COMPLEXITY REFERENCES
BOOK REVIEW

Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software, by Steven Johnson, 2001. New York: Simon and Schuster, 288pp. ISBN 06848675

In the introduction of his text, Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software, Steven Johnson, a recognized author in electronic and popular culture media, provocatively proposes that experiments with slime mold may represent one of the next major scientific breakthroughs in our understandings of self-organization, emergence, and intelligence. Johnson skillfully narrates how these scientific experiments demonstrate a paradoxical relationship of singular and group coordinated behaviours, which constitute an intelligent and complex system. A surprising feat, considering slime mold represents one of the simplest forms of organisms. This discovery holds radical implications for how scientists and educators understand interaction, learning, and intelligence – No longer can they be considered the sole domain of complex organisms or human beings. Instead, Johnson posits that they should also be recognized as an integral part of social systems. These social systems, such as cities, economies, and classrooms, create their own forms of collective intelligence that exist as more than the mere sum of their parts.

Johnson’s thesis dramatically challenges analytic perspectives that have traditionally positioned the study of science and the pursuit of knowledge as closed systems. Moreover, intelligence or learning in simple celled organisms, and even more provocatively in social systems, should be understood as more than a series of complicated command systems or “pacemakers” (p. 14). Johnson utilizes this understanding of emergence, as informed by the rapidly emerging field of complexity science, to contextualize his bold theories.

Johnson identifies the phenomena of emergence as one of the defining features of complex bottom-up systems. Johnson argues that these bottom-up systems operate with relatively simple rules that move to increasingly higher levels of sophistication. Interestingly, Johnson proposes that emergent systems share the important characteristic of growing smarter as time progresses. In essence, these complex systems learn to respond and adapt to their changing conditions and environments.

Like a clever techno savvy archeologist, Johnson spends the majority of his text developing this argument by exploring three important conceptual phases. First, he skillfully outlines how ant colonies represent one of the most significant, enduring, and complex forms of self-organizing and adaptive collectives that exist on the planet. Next, he explores contemporary understandings of how emergence is currently conceptualized and prompted in social and scientific discourses. To conclude, Johnson boldly speculates towards the possible future of a humanity characterized by a “global mind” that is self-aware and governed by billions of bottom-up interactions, rather than rigid top-down or command forces.

Drawing on a myriad of popular culture references, and in a very playful, yet serious style that characterizes his captivating writing, Johnson creates vivid examples of emergent and self-organizing systems by comparing a colony of densely packed ants and the New York subway system (p. 30). Both he argues are complex systems, which develop a collective intelligence or in the case of New York City – a personality, that is built upon millions and millions of individual localized interactions. Or in other words, out of the seeming chaotic behavior of random interactions comes an elegant complex pattern of behaviour that defies quantitative or linear explanation. Johnson also extends his analogies to a brilliant analysis of cities as emergent phenomena that draws heavily on Jane Jacob’s foundational work, Death and Life of Great American Cities.

According to Johnson, there are five necessary preconditions for emergent forms of behaviour to occur: (1) More is different – diversity, (2) Ignorance is useful – rich interactivity, (3) Encourage random encounters – redundancy, (4) Look for patterns in the signs – feedback, and (5) Pay attention to your neighbors – non-linear distributed intelligence (pp. 78-79, 220). It is this emergence of the whole from the seemingly random interactions of its parts that is the defining characteristic of complex systems. Johnson uses these preconditions for emergence to provocatively explore how complex systems, like cities, computer software, and our brains learn. For example, Johnson muses: Can the World Wide Web be considered a conscious system that is capable of learning and becoming self-aware?

To understand emergence in action Johnson suggests that all we need do is to open our front doors and step out into the bustling city streets and “make our own connections” (p. 277). It is this non-linear interactivity, in all of its vast forms, that leads to the rise of intelligent systems. For Johnson this phenomenon of emergence is characterized by bottom-up systems that can never be prescribed, controlled, or predicted in advance. Johnson concludes his text by provocatively asking the haunting question: Is society ready to relinquish its obsession with order and control to find out where it might finally lead us?

Despite his masterful narrative, Johnson’s text is not without absences. Most notably, Johnson fails to consider how reciprocal causation might influence the dynamic relationship between, what he describes rather simplistically as, bottom-up and top-down forces. The principles of reciprocal causation recognize that bottom-up and top-down forces are always in a dynamic interplay within complex systems. This understanding of reciprocal causation has begun to play a central role in recent analyses into studies of consciousness and the brain as biologically, socially, and culturally enmeshed systems (See Thompson & Varela, 2001). From this perspective, emergence involves both upward determination and downward causation. Johnson hints at these important reciprocal connections when he speaks of “ordered randomness,” but he fails to fully develop his argument to reflect the importance of emergent and complex systems that operate on a multitude of historically embedded and shifting levels. The key element to remember is that Johnson’s descriptions of bottom-up and top-down forces are not independent of each other. Moreover, they should be more accurately viewed as two-way reciprocal relationships.

Johnson also fails to engage critically perspectives from social theory that might account for self-organizing phenomena through discourses of politics and power. Perhaps, on a sociocultural level, we might ask if self-organization can be explained as more of an active source of resistance rather than emergence? In addition, Johnson needs to more fully explore the potential ethical implications when speculating towards the future role for artificial intelligence and the prompting of other emergent forms of intelligence in our society. These areas merit further exploration and would serve to strengthen Johnson’s multiperspectival approach.

Regardless of these absences, Emergence is not designed as a technical treaties on complexity science or social theory, but rather its strength lies in the authors accessible and engaging writing style, which Johnson himself describes as “popular science with a literary gloss” (SBJ, 2004). Emergence provides for an excellent and muti-disciplinary introduction to a wide variety of complex scientific and social phenomena. This highly recommended text provides for a brilliant introduction to readers who are interested in learning more about the fundamental principles of complexity science and emergence.

Kristopher Wells
University of Alberta


References

Jacobs, J. 1961. Death and life of great American cities. New York: Vintage.

stevenberlinjohnson.com. (SBJ). 2004. Retrieved February 2, 2004, from HYPERLINK "http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com" http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com.

Thompson, E., & Varela, F. J. 2001. Radical embodiment: Neural dynamics and consciousness. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 5 (10): 418-425.