Have you been feeling frustrated by your relative impotence in our hierarchical society? The President bombs the wrong country in response to 9/11 or your boss lays you off at 62 to save the company pension costs -- these are examples of top-down command and control. Don't despair. There is hope in the strangest of places.
EMERGENCE examines the worlds that exhibit self-organizing
behavior, from the swarm intelligence of ant colonies (where the
individual ant is not the organism, but the colony as
super-organism is) to the systems engineering of increasingly
complex and powerful software. Self-organizing systems are
affronts to the carefully-nurtured myths of the necessity of
hierarchical
control, and they offer visions of how advanced homo sapiens might
re-organize the exploding populace to take better advantage of its
conscious, and unconscious, talents and sensitivities.
We all think we know how an ant colony works. The supreme
queen breeds and breeds, and her fecundity is the motive force for
all the worker ants to keep her fed and safely hidden. But
entomologists have found other factors at work. They asked
the question: How are the specialized work demands of the colony
communicated to all the dispersed worker ants? The old
answer was that it was their DNA that hard-wired them to build
tunnels, seek food, and separate their garbage and their dead fro
their stockpiles of foodstuffs. Not so. It turns out
that proximity to other workers sets their task lists as well. The
foragers influence those near them to forage, as do the builders,
the garbage collectors, and the undertakers. The queen,
putative head of the colony, is actually a passive receptacle, a
breeding machine, not an ant monarch or prime mover. This is
an example of
self-organizing complexity in nature.
Analogous to this, says Johnson, is the growth or urban
metropolises. Manchester, England transformed itself from a
sleepy agrarian town to the world's first bustling industrial city
before hierarchical control had been imposed, before it had even
been incorporated as a legal city. The starting point for
this change was the industrial revolution, and it was the
responses of individual workers and their families, acting not in
concert, but from the same stimulus, that forged the notions of
specialized
neighborhoods and segregation by class that now define the urban
city.
Perhaps more obviously, the acceleration of computational power has led to "smart" programs, ones that learn from experience. An example of this is Sim City and its successors, games in which a seemingly pre-set program responds differently to the sophistication levels of each of its players. Another example is Amazon.com's customer ratings system, which will tell you "If you liked EMERGENCE, you might like FLESH AND MACHINES as well." At first, this was based on purchasing patterns, but it has evolved to now allow users to "rate' the other user-reviewers.
The human brain, too, can be viewed as a self-organizing entity. It is a complex adaptive system capable of displaying emergent behavior. It is the genotype (the DNA) for the phenotype (the human race). It has invented consciousness, a property not possessed, so far as we can determine, by ants or antelopes. And that has led to emergent meta-consciousness (first language, then the codification of language through writing and the invention of the book, then the encyclopedia, then the telephone, the typewriter, the computer and the Internet.) The emergence of these disruptive technologies has challenged our ancient traditions and cherished shibboleths. Local information can now act as the basis for global wisdom.
How does all this help us correctly categorize Bush as a dinosaur (munching on Carboniferous stored wealth) and propose a better symbolic leader, or change the inhumane policy of the corporation to which we devoted the best years of our lives?
Self-organizing entities, emergent from the bottom up, despite
active hostility from the powers-that-were, created a climate that
ended the Vietnam War and that dealt a severe blow to racial
segregation. The democratization of mass communications
allowed multiple opinions and points of view to emerge and
flower. Could the democratic movement in China have
occurred without the fax machine? Could the opponents of
globalization have organized sustained leaderless protests without
the creation of non-geography dependent virtual communities of
interest via the Internet?
Of course, not all bottoms up self-organizing is good. The
same tools available to well-meaning individuals are also
available to terrorists or nihilists, as we learned so
dramatically just a year ago. Yet a principle of emergent
self-organization offers some hope here too. It is not
inconceivable that virtual communities of peace-seeking Arabs and
peace-seeking Americans, peace-seeking Palestinians and
peace-seeking Jews, will spontaneously arise, resist the
old-fashioned thinking of top-down
leaders, and fashion their own visions for society. If these
visions confer survival value to our species, evolution will favor
them, just as it did the mammals (with a little asteroidal help)
over the dinosaurs.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzerseltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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