Emergence: What is it?
First, thanks to all for the participation on the intuition question. I’m sure we’ll come back to that. How something comes into being is one of those mysteries of life. Why it comes into being is equally as mysterious.
Thrownness
Martin Heidegger coined the term “thrownness.” He thought humans are completely shaped by the culture they are thrown into. While we are born with capacities, it’s through our interaction with environment that possibilities are realized-or not. There is evidence to support our innate ability to use language will atrophy if not nurtured by onset of pubescence.
But whether or not we can understand how ideas burst into being, or the how the illusive nature of any electro-chemical state in the brain can be reproduced, we can perhaps get better at looking and listening for emergence. In other words, it seems reasonable to understand the likely environment, or way of perceiving changes in personal mood, energy, focus, curiosity, action, and awareness of an external environment that will lead to a creative act.
Language is the medium of thought
When we speak we don’t think first in some kind of meta-language that gets translated into language. Language is the medium of thought. I’ll modify that to be, language is the medium of conscious thought. There are those processes incubating of which we are not yet aware. As we discussed earlier, this is the wellspring of intuition.
It’s curious how, when writing, we see our words on the page or screen often with surprise. It’s as if someone else wrote those words. Isn’t this idea embodied in the Muse? She is the one who speaks and the writer is merely the channel, or so it seems. Many fiction writers report their characters having a life of their own. What happens next is suggested by what has gone before. The writer is listening to his or her Muse.
Serious imaginings
Children play “let’s pretend.” Actors take on roles as if they were someone else. Economists and planners consider “what if.” All of these things require imagination and the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist.
We don’t necessarily have to shine the laboratory light on the mystery of how emergence works. But we can learn to be better prepared to listen to what is emerging by working with and developing our imaginative faculties. If ever, “Use it or lose it,” were true, it’s true when it comes to imagination.
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And just for good measure, here is Wikipedia’s definition of emergence.
I agree Christopher emergence is this phenomenon of what’s next somehow coming out of what’s now yet it’s awfully hard to imagine and even harder to predict. It’s dead exciting though, huh?
Funny to see you musing over the word “mystery” cos that’s the exact same word I’ve been musing over this very weekend while walking around the Isle of Skye.
Here’s what I was thinking. Human beings find it pretty hard to handle the unknown and especially uncertainty. One way of tackling that is science - the attempt to understand how things work. Another way, though, is mystery. Mystery is appealing. It’s attractive. We love mystery stories, movies, books. We construct myths to promulgate mysteries. Why? I think it’s because mystery is another excellent way to handle what isn’t known (actually to handle what is unknowable and probably beyond our capacity to ever understand using reason and science)
What do you think?
thinking…
Yes. If we can’t know something we make up explanations. I hate this when I ask for directions. And contrary to popular opinion, there are real manly men who do ask for directions. I’d prefer the Gallic shrug and the inflated cheeks. At least I would know I don’t know.
But “I don’t know” seems unacceptable. Although, I did hear of a woman here who claimed she had attended MSU and when questioned for details about her Alma Mata said that those initials stood for Make Something Up. I love this sort of creativity, verve, and zeal.
I continue to be struck by how pragmatic, dynamic, and energetic American culture is. I realize how foolish it is to say American Culture because any attempt at defining it can always be negated by exceptions.
But on the whole, the populace’s first impulse isn’t to be reflective. It believes in hard work, achievement, competition, and getting the job done. Why else would there be so many self-help tips everywhere you look on the internet? It wants to be told what to do. These functional attributes are all external.
But not all things of value are useful. The useful and the good are conflated. This task orientation has had huge benefits to a society whose faith is in technology, but along with it come almost a fanaticism for explanation and certainty. It’s the nineteenth century mentality of ‘conquering’ nature. I don’t want to sound like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his rosy view of the natural world. I am not a creature of The Enlightenment, and I don’t believe in the Noble Savage.
Not everything needs to be taken apart and explained. When you try to define things you often end up going around in circles.
Few people would literally believe Greek myths, but they nevertheless are engaging, stimulating, and a reflection on the interior world of the imagination.
At last, I’m getting at my discomfort with the literal. It denies interiority. For me my personal world is rich in interiority and imagination. But this isn’t something you can put in a test tube and hold up to the light for examination.
Christopher,
You have an interesting bundle of ideas here—emergence or “thrownness” as Heidegger perceives it, the language of thought, and “serious” imaginings. Yes, we are very much thrown into an environment and learn its culture, language, rites of passage, and rituals of behavior. We adopt and adapt as we see fit for the sake of survival. We all learn our mother tongues and we think in the tongues we learn. But what about animals? Do animals think? Does their non-verbal behavior translate into an intricate pattern of thought regardless of the fact that they don’t practice linguistics the way humans do? I used to have a wonderful Abbysinnian cat who would often bask in the sun in the backyard in a house I used to live in and I would wonder if she thought at all and what her thoughts were. Also, I remember the often-seen ubiquitous cow standing uncaring in a middle of a crowded street in India, a street populated by pedestrians, vendors, rickshaws, cars, and scooters and wondered if that cow was thinking and if so, of what? I’ve somehow come to the conclusion that it is possible that animals think and they probably have developed an elaborate language based on the non-verbal cues they receive from their environment. It’s also possible that their thoughts may be different and that they may have a wholly different way of perceiving and responding to the universe around them. I think as long as the mind, any mind can make connections linking two events, repetitive or even random events in a cause and effect sequence– thought is possible. Again the process of language is nothing other than the “naming” of forms. Without naming we cannot have language. Animals may have learned to decode experience in different ways with a different type of naming or without the naming process altogether.
What then is imagination? It seems to me that it is just allowing one’s mind free rein to make all sorts of fantastical connections, which it is only too ready to make especially when we give ourselves the opportunity to daydream. Ideas come in all forms; our Muse is ever present to assist us in making wild and farfetched connections, the wilder and the more far-fetched, the more “creative” our ideas appear to be. In the daily laboratory of life we are constantly experimenting with new ideas, new forms, and reshaping them to give rise to fresh forms. Hypotheses are formed, tested, nourished, or squelched in the process of our minds collecting knowledge of the world around us. Experience and knowledge in turn give rise to fresh imaginings, new surmises, and new connections. Would you agree?
Hi Christopher, and thanks for another engaging post.
I know exactly what you mean when you talk of ideas and words “emerging” in this way, but I wonder how it is related to the scientific or philosophical sense Wikipedia mentions. What, in particular, are the simple agents from whose interactions something new emerges? I’m also interested, and had been planning to blog about how ideas emerge in mathematics, or rather, how new results emerge from a set of axioms and rules of logic. It seems like you can start with a bunch of known things (axioms or already-proved results) and a bunch of known rules of logic (telling you in which ways axioms and results can be manipulated) but end up with a totally new theorem. An almost infinite number of things are contained within a small number of things and rules for working with them. Hmm.
On Bob’s mystery front, I agree that mystery can be a wonderful and inspiring thing. It’s so annoying to hear naysayers talk of mystery and obfuscation as if they were the same thing. A sense of mystery should be a driving force for discovery: we can revel in mystery without claiming that perpetual ignorance is good. Also, there will always be the unkown, a mystery, so we shouldn’t rush to explanations.
The role of language in mystery and explanation is an important one, I think. My Japanese colleagues and wife have often told me that they think Japanese scientists should work in English because Japanese is much more about hinting at ideas and evoking feelings and lacks the rigour and linearity required for science. This was also discussed in Neil Postman’s Technopoly, which goes into in some depth the aspects of American culture you mention, Christopher.
Dang! There I go again asking questions that are too complex. This blog is a learning environment for me and I’m grateful for the responses.
Rathi, You bring up the question of animal minds which certainly could be a subject for one of our face-to-face discussion topics. Is it possible we feel compelled to regard thought as a purposeful activity? Once you start to talk about purpose you have to think about to what end. Then you can ask yourself what is the purpose of that end and so on.
Thinking may be a landscape, a geography, rather than a purposeful action. Surely we perceive differently depending on which brain patterns are activated. All animal brains have commonalities, but the world of a squirrel is different from that of a middle manager. Each has different priorities.
If you are in the market to buy a new car, you tend to look at models you are interested in. That becomes your focus. If you are looking for a good tree in which to build your nest, or where to hide nuts, you’re not going to be interested in the gas mileage of new cars.
Thinking, as I see it, has to be more than rationalizing. When we command ourselves to think, who is doing the commanding? To rationalize is an act of will, but I don’t see how we can say where will comes from.
So I see emergence, coming into being, as something that can be acknowledged but not taken apart and manipulated. Having mysteries that remain mysteries just stimulates my own open-jawed response to living in an unexplainable world. I agree with Phil, rather than try to talk about the ineffable, or to try to explain the unexplainable, why not feel grateful and stand in awe of this fleeting thing called life. In other words, let’s celebrate mystery or at least make room for it.
Emergence, like all experience is fleeting. Everything in life is now just a memory, a pattern in the brain. It has no substance. The residue of past actions contributes to the present, but we can no more go back and re-experience anything than teach a fish the niceties of tax law.
I’ve been reading about the Japanese monk, Ikkyu (1394-1481). I like this short piece about the ephermerality of thought and trying to capture it in writing.
Phil, when you talk about simple agents, I have a picture in my mind of two things colliding to form something unique, like a chemical reaction. I believe this does happen. We can create something new this way as in the girrafacycle idea (something I have been giving more thought to and I’ve even drawn it). But this way of knowing one plus one equals two, is different from this incubation idea of Guy Claxton’s undermined. You might like to play with this method of relaxing with an idea, instead of trying to come up with the new, try to just keep looking at the idea. Cézanne was one to stare at an object for a long time in order to see it differently, which leads me to think about a ‘simple’ next post.
I liked your piece about “emergence”. I’ve been curious about how language and how its structure help determine thought. In any given day I might have as many as 15 different language groups in my class. As a very simplistic analogy — what about the languages that put the adjective second? We think about a “BEAUTIFUL house”; while others think “HOUSE beautiful.” Could a point be made about a consumer society being more hung up on the sell-job of “beautiful than in the “house”.
The idea of pre-language thought is an interesting one. How complex were the thoughts of the early hominids? Does the complexity of the language determine the complexity of the thoughts?
In addition to cats and cows, what about the emergence of thoughts from the animals with larger amounts of the reptilian portions of brains?
The more I take part in complex discussions about this and that, the more I tend towards thinking that life/existence is so inconceivably complicated that we can never truly *know* anything… nor even have a truly meaningful (in the logical/rational sense) opinion! I am therefore tending, more and more, towards a more intuitive/imaginative/creative approach of diving into an aspect of reality, swimming around a bit, going with the flow, drifting with the current of my semi-conscious musings, and emerging with whatever thoughts happen to attach themselves to my brain. It’s amazing what you can discover (about what you think, etc) when you don’t know where you are going or what you are looking for! The “Blind Watchmaker” of evolution has created the entire beauteous bounty of nature… Would it not behove us to approach our seeking after knowledge in a similar fashion???
Christopher,
Dan, Phil, and Matt have thrown in some interesting ideas into the “throwness” of this dialogue on emergence. As humans we seem to adopt the superior position of “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am.) Animals may or may not think, but they “are” anyway. Yet as has been pointed out in this discussion, there is much to be said for leaning back on the more creative, intuitive, and irrational sides of our psyches. There is much to be said for just confronting the awesome mystery of the universe around us and not necessarily trying to rationalize or unravel the mystery, but to swallow its presence whole into our consciousness and thereby understand it on a more intuitive or creative level. When I watch a movie, read a poem or a story, or listen to music, I will often try to respond to it holistically, from the gut or the heart or whichever other seat of experiential knowledge resides within us. I will not immediately try to dissect it apart in my mind. I will allow my mind to take over later, but only after I have had a visceral and fulsome response to the experience. And even when the mind takes over, I will generally let it run amuck and make the wildest assumptions. The greatest fun is to let the mind take any dizzying path it wants to and let rationality have its way only in the very end.
Wow, what an inspiring line of debate, and so reasonably and thoughtfully done!
I think I would like to clarify my comments on mystery. I maintain that it is an essential aspect of any wordlview, without which life would be dull and routine. I agree, Christopher, that “we should feel grateful, and stand in awe” - but I also think it’s worth digging under the surface to work out what is going on. We may never find out, but we should try. Indeed, that is one aspect of myth that wasn’t quite picked up: a coherent mythology explains not only the natural world but the laws of the society we are thrown into and the reason for our confusion and suffering in life. Science tries to do this too, of course, and so it certainly functions as mythology, even if it is more universal, in some sense, than other mythologies.
Christopher, emergence is also more than about one plus one equals two. That one plus one equals two is contained in the nature of the integer one and the laws of arthimetic. But emergent phenomena are things not contained within the properties of the enttities concerned, but which arise from their mutual interactions. Water molecules are not wet; water is. The concept of wetness doesn’t make sense for a water molecule, only for a large enough collection of them. Likewise, humans are not fluid. But a moving crowd of humans most certainly is, to the extent that recent work has shown that the crowds at the annual Hajj at Mecca obey all sorts of known laws of fluid dynamics and even turbulence.
Phil,
You write: “Science tries to do this too, of course, and so it certainly functions as mythology, even if it is more universal, in some sense, than other mythologies.” I like your notion of science as myth. I’ve often thought of science as an art form—the scientist makes a conjecture—a hypothesis, which may be a fantasy of sorts. Then he or she conducts an experiment, which is a very selective process and includes some facts or factors and excludes others so that a proof can be established. The proof stand its ground for a while till someone else comes along and overturns it or makes a new postulate based on it. You can see clearly from my line of thinking that I’m not a scientist.
The very act of asking a question seems to presuppose a possible answer. When the question and answer collide all we are left with is the mystery of the phenomenon. Does this sound like nonsense?
Rathi,
No it doesn’t sound like nonsense to me. Thank you for saying, “The very act of asking a question seems to presuppose a possible answer.” You have me thinking about what a question is. The question can be more than catechism. In one way, it is a plea to satisfy uncertainty and yes, it does point to a possible answer. However, a question can be a first attempt at understanding something, maybe understanding the question. The question emerges rough-hewn. It is a trial emergence. It is often the question that helps us understand a viewpoint but an answer can dispense with the question, kill it, and we move on in the knowledge we have labeled something, and now we can heuristically react to that label. I think this is what Fred was talking about at our last face-to-face meeting when he clenched his fist and acted the hard-driving dogmatic. But opening up the question, or staying in the question lead us into new territory.
And one more point on nonsense: anything new must not make sense because making sense of something is to fit it into an existing framework. I am using new here in the way of unique and previously unencountered rather than an upgraded version of something.
Phil,
Thanks for your comment. I am not disagreeing with you when you say, “but I also think it’s worth digging under the surface to work out what is going on.” But why dig, and why not? Should all things get the analytical treatment in your view? If yes, are there any exceptions? This brings up all kinds of things about curiosity, but let’s try to stick to emergence for this post.
This concept of wetness is fascinating. And, as I mentioned on your blog I am still reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked. I am not (albeit dimly) grasping what you are saying about objects bumping into each other to form something that emerges. The molecules aren’t wet but are they dry? Do molecules have a tactile property? I have no idea. But what I do have an idea is that you are making me think and I appreciate it.
Hi everyone. I must remember to check back more often on comments I’ve made so that I can respond again!
Rathi, I hear what you’re saying, but when I said that science functions as mythology I meant more that it does what only mythology used to, namely it tells us where the universe came from, what our place in it is, and what will happen to the universe in the future. This notion isn’t mine: certainly Joseph Campbell explained it well, and others such as Thomas Moore and (I think, but can’t be sure) Mary Midgley have run with it.
Christopher: why dig and why not? Excellent questions! Perhaps we should move away from two traps. One is seeing only the dual nature of that question. For example, we can not dig (enjoy the mystery) and use that as motivation to dig (explain/explore the mystery). I would guess that most people do this in most areas of theire lives: sort of a multi-layered approach to life.
The second trap is to see a word or concept as a real thing, rather than merely a culturally-conditioned label pointing to something external to ourselves. So someone might ask me “Should love get the rational treatment?” and they might expect a yes or no answer. But love as the most wonderful experience of life needn’t be rationalised, while the chemistry of love can be. Neither is love; both are aspects of it.
Christopher and Phil,
“Why dig?” Good question. As humans we seem to have a penchant for rumination and dissection. And it has been said that a life unexamined is not worth living. With our face to face philosophy group hereabouts, we discussed how the immediacy of an experience can somehow get mired in a jumble of words, in the retelling, or the analysis of it.
While it is enjoyable to get lost in an experience, it is equally fun to be able to dissect it afterwards, even if the words may or may not do justice to it. At any rate, I think we use language not necessarily to relive experience, but to comprehend it. Getting back to the creativity theme, it’s fun to be an artist—to create, and also to critique afterwards.
Aw go on, Chris, let’s talk about curiosity…
Let us allow this conversation to take its own course and to flow into whatever shapes it chooses!
And on that note, I would like to suggest, by extension of some of the above, that science, in the ways it is usually expressed, has little to do with curiosity and a lot to do with the answering of questions and the “proving” of hypotheses. How many questions, in the modern scientific framework, do we ask with not the slightest idea as to the answer? This very question itself presupposes an answer of “Very few.” It is only by removing these scientific blinkers and putting on the more exciting, but scarier (because we might find we are asking questions we don’t have answers to) Goggles of Curiosity that we might discover things that are truly new.
To be curious is to be childlike…
When did science last ask such as question as “Why is the sky blue?”…?
Dan/Peps, my personal experience is that scientists are motivated by many things, not all of which are decent or honorable, but without curiosity they simply wouldn’t bother. Questions and hypotheses are formulated by a scientist to give structure to her curiosity and to guide her in their solution. To say that that’s all a scientist is to say that the point of being a writer is to write sentences.
Perhaps I should have specified that there is maybe *not enough* open-minded curiosity in Science… or is Science exactly as it should be, and should we leave such “Why is the sky blue?”-type questions to the Philosophers…??
Hmm, well I might be a bit more sympathetic to your restatement. Certainly there is quite a bit of grant-chasing, and with ever-more onerous ways of assessing and ranking academics, the temptation to pursue more-of-the-same, off-the-shelf science rather than dreaming blue sky dreams is certainly there.