I have re-started reading “Emergence”, a book by Steven Johnson, about “bottom up” intelligence – one example being an ant colony. The full title of the book is “Emergence – The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.
\nClick here for an excerpt from this book.<\/a><\/p>\n

This triggered a thought today that perhaps “death” may be as important to the evolution of these kinds of consiousnesses as it was to the evolution of life on earth. I’m going to work my way up to that thought below. First I will lay out the context in which that thought is especially interesting to me.<\/p>\n

In the opening chapters the Emergence book discusses how some kinds of complex systems can evolve to have adaptive behavior. The kind of complex system they discuss have multiple independent agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways with rules, such as the laws of physics, determining the outcome of each interaction. These systems can evolve, or progress, or whatever word you want, to behave somewhat like living beings. Among the examples they give are ant colonies, cities, and slime mold. The author says that we humans tend to look for some sort top down direction, a pace maker, or a ruling group, but that in fact these systems tend to behave more or less indepently of any such control. Rather they are the product of the interaction and the results of each interaction. This is referred to as “bottom up” intelligence.<\/p>\n

This fascinates me and also expands on my own view that complex systems, such as hundreds of birds chattering in a tree, or a nation, or a city, can be usefully viewed as life forms with intelligence, memory, purpose, and the ability to learn and adapt. They can exhibit attributes of life and intelligence even though the individual components do not have significant intelligence as with ants and slime mold. Similarly the human body, I have read, is actually a community of cells that work together to form a complex system, though each of the cells is, relativly speaking, dumb. The human brain is another example of this. In other cases, such as a city or nation, the individual units, the humans, have some intelligence, but each one is only a tiny part of the greater creature and the “consciousness” of the greater creature, such as a city is not based on their consciousness.<\/p>\n

This is somewhat old ground for me and one I have been thinking about, just for fun, for years. However, today I came up with a new wrinkle on this and I want to write it down while it is fresh in my mind.<\/p>\n

Let me start by restating my perspective, my guess, about some of the fundamental aspects of our reality. It seems to me that life and conscioussness are “emergent” qualities of our universe. When certain kinds of complex systems ( multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways) are allowed to persist for long periods of time (it may take billions of years) they tend to (a) get more complex and (b) eventually become homes for forms of life (hard to define, but definitly a persistent dynamic organization [ a dynamic pattern or sequence of patterns ] of physical matter over time ). We see this in what we know of the history of our universe. Initally, we now think, it was amost pure energy (whatever that is) but over time simple elements, like hydrogen, came into being. Over more time more complex elements, like carbon, came into being. Eventualy something we would call life “emerged” from these elements. And eventually something we would call conscioussness emerged in the evolution of some of the life forms. The key elements here are
\n(a) certain kinds of complex systems,
\n(b) something like “evolution” where the complex systems eventually find ways to become more complex,
\n(c) the emergence of something we would call life and
\n(d) finally, the emergence of something we would call consciousness.<\/p>\n

I want to comment at this point that, from our perspective, consciousness seems to be the highest level of this evolutionary chain. This seems to be the most complex and interesting thing to emerge from energy, time, and simple matter, but, it seems likely that there are stages beyond this which either have yet to emerge, or which we cannot percieve. I find it fascinating to speculate on what these future (or unseen) stages of this process might be.<\/p>\n

Now for today’s “insight”:<\/p>\n

I recall reading years ago, probably in a book by Carl Sagan, that the early forms of “life” on our planet did not evolve.. they just persisted. They were able to somehow absorb things from outside and use them as a source of energy, and perhaps to replace detriorating components, but they just kept existing as long as they could with no real possibility of change.<\/p>\n

Then, somewhere along the way, some of these life forms, through trial and error, which we now call evolution, changed so that they did not live forever. Rather they created clones\/offsprings and then died. Death entered into the evolutionary chain. This, so it said in the book I read, was a major improvement in the nature of evolution. The other, perhaps equally important change, was procreation from sex. Both allowed for more or less random changes, mutations, to occur between generations. This opened the door to threads of evolutions, evolutionary paths. In some cases the life form evolved to favor one kind of mutation over another. In some cases this gave evolutionary advantages to particular life forms. The stage was set for the process of which we are the product.<\/p>\n

Prior to the emergence of death in the process, change was far less likely, and far less able to form preferences and trends (get bigger, survive out of the sea for longer periods etc. ) because there was far less replacements of one system with another. Death, said my unknown author, was probably one of the most important things to come into being in the evolution of life. After organisms started to die and be replaced by their offspring, the evolutionary process took off and evolution occurred at a much much faster clip than before.<\/p>\n

So, how about the emergent consciousness of ant colonies, of slime mold, of cities, of nations. Look ma, no death! Cities don’t die very often. They just persist. Interesting. What if cities had to be destroyed every two hundred years. I don’t know that the residents would have to die. They could be redistributed to work those from other cities to build knew ones. Would this be a good thing?<\/p>\n

But wait… though cities don’t “die”, they do seem to evolve. They can’t move, as a rule, but they can change. They can add new technology, new infrastructure, new ways of moving goods and people, new laws, changed laws, new guidelines, changed guidelines, new ways of enforcing laws and guidelines (rewards and penalties), new services and new ways of delivering services, new kinds of entertainment, education, communication and on and on.<\/p>\n

This is different. The early life forms before death could not do these things. They did not have the abilty to change and adapt that a city does.<\/p>\n

Still… I wonder if something like “death” would be benficial. E.g. every 100 years all laws must be abolished and a new constitution adopted. Each new law must be approved individually… no blanket adoption of groups of old laws. The same for education. The same for everything that could abolished and recreated, maybe even buildings, roads, parks, pipes, wires … every physical part of the city and and every rule or convention that could be changed. The same for nations, for clubs,…. for churchs (now there’s something I could get enthusiastic about)<\/p>\n

Phase 2 of this line of thought: Early life forms were not mobile. They were stuck in one place, like plants, or they were completely at the mercy of the medium they were in, like the ocean. They had no choice as to where they would be tomorrow. For many of them they would live in only one location. Trees, flowers etc. are like this. Their offspring might end up far away (birds carrying seeds), but often their offspring would very close. Then life forms came into being that could move about, that were not anchored. Mobile life forms, animals, came into being and evolved. These tended to be more complex than plants (at least it seems that way to me) and more able to evolve into creatures that could survive and reproduce in a wide variety of climates. I read recently that man’s evolutionary advantage was in his\/her lack of specialization to one climate. We survived because we were generalists. We did not have a shaggy fur coat as part of our body because that would be a disadvantage in hot climates. Rather we had vulnerable skin that could not survive at all in cold climates, and often had to be protected in hot climates… but, we developed the abilty to adapt by making and wearing appropriate clothing.<\/p>\n

So… how do these concepts apply to “bottom up” intellgence. Ant colonies can move…a little.. and they do. So can slim molds.. but I don’t think they are truly mobile beings, like individual animals. I would like to hear from the experts about “mobility” in bottom up intelligence.<\/p>\n

So, trying to end this rambling, where does this lead? For me it leads to questions about the nature of bottom up intelligences and how that nature compares to more traditional life forms and consciousnesses like animals and humans. I would love to hear, or read, the reflections of experts related to this issue.<\/p>\n

Finally, it occurs to me that though cities cannot die, move and adapt the way an animal, especially the human animal, can, there can be other “bottom up” entities that can. These could be virtual entities that exist in cyberspace…and we could attempt to build an environment in which these could evolve, in which something like “death” could be a useful attribute. I find this a big stretch of mind… and perhaps I will be able to say something about it once I have had time to think about it. Right at the moment I feel like my mental reach has significantly exceeded my mental grasp.<\/p>\n

Is this line of thought of interest to any one? Did you read all the way to here? Do you have any related thought you would like to share?<\/p>\n

Harry Baya Sept 2, 2006<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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