, choosing tasks on the basis of frequency of interaction with other ants), and there's colony-level behavior (e.g., global foraging strategy, aggressiveness toward neighboring colonies). Here's what's cool: colony-level behavior changes even though ant-level behavior stays the same. Ants still choose their tasks the same way, but because the colony is larger and the nest has a different architecture (thereby changing interaction frequencies), colonies change their foraging strategies and aggressiveness over time. This, I think, is a perfectly good example of having the same rule set -- late ants share rules with early ants, but these rules play out differently because the environment or the global state has changed. Developmental genes. (And here I risk exposing my great ignorance of genetics, so please bear with me.) Some genes are for structures, different structures depending on where and when they're being expressed. The wheres and whens are determined by concentrations of signal chemicals, which are produced upon activation of other genes. The one example I have on hand is Antennapedia, which when rendered nonfunctional allows a leg to be produced in the developingfruit fly where an antenna ought to be. That is, it's a gene that somehow tells the developing structure to be an antenna instead of a leg.

In my schematic language, here's the rule: Make an antenna if you're in the head; else make a leg. Should that count as one rule? If so, then the differential behavior of the development process should be seen as emergent. I don't think it should count. Counting that would be like counting colony-level behavioral change if the ants had some time-dependent rule, or counting sandpiles if someone rigged it such that cascades obey a power law after some given time step.

"Are two agents of the same kind because they share a rule set? ... Here's what's cool: colony-level behavior changes even though ant-level behavior stays the same. Ants still choose their tasks the same way, but because the colony is larger and the nest has a different architecture (thereby changing interaction frequencies)..."

But how do interaction frequencies change the behavior of an ant? There must be a place in memory that is keeping track, and the rules must be sensitive to that change. We could represent that in a rule, like:

IF memory[4] > .45 THEN MOVE left

(consider memory[4] to be the 4th place in memory where some internal counter gets incremented with each encounter with another ant).

But if we allow that, then why not something like:

IF memory[4] > memory[5] * memory[1] THEN MOVE memory[2] direction

(where all of these memory positions are counters, sensors, and other internal states of all kinds).

In this manner, the rules could be the same for a million ants, but they would all have different behaviors... even if you had only one rule! Of course, if ants all had similar experiences, then they might all have similar (subtly different) behaviors.

I'm just pointing out that memory + memory-sensitive-rules can allow for much more individuality than those systems without memory, and the rules don't need to change a bit.

-Doug

P.S. - memory is just internal stigmergy, or stigmergy is just external memory :)

With all due respect to Bonabeau, Dorigo, and Theraulaz, and possibly (depending on what he means) to Doug, I think that the following way of talking about stigmergy:

"two individuals interact indirectly when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy...individual behavior modifies the environment, which in turn modifies the behavior of other individuals" (B D & T)

"memory is just internal stigmergy, or stigmergy is just external memory" (DB)

misses something critical about the process, whether or not we want to use the term "stigmergy" to describe it.

It isn't JUST a case of individual behavior modifying the environment and in turn modifying the behavior of others (i.e., indirect or delayed feedback), it's rather that LOTS of individual behaviors pool into patterned aggregate changes in the environment (e.g., pheromone trails left behind by group activity, where individual variability tends to wash out) that in turn modify the behavior of groups of individuals. This is what links individual behavior to colony behavior. If we want to use "stigmergy" for the simpler case of delayed feedback, which is all that seems to me to be implied in "individual behavior modifies the environment, which in turn modifies the behavior of other individuals" fine; but then we need a new term for the fact that "individual behaviors pool into patterned aggregate changes in the environment...." "Colmergy"? (Anne where's your OED?) or perhaps "Durkmergy" in honor of Durkheim who may, if my memory serves me right and it may not, coined the term "collective representation."

A propos Doug's P.S., "colmergy/Durkmergy" is clearly much more than "just external memory." Internal (i.e., agent) memory, on the other hand, (at least what psychologists call "semantic memory" which is essentially memory for the generic rather than the episodic") may very well be a kind of "colmergy/Durkmergy" in that it is the patterned aggregate of "traces" (or activation levels between nodes or whatever is actually in there) in which individual variability tends to wash out. This is what gives memory its power and efficiency.

Rob

P.S. I hope that there is no stigma attached to those who neologize!

I agree with Rob that the collective nature of stigmergic memory (we should all have gone to Carol Bernstein's retirement events!) makes stigmergy different from memory. There's something here that's also why I disagree with the characterization of stigmergy as "delayed" whatever. What we describe as delayed is generally (always?) a discrete event. The effect of a stigmergic modification to the environment is no event -- rather, either it results in some event (the interaction, or contribution to behavior) after an unspecifiably long delay, or else its effects are distributed among (I want to say, smeared across) many future events.

I suppose this is the point of Rob's neologisms. If we take stigmergy to mean delayed feedback or delayed interaction, though, without the collectiveness, then I think we can simply dispose of stigmergy. Dynamical-systems people (my exposure is through population dynamics) have long known about the importance of time lags. There's no need to invent or invoke new ideas like emergence or even environment to account for time lags, even though time lags have been shown to be instrumental in producing chaos.

A few thoughts re: neologisms.

• Every new coinage seems like it might act as a sort of semantic bifurcation, and dynamical-systems people all know how bifurcations can lead to chaos.
• Neologists are what taxonomists call splitters, as opposed to lumpers. Neologists think the world is complex and that order can exist amidst apparent disorder. Paleologists (like Doug) think that complexity can emerge from a low-dimensional world. Rob and Doug are opposites and might cancel each other out.
• Are neologisms themselves emergence events? Or maybe stigmergic modifications of the environment. I suppose they could be both, depending on what the system is.

As per Ted's suggestion, I did go Carol Bernstein's retirement events, and found them quite rich and generative (see postings on Language and Time). I didn't find much there, though, to contribute to our discussion here: Carol's project (and those of her teacher and student who also spoke) has to do w/ re-capturing and re-presenting what has already happened (particularly that which is traumatic, catastrophic). The work is quite preservative in intent ("we must not forget") and quite melancholy in mode ("how can we bear to remember?"). The past pressed very hard on us during those discussions--and I found myself wanting the less time-bound work of emergence, which laments less the "absence of closure."

On the other hand, still musing over (one of the) questions left hanging last week, whether "criticality is critical," I found a melancholy note in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Gauging the 'Enough Point'" (and what happens when you fail to do so accurately):

"We are leaping across thresholds...That's how thresholds work: Up to a certain point something is good, and past that point there's trouble....Judging when you've reached this 'enough point' is, admittedly, no easy trick. You might stop short and miss some real improvement; you might overshoot and hit some wall....It's always going to be a guess, a question of feel, an art....But there are plenty of clues to alert us that we're near a technological saturation point, past which we will hit radically diminishing returns. The sheer speed of the world...overwhelms our ability to keep pace; we feel a kind of frantic restlessness which we sense will be alleviated only by slowing down."

More on neologisms later. Am slowing down for now.

Thanks, Ted, for what (to me, a word lover) is an amazing range of thoughts. To think of neologisms as "semantic bifurcations," as ways of making order out of apparent disorder, and as themselves emergent events, stigmergic modifications of the environment, just... blows me...back to the OED for more richness:

this term, for the "practice of using new words, innovation in language" first appeared in 1800: "Quaintness, the unavoidable companion of neologism, is...hostile to grace"
and again in 1858: "Neologism, in revolutionary times, is not an infirmity or caprice."
and 1867: "Since that day neologisms have fertilised the barrenness of our Saxon."

Most interesting, however, since the term was first introduced into this conversation by the psychologist in our group, is that it has a very particular meaning in Rob's discipline:

"An invented or concocted word or word-sound without recognizable meaning, freq. interpolated in otherwise correct sentences, and used by persons in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders"; see

(1905): "Neologisms the meaning of which may remain absolutely enigmatical to the patient himself...are frequent in the period of dementia."
(1906): "In the typical form [of mania]...neologisms and symbols are found in great number."
(1932): "The verbal repetition of these 'new' words neologisms or senseless words invented by himself."
(1960): "Word-formations, which are so bizarre that they immediately bring to mind the neologisms of dementia praecox."
(1969): "Other patients refer the origin of neologisms to hallucinatory experiences."

So...assuming that emerging amongst us is...something really new, I propose we add a new (not @ all dismal) word, "neologismal," to our emerging vocabulary.  

Anne's reference to a passage decrying the "sheer speed of the world" brought to my mind William Carlos Williams's remarkable, breathless poem, To Elsie, or the Pure Products of America Go Crazy -- and especially the last stanza ("No one/ to witness/ and adjust, no one to drive the car"), in which Williams blames desperation, despair, and the disintegration of noble folk traditions on the absence of a central organizing agent.

We should occasionally pay more attention to the dark side of emegence -- how segregation emerges (thanks, Mark K.), how monopolies and dictatorships emerge, how Williams's Elsie, "her great/ ungainly hips and flopping breasts/ addressed to cheap/ jewelry/ and rich young men with fine eyes" emerges.

Of course, we'll think about all that with plenty of salt, noting that the passing of ethnic and cultural purity isn't all bad and that there may be extraordinary beauty in the "isolated flecks."

One possible point to argue in Rob's quote of B, D & T:

...individual behavior modifies the environment, which in turn modifies the behavior of other individuals

We should be careful to explore what causes what in the above example: is it the individual behavior of an ant that triggers the events? Or is it somehow the collection (e.g., the colony via the stigmergy)?

When the ant begins to move, we usually don't say that a cell in the ant's brain began making signals to get the whole body moving. Nope, we talk about the ant as a whole turning left by some rule.

But, when we talk about a group of ants, we talk about the individual ants modifying the environment. But we should be talking about the colony-level organization. For some reason we give special preference to talking about ants as agents, but not ant brain cells as agents, nor ant colonies as agents.

So, I see a direct analogy between what brain cells do, and what ants do. Do you want to call one stigmergy and the other not? I'm am a lumper and so I'd rather not try to make some artificial distinction between those two. Both of these systems are causing changes in the environment that can be interpreted as "information" in the proper context.

I'm not sure what the word is that desribes both of these situations, but here is the begining of a definition:

a signal generated by a part of a system that interacts with other parts (or other signals). The interaction causes two separate levels of a system to be integrated, causing emergent properties.

Here's a conjecture about the parts: it is necessary that the parts have limited capacity about what they are doing. For example, if the ants attempted to "understand" the "meaning" of the pheromone (and thus change their behavior), the colony-level organization would break down.

Said another way: a network of Einsteins would make a really lousy brain. "That Einstein is firing! Why? I don't understand what all the chatter is about; I'm thinking! You never fire when I want you to!"

-Doug

"No. The whole point is that there's no need for change to the agent's internal state. Colony behavior changes over the course of years, even though no ant (except the queen, and she seems not to be involved in these behaviors) lives even one year. Yes, memory is powerful and can allow for changes in behavior without changes in the rules. But memory must not always be necessary -- or stigmergy must substitute for memory."

So, just replace what I said amout memory[n] with sensor[pheromone]. You're right: one "rule" (no memory, just a pheromone sensor) and you have an infinite amount of variation in your ants, all with a single rule.

So, memory and stigmergy could perform the same function to a single ant. But stigmergy has the added benefit of being one-of-those-things-that-I-don't-have-a-word-for. Here, let me bifurcate:

• stigmergy + symbol or signal = stygmol
• interaction + information = intermation
• ...

http://www.cna.org/isaac/Glossb.htm

I'm assuming that these are definitions that those who worked on the ISAAC project developed. It seems that their use of words, like "agent" for example, is much more specific to their application than the sense in which we use the terms. I found it interesting to note the differences between their defintions of some terms and our use/meaning of them in our discussions.

My only objection: an agent's memory is accessible only to it, isn't it? Pheromone deposited on a trail is accessible to (and modifiable by) everyone.

More bifurcations (or coalescences?):

• stigmol + intermation = stigmermation
• stigmermation + Durkmergy = stigmermurkmergy
• beer + lemonade = shandy

SOMEWHAT INTERESTING
In the "Inventions" section he describes a couple of nifty games for generating comic-strip plots, 5-Card Nancy, and The Story Machine. Neither is actually implemented on the computer (this is why these are only somewhat interesting), but the graphics are cool.

HUGELY INTERESTING
In the "Online Comics" section, there's a reader-generated strip. First look at "Original Recipe Carl," which is a brilliant examination of narrative structure and modularity. Then look at "Choose Your Own Carl," which is the Carl strip implemented as a narrative network (multiple paths exist simulataneously), with panels suggested by readers.

Am also attracted by the similarity between such a "within range mismatch detector" and some ideas about how the nervous system fundamentally works (create model, test model by generating output, comparing resulting input to expectation ... cf http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/mindbody/mindbody.html). Along related lines, it seems to me increasingly important to recognize that the unconscious/metonymic probably does NOT have temporal/narrative structure (a slight but important modification from http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/time/time.html). So this has to emerge somehow from the bottom-up/top-down interaction.

Final point, I think there is something quite profound about the "AI doesn't know how to leave out the boring bits" remarks. In biological evolution, of course, there IS a more or less random generation of things, and what order one sees DOES result from leaving out the "boring bits" (this is what one actually means by 'natural selection'). Or, to put it differently, death is an essential element of evolution (and emergence?). See http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/philsci/s03/31march.html for an effort to think through the significance of evolution/emergence in a different context. And we'll hopefully get back to the "death" issue in an upcoming session on information.

Turns out it wasn't exactly free will I was longing for but rather a particular version of it: creativity (aka "aethestically useful surprise"). Thank you, Tim--and all the rest of you for further adumbrations.

I'm laughing with delight @ the neologismic (=orgasmic?) energy recently displayed by Doug and Ted. To paraphrase my friend Andrea Friedman, w/ whom I've been sharing these conversations: "I love the new words, love even more that your new words are new words about making up new words, and I love even MORE that you are making up words as you need them. That's chutzpah."

But now my attention thas been captured less by "emergent narrative" (which still seems to me indistinguishable from narrative-as-I-have-known-it) than by the emergence of new images. Paul and I are piloting a new course in the Bio, English and CSem Programs, called The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories, so you can see why I was so engaged by Tim's presentation, this morning, on Creativity and Emergence (=Evolution, right??? RIGHT??)

The images we used to illustrate the syllabus were suggested by Andrea (see above re: chutzpah); each one is a "renga," or "linked image," generated when artists exchange and then modify computer graphics art works on telecommunication networks; they are VERY powerful individually and even more so in sequence. See http://www.renga.com for a display of a range of this work. It resembles in some fascinating ways the work Tim teased us w/ this morning: "Bush Soul," created by "Emergence."

Yum. Not sure yet about the death part of this, but...ready for more.

Well, I'm getting surer and surer about the death part of this (or @ least I've told my students I am).

Ted's talk this morning pushed the edges of my mathematical abilities/knowledge, but/so I found it a very rich one. I find myself wanting to understand better what was said early on, what "non-biologists can't seem to understand:" that "evolution does not optimize," is not meaningful, that evolving mechanisms "have no adaptive significance." And I very much want to understand better the implications of Ted's "suggestive" suggestion at the end of his talk about mutual information (about which I'd welcome further illumination/illustration/information...)

But what I found most generative was something Ted said in the middle: when "your cues are less good, you'll hedge your bets more"; that is, the MORE varied the signals, the LESS varied the resultant behavior. This is a very intriguing and troubling thought for me, as I think about applying it to human behavior. I'm reminded, for instance, of the conversation going on in the forum on The Place of the U.S. in the World Community, the notion that we respond to the world's increasing instability by (futilely) attempting to build constructions which will not change.

As Ann pointed out, there were comments this morning about frustration from those that study life (both biological and artificial) that others see evolution as an optimizer of some fitness function. Of course, when we use evolutionary models, that's exactly what we do: we optimize some function. We can also do it when we breed dogs or flowers: we can have in mind some measure of fitness (big and purple, or spotted) and select on those criteria. Purple flowers, spotted dogs.

But this is not what natural evolution does. Evolution has no "goal" or "fitness" of some task. Nonetheless, we have seen a "progression" from simple creatures to more complex ones. But it's not because complexity is nature's goal. It is a natural consequence of the process (limited resources).

Deepak and I are trying to develop artificial intelligence without having a fitness function to optimize. We see this paradigm in co-evolutionary models. In this way, the model's idea of fitness is grounded in the model. The problem is, though, we never seem to get the complexity to emerge out of these models like we see in real life. I suspect it is because of the limited ways in which the pieces can interact to produce new things.

-Doug

Bottom line is that evolution has had (even today) a bad wrap. As Doug says, it actually has "no goal", not even the "maximization of fitness", but there is a "progression" of SOMETHING. As Karen points out, "progression" does not mean improvement. But may, as both Karen and Doug say, have to do with "complexity" (see discussion of evolution of brain size). There's a clear explanation for this in what Gould called the "left-wall effect": with random change from any starting point, new things will appear in whatever space is currently empty (if one starts with maximal simplicity, hence at the left wall, the new things must appear to the right, ie at greater complexity). Note that it does NOT, contra Doug, depend on "limited resources", (this is the "bad wrap" which still hangs on, and which relates to altruism, as I'll get back to some time) but only on random change of a kind which can yield forms of increased stable complexity.

Upshot is that I suspect what's keeping our models from exhibiting the kind of progressive emergence they should given a consideration of emergence as evolution is a failure to understand what is required for "increased stable complexity" and to incorporate that into our models. I don't think its "limited resources" but it may be something having to do with the exploitation of entropy increases. I don't think I'll have this worked out in time for our next session but maybe some relevant background ... ?

I ask this because Gauss demonstrated, in what we now call the Principle of Competitive Exclusion, that two species cannot simultaneously occupy the same ecological niche. one species always outcompetes the other and drives it to extinction. It's only a slight exaggeration to claim that community ecology, one of the larger branches of ecology, sprouted and flourished nourished by the question that the Principle raises: why are there so many species in the world? Why are there a quarter million species of plant, when all plants are limited by only a handful of different nutrients? Why are there so many species of tropical tree, when the whole forest seems more or less uniform in moisture and soil quality? Why are there several species of marine invertebrates in the intertidal zone, when in the laboratory one species always eats the others to extinction? In general the answers have been versions of these two notions: (1) the world is composed of many, many niches, and (2) multispecies communities tend toward one species's exclusion of the others, but perturbations to the system always reset the clocks. That is, there are so many plants because plants make fine-scale distinctions among environments on the basis of subtle differences in the ratios of the available nutrients. Or, one plant would dominate the forest if not for the fact that hurricanes keep knocking back whatever species is ever ascendant.

Anyway, back to the point. Bacteria and we are around to enjoy each other's company, either because nature hasn't gotten around to killing bacteria or us off, or (more likely in my opinion) the environment is so complex that bacteria and we don't actually compete for the same set or resources. That is, if resources were limiting in a niche-relevant way, I think that either complexity wouldn't have evolved, or complexity would have evolved and we'd have lost the simple organisms.

Here's where I see a source of confusion: evolution isn't the same thing as natural selection. Any change in a population would be evolution and wouldn't necessarily be directional. Natural selection is directional and does take a population toward local fitness maxima.

I think evolution is best thought of as a phenomenon and not a process. The main process (or mechanism) is natural selection. (Whether natural selection is the main source of interestingness is open to debate these days. Emergence of order may also be important.) So I agree with Paul that evolution doesn't require scarcity of resources. But natural selection does require scarcity, and if we believe that selection is the main driver of evolution, then we should also believe that scarcity is required for most of the evolution we're interested in.

As you all remember from Intro Bio, the mitochondria in our cells are believed to be the descendants of free-living ancestors which were engulfed but (for some reason) not digested by the also free-living ancestors of our cells. Since that fateful First Supper, the two lineages (that of the host cell and that of the endosymbiont) have coevolved by a process which has probably been driven largely by natural selection.

Natural selection is of course all about the environment. What's interesting here is that the environment of the endosymbiont is the host cell. The host cell's environment includes more than the endosymbiont, but it's certainly the case that its environment is affected by the endosymbiont, though from the inside.

The endosymbiont lineage and the host-cell lineage both evolve. They move around in genotype spaces (where each location in the space corresponds to a genome sequence). How is one lineage's position determined by its position in the previous time step? By some selection rule, where the action of selection is itself partly determined by the position of the other lineage. So the endosymbiont lineage affects selection on the host-cell lineage (that is, on its environment!), and the host-cell lineage in turn affects the endosymbiont lineage's next position.

It's indirect, reciprocal stigmergy.

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that indirect, reciprocal stigmergy is common, not unique to endosymbiotic systems. Okay.

So... being the one who first "expressed some concern" about the pattern of death, and the one who has been worrying the matter incessently since--waffling between quoting Ovid's saying, there is "no death, but only change/And innovation," and giving sermons to my students about how death is essential to emergence--I'm impatient/eager/unsure I can wait til next week to find out whether it actually IS "necessary" or "just" a (bad? good?) side effect....

Anyhow, as a placeholder and sobering reminder of the LOCAL social relevance of these questions, see the e-mail we all just got advertising
*** BRYN MAWR COLLEGE ***
*** Better Dead Than Coed ***
***T-shirt now available in PINK!***

Am wondering, obviously, what role the insights of the Emergent Phenomena group can/could play/ARE playing in the "death" of the old/"evolution" of the new (could there BE a new?) Bryn Mawr....

When Anne first asked the question "is death necessary?" as I was doing the demonstration of the Genetic Algorithm and Genetic Programming, I said "No". The term "death" as an appropriate term for what happens to those "individuals" in the models: they are (usually) removed from the population and no longer contribute in any way to the "search".

I said that death wasn't necessary and maybe removing it form the model would be an interesting experiment. That is, keep all of the individuals around, letting the population size grow after each generation. But I think that that would be a very bad idea.

Death, in the model, does at least a few things:

1. Keeps the population size reasonable so that good combinations of two individuals are likely (probability is high they might "mate" using crossover)
2. Focuses resources (machine time and space) on the areas of the search space that look more promising compared to other areas
3. Makes room in the "probability space" so that novel things have a chance of catching on. Too much dead wood, and they get drowned (so to speak, because of course they wouldn't die) out

Death is as important in the models as limited resources and competition: without it, evolution of complexity couldn't happen. I believe that real evolution could have "solved" the "death problem" if that had been advantageous to do so. Keep in mind that the process we call evolution (and death) are an emergent properties of the system.

Natural death is the ultimate altruistic step of an organism taking itself out to make room for a fresh try. (Reminds me of a quip that Bill Wulf said when he was here last year: "Know how to change a department? One grave at a time.")

-Doug

Some comments on Paul's presentation.

• Outside the context of competition, fitness is meaningless. Fitness means reproductive success (including the survival ability necessary to allow the organism to reproduce), and unless we're talking about competition, there's no reason to talk about reproduction. If we're going to talk about evolution but not competition, we should be more precise in our language: evolution is or isn't directional in terms of size, complexity (defined how?), or aptness (apt as in ad-apt-ation).
  

• Isn't competition important in speciation? In allopatric speciation (so I'm excluding speciation that occurs as a result of weird chromosomal events, like polyploidy), a population is divided into two and the two subpopulations are prevented from interbreeding. While the subpopulations are separated, they become different from each other because of selection by different environmental pressures or simply because of random change. If the populations are reunited, they have differentiated enough that they are no longer able to interbreed -- or their offspring have reduced fitness.
  

  What does it mean for the hybrids to have reduced fitness? It just means that the hybrids have fewer viable offspring, on average, than do the nonhybrids. Because the hybrids and the nonhybrids compete, the hybrids are driven to extinction. What's more, since the production of hybrids is itself a behavior that should be subject to selection, the nonhybrids eventually evolve mechanisms that prevent their even trying to mate with members of the other subpopulation -- now species.
  

  What would happen in a world of unlimited resources -- where there would be no competition? I suggest that we'd see no species. We'd just see a huge blur of forms, and we'd all be mating (or trying to mate) with organisms which we'd otherwise call members of other species.
  

  And would evolution still work? As Doug suggests in his post about GAs, I think all that unorganized mating would probably just move us around already-explored regions of the phenotype or genotype space. Maybe. I think it's worth looking into in models.
  

  And anyway, is complexity or aptness meaningful or interesting if it's a property of individuals rather than of species? Because then it seems more haphazard: there's no guarantee that a particularly well adapted individual would have a similarly well adapted offspring. Complexity or adaptation or whatever would be the result of a random search, and we wouldn't be talknig about it in an emergence group (if such a group could exist).
  

• It's certainly the case that much directional evolution is driven by competition or its direct consequences. I'm mainly thinking here of plant-pollinator coevolution and other kinds of sexual selection. Sexual selection is when selection for sexual attractiveness or for other things that figure into frequency of mating drives evolution. Selection for pollinator-specialization has definitely been what's driven the diversification of many species of plant. Mate preferences and secondary sexual ornamentation is believed to be a big force in bird speciation. Peacock feathers, floral morphology, mating dances -- all traits that serve to isolate species, and all traits that probably evolved purely because of sexual selection.
  

  Why do I say that sexual selection is a direct consequence of competition? Because reproductive success is only important if there's competition. If there's no competition, then anything that reproduces at all will continue to be represented in the extant biota. What reproduces more might have greater representation, but if that matters then it's a kind of competition.
  

Ted

The great thing about species, though, is that it makes evolution all about discrete events. Branching events either happen or they don't -- and when they happen, they happen at precise moments in time. In fact, natural selection acts as a sort of noise filter immediately after branching events: behaviors that generate hybrids are selected against until species are so separated from each other (reproductively) that they don't even bother trying to interbreed. Noise filter -- exactly what an engineer might think to use to turn some analog signal into its digital representation.

Now, one thing we left off talking about earlier in the year is the relationship (is it a necessary one?) between emergence and discreteness. All our simulations are in discrete time. Our agents are discrete individuals, and their states are defined as sets not functions. If competition is what allows speciation to work, then competition is what makes evolution discrete and might therefore be responsible for emergence.

Is very interesting question, worth using to dissect terms and illustrate an argument I'm trying to develop. As Ted says, separated populations may come to be different "simply because of random change". To press the point further, separated populations may come, because of random change, to differ from one another even if the two environments in which they find themselves are identical. And in principle these randomly produced differences could be sufficiently great (or small but specific) so that individuals from each population are literally physically incapable of mating with individuals from the other. Bingo, "speciation" without anything even remotely resembling "competitition" and, for that matter, without any differences in "fitness". The story depends only on randomness and on the (perhaps revolutionary?) idea that different evolutions/emergences may occur under identical environmental conditions.

The story does, interestingly, depend on "death", ie it will yield reproductively isolated species only if the two founding populations of individuals die (otherwise they would provide opportunities for mating after the barrier was removed). And that's important, since it may help to illuminate the general significance of "death" (somewhat along the lies of one or more of Doug's suggestions). At the same time, there is no necessity in this story for death to relate to competitition or even to "differential reproductive success". It would be enough that things die after a fixed amount of time irrespective of their genes.

I trust Ted (and everyone else) recognizes that I am not asserting that this story is "representative" of actual biological evolution. There are lots of reasons to believe it is not. But the game here is to try and abstract some potentially generalizable ideas which in turn could help to account for similarities in global properties between biological evolution and other apparently quite different situations. If there are deep similarities then those similarities (randomness?), rather than idiosyncracies of particular phenomena (competition?), may help to better understand particular situations like biological evolution and be better guides to figuring out how to mimic emergence.

With that objective in mind, let me press the current story a little further in the case of biological evolution. Evolution has in fact created "aptness (apt as in ad-apt-ation)", and this must indeed, as Ted asserts, reflect "differential reproductive success" (assuming we discard the idea of a designer because we are impressed by evidence that differential reproductive success can yield "design", which I am and do). This is NOT, however, the same thing as asserting that is directional in terms of aptness. Indeed, my argument is that evolution is, in an important sense, demonstrably NOT directional in terms of aptness. Bacteria appeared first, but are no less "apt" than humans who appeared much later. Evolution by way of "differential reproductive success" does make "apt" things through local processes of differential gene contribtion to subsequent generations, but there is no strong evidence that things become more apt (or adapted or "fit") on larger scales or over longer time courses (while they DO both become larger and more complex (yes, interesting and productive definition problem) through a left wall effect). What this does is to pose an interesting question: is "differential reproductive success" at small scales and short times essential for particular aspects of the larger scale patterns, including, of most interest, appearance of new levels of organization? I'm not sure yet about the answer, but it is certainly possible that Ted's distinction between what is going on at different taxonomic levels could be pointing toward something quite significant.

At least for the sake of completeness (and perhaps for the general issues as well), let me make one other point in the biological context. "Differential reproductive success" should not be unthoughtfully equated with "competition". By the latter, many people tend to understand a process in which the success of one entity depends on the failure of another. To put it differently, what "competition" brings to many people's minds is the idea of "limited resources" and of a "zero sum game", so that one entity's increased "fitness" necessarily means decreased "fitness" for another. My assertion is that evolution in fact rarely proceeds under conditions of "limited resources" and is not generally best thought of as a "zero sum game". Instead, much of evolution involves cooperative adaptations which themselves increase the total possible payoff and the total available resources. This is important to understand as a counter-balance to "social darwinism" and related more subtle efforts to make use of the evolutionary idea in biology and other contexts. But my hunch is that it is equally important for the general emergence issue. Its my guess that the development of new levels of organization may in fact critically depend on systems NOT operating under limited resource, zero-sum game conditions. The appearance of multi-cellularity, for example, may have been the discovery of a way to increase the use of available "negentropy" rather than of something which could use a fixed amount of negentropy better than that which previously existed.

Yeah, we'll talk about "negentropy" tomorrow, along with information and death, and some of Doug's ideas (which, along with death, are ways of "avoiding unorganized mating" and hence maximizing exploration, which in turn is what the whole thing is about?, avoiding ). Very much enjoyed the shared journey, and looking forward to seeing where we get next. Here's to the new Bryn Mawr and beyond.

I think the problem is with the words "fitness" and "competition". Here's a story: two brands, er I mean, species of butterflys live in the same neighborhood. Let's say that, because of something having to do with soot and birch trees, the white butterflys get eaten. All of them. It wasn't really any "competition" of some measurable "fitness" quality (faster, stronger, smarter, etc) that led the black butterflys surviving. Rather it was something in the "web of causality" that led to one working better in the total system.

Out on a limb aside: from a scientific point of view, I don't think that we can ever say what "caused" the white butterflys to become extinct. It is too complicated and would involve such an interconnected chain of events that it becomes, in principle, impossible to identify (in a rigorous manner) the exact causation (see above on my ramblings on cause and effect).

However, the above situation is what I take to be meant when I hear the words "fitness" and "competition". The measurable fitness quality is defined exactly as the organisms fitness into the whole. "Survivor of the fittest" is a tautology, and that is exactly what gives it its meaning.

Is there a better word than "competition" that describes this scenario? I can't think of one, but it can bring to mind inappropriate analogies too. Where's George Lakoff when you need him...

-Doug

Yes, we DIDN'T get to "negentropy" nor even really to information. Sorry, but ... there's something interesting about that, in re pedagogy AND in re "emergence". With regard to the first, the issue of process versus content in the classroom is germane. The older I get, the more convinced I become that time spent seriously engaged in process is invariably more productive than time alloted in terms of content. For all concerned. To have "heard" about something is less meaningful than to have genuinely worked through the subtleties of important general concepts (which inevitably takes time). I learn better that way, whatever my classroom role, and don't think I'm at all unique (at least not in that particular respect). Moreover, getting through something one knows about is, as an objective, fundamentally inconsistent with the cardinal principle of "emergent systems": to create the circumstances within which the meaningfully novel can appear. Anne Dalke, Liz McCormack, and I have a manuscript on this, based in part on experiences with the emergent systems group, which some of you have seen and which we'd be delighted to make available to anyone else interested.

Having said all that, I still feel a need to reassure everyone that there WAS an imagined arc behind the conversation, and that it DID not only get through negentropy and information and death but even had at the end a pot of .... something. No sweat. Al and others will undoubtedly pick up some of the as yet unaddressed topics in future sessions, and, for the impatient, there are summaries and links in my notes. As for the pot ... That too is in the notes, but I'll summarize here.

My current hunch, based in part on recent reading of the beginning of Dennett's new Freedom Evolving (warning: the book is nominally about "free will" not about "emergence", and is probably misdirecting on that topic), is that we may actually already have the wherewithal in our hands to create true emergent systems which will generate multiple levels of organization, and this DOES depend, for very interesting subtle and not so subtle reasons, on killing Paul (metaphorically, and not exclusively but repeatedly). What has so far prevented us from doing so (creating emergent systems, not killing Paul) is not that we aren't "smart" enough (the universe was doing it long before "smart" organisms appear on the scene) but that we are in some ways TOO smart.

Thinking is not at all a bad thing. Some of my best friends do it, and I've even been know to engage in it myself on occasion. On the other hand, there are abundant reasons to recognize that thinking, at least in the formal sense, has serious and fundamental limitations (Hume, Kant, Godel, Turing, Popper, Penrose ... among others). In addition, it has some serious occupational hazards, among which one might mention tendencies towards conviction, arrogance, and impatience. Some times problems are better made sense of/solved by thinking less, by letting things flow a bit so that what one could NOT have thought of ... emerges. So maybe we're being too smart to let what could happen in our models happen? Maybe we'd see it given what we already know if we allowed/encouraged ourselves to engage in greater

• Humility, skepticism, patience, ambition
  
• Tolerance for uncertainty, tribes, conflict
  
• Willingness to onself engage in transcendence (change and/or death)
  

Sandy Schram passed on to me the syllabus for the doctoral seminar on Social Theory he'll be teaching this fall. On it I discovered, and read, Max Weber's 1918 speech, "Science As Vocation," which draws on the broodings of Leo Tolstoi to make a very interesting observation about the meaningfulness of death:

"for a civilized person death has no meaning...because...there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress....Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died 'old and satiated with life'...because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve....Whereas civilized man...may become 'tired of life' but not 'satiated with life'....what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence....civilized life...by its very 'progressiveness' ...gives death the imprint of meaninglessness."

In other words, death, as we've been using it (to mean erasure that creates space for the emergence of new things) is meaningless (at least to us as individuals). We need another word.

Neologists, to work.

This message is really addressed to Tim, but I thought others might enjoy listening in. I was blown away by this morning's discussion; it picked up on lots of things I've been thinking/reading/writing about for the past few years, in a few other working groups, about the nature and function of language, in particular regarding the different sorts of languages valued by scientists and humanists. See The Two Cultures for the initial articulation and the Language Group for a continued discussion of the idea that scientists aim for "no slippage," no "ambiguity," in their professional communications, while humanists not only revel in the play that ambiguity invites, but actually see the function of language as inviting and encouraging that sort of play, the sort of communication that can only happen when the receiver "doesn't quite get" what the sender sent.

What Tim's comments this morning added to these ideas, for me, was incorporating the whole matter of negentropy into what he and I fondly think of as "Derrida's Demon." Tim's very cute/acute questions:

• when there is a slippage of information, where does it go?
• how are multiple interpretations of a text (translated into my lingo: your guys' "multiple macrostates for one microstate" ) possible thermodynamically?
• IS the act of interpreting a "thermodynamic cheat"?
• is/what is the expenditure in consciousness?

Another note (and perhaps an oblique illustration of the above?): before the conversation took this turn, Tim was talking about the evolution of e-lingo, various shorthands used by some to speed up the typing process, and scorned by others (presumably the fast typists!) as impure and/or unnecessary. Tim suggested that these variations in accepted style are in some way a return to the era before printing, when there were multiple ways (and no standard way) of writing words. I was reminded of an account I just read in Stephen Jay Gould's The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities:

In the "early stage in the history of printing, publishers had not yet fully recognized the advantage and tranforming power of moveable type...[an early printed book] still uses cryptic and extensive abbreviations for many words, converting the entire text into a form of shorthand. These conventional abbreviations had greatly boosted the speed of production for texts, when each copy had to be written out by hand, but saved little time, and perhaps a little more space--but only at the cost of great ambiguity and difficulty in reading--when the type for each word only needed to be set once. Thus these abbreviations slowly faded from use, leading to our modern conventions of writing texts in full..." (127n.)

Such varieties of notation of course invite/insist on...
careful--and/but always uncertain--interpretation.

Better go get something to eat. Need to add energy in the system.
A.

Hm...I seem to be the only one w/ "energy" (=information) this morning. But, still chewing over yesterday's conversation, wanted to say a bit more...

Also quite resonant for me was Deepak's charge that we'd arrived, @ the very end of our session, at a contradiction: claiming BOTH that the generation of novelty "is the point" of emergent systems AND that the move (of the universe, of evolution, of exploration, of emergence) is always from improbable to more probable states....how can both those claims be true?

Since I find answers to abstract questions through concrete examples, I offer one here to the group. It's a gift to us from my friend Andrea Friedman (McBride 01), and evokes BOTH our delighted constructions of neologisms AND a process Doug described to us on 2/26/03:

"This guess-and-step methodology is actually called hill climbing due to the following metaphor. Start at a random place on a hill. Pick a direction to step. If the place you would step to is higher than where you are, make the step, otherwise stay where you are. This little algorithm will eventually take you to the top of the hill. However, it might might not take you to the highest place around because you could get trapped on a little plateau (i.e., you would have to step to a lower place before stepping to even higher ground)."

And here's Doug's hill-climbing, and ALL our neologizing, in poetic form:

The Hunt

Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country
that lie beyond speech
Noah Webster and his assistants are moving
across the landscape tracking down a new word.

It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,
one that will be seldom used by anyone,
like a synonym for 'isthmus',
but they are pursuing the creature zealously

as if it were the verb 'to be',
swinging their sticks and calling out to one another
as they wade through a field of waist-high barley.

- Billy Collins

Kim Cassidy, Doug and I are co-directing a Summer Institute for Philadelphia Teachers: "Exploration and Emergence." When we met yesterday afternoon to continue our planning, Doug was puzzling about how "emergence" could work as a guiding principle for pedagogy. For me, that has been the clearest and most exciting application of the ideas we've been discussing, and "emergence" has become my newest shorthand for most of the progressive pedagogical strategies I employ: local hands-on interactions that produce unanticipated outcomes by validating multiple ways of knowing and thinking, and the relationships and interdependencies among the people doing the thinking.

I gave, as evidence of this process, what happened in our Emergence Group meeting yesterday morning : Paul came in w/ a series of (elaborately backed-up) propositions about the need for information loss and death, in order for new levels of complexity to emerge. By the end of a long hour's interaction among us all, w/ several of us providing the punch lines along the way, we arrived together @ several very different claims: that information, like energy, is not actually lost, but instead transformed, as it "moves up to another level," forming a category, an abstraction. This is not death, but resurrection after all!

While I'm reveling in this illumination, I'll take the opportunity to say that I'd like us to talk more about Rob's suggestion, just @ the end of our discussion, that Paul's "input-output" boxes are too static in their representation of how the nervous system works: it's an active "information-grabbing" device, and what it chooses to attend to is very important. I'd like to think about this matter of active attention.

A few afterthoughts. Rob is of course right in his assertion that I neglected two central aspects of what makes the brain an emergent system (in some ways even more paradigmatic than biological evolution, or at least more rapid). Both are in my notes (an autonomous, to some degree "random", generation of signals, and the output centered conception of the box which, with it, gives the nervous system a fundamentally exploratory character; the nervous system as Rob's "information grabber (see my earlier struggle to reach this conclusion). Both make the system in its function even more "irreversible", and hence history-dependent. In my brain/mind, we'd been over this stuff in connection with evolution and so, in presentation, I guess I let myself get preoccupied with the "new" point (the irreversibility at multiple levels which is both information "slippage"/loss and creation). But, its misleading to identify emergence in the brain ONLY with the latter. The ability of the nervous system to generate outputs independent of input, and to use the "reafferent loop" to test "expectations" are equally important in thinking of the brain as a paradigmatic emergent system. Similarly, Rob is right that the time parameter needs to be included (though I have some doubts, for other reasons, about the efficacy/significance of "contingency"; see Time talk and William James). I had the time embedded in the "irreversible" concept but should have made it more explicit.

Also re Rob: my GUESS is that "reflective consciousness" is in fact necessary for "consciousness", but that's a much longer conversation and the notion that there is information loss/gain in going from the unconscious to consciousness holds however it comes out. As for the idea that "attention"/"expectation" is an important emergent, not present in neurons, I need to think more about that one. Not EVERYTHING has to be found at the lowest level, as Mark noted, but as Karl Lashley wrote in 1951 "I am coming more and more to the conviction that the rudiments of every behavioral mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale and also represented even in primitive activities of the nervous system". There is an interesting way in which the neuron might (like the nervous system itself) be seen as a device which generates output in a continuing effort to stablize its own state (the "expectation") in the face of input.

Back to the main theme (as it "emerged" in the talk): the idea that each level of organization "categorizes" the previous and so both gains/loses information (thanks again to Geoff and his leaky integrator question for triggering my thoughts along these lines). My intuition is that this is in fact an important piece of the "level of organization problem" (with the parallel in biological evolution/ecology being the appearance of new "niches" which in turn support new adaptive radiation? in developmental biology events like the early establishment of bilateral symmetry which in turn permit ... ? in social/cultural evolution new ideas/artifacts such as "christianity", "democracy", "communism"?).

If all this is anywhere near the right track, Doug (and Deepak) posed two important issues: is threshholding (and associated informatio