Welcome to Emergence!

Like Lindsay, I am very excited about this class. I like thinking about emergence! Its hard to focus on Emergence solely in my physics arena. The interdisciplinary nature of the discipline makes me want to read what everyone else is thinking. Monday I came into class with a very loose understanding of what Emergence is. I was intrigued by the course description, by the prospect of linking scientific and social phenomena together in a much more broadly based Theory of Everything. Two discussion topics have resonated with me hours after class. First, I am surprised to learn that there are not mathematical methods of predicting the outcomes of Emergent systems without computer trials. I remain skeptical of Professor Grobstein’s insistence that these emergent processes cannot be predicted at an earlier stage but must played out via a computer simulation. Comparing a computer to a microscope or telescope implies its use as an observational, not a theoretical, tool. Newton and Leibniz updated Calculus to explain Newton’s oberservation-based theory of gravity. Who’s to say that there isn’t another branch of mathematics waiting to be discovered that can predict these computer generated reactions? Maybe we just need more data before we can posit a theory of Emergence. One cannot predict the outcome of the game of life at an early stage. One cannot judge the curvature of an object much larger than us, like the earth, while standing on it surface without making certain observations and interpreting them. Perhaps by correctly analyzing initial emergent processes, the structure may be understood. Then, just as in calculus, initial conditions may be used to predict outcomes. Is it a coincidence that these theories conceptually overlap or merely a result of the same authors repeating motifs? Secondly, I am struck by how much the implications of Emergence parallel the recent Intelligent Design versus Darwinism debate. It sounds to me that this discipline provides more than just a surprise. If, as I understand Emergence to be, this theory/discipline argues that complex processes arise out of a system of simple rules, then strictly interpreted Emergence could argue that all of human life operates under a form of scientific determinism. Our lives are dictated by smaller interactions via genetic disposition or cultural imprintation. Free will is an emotional/mental construct arising out of smaller interactions. It is a bit frustrating to think that we have as much control over our destiny at Bryn Mawr as ants in a plastic frame. However, the application of Emergence to life appears to assume the falsity of human free will. Stephen Hawking puts it well in A Brief History of Time: "These quantum theories are deterministic in the sense that they give laws for the evolution of the wave with time. Thus if one knows the wave at one time, one can calculate it at any other time. The unpredictable, random element comes in only when we try to interpret the wave in terms of the positions and velocities of particles. But maybe this is our mistake: maybe there are no positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability." Found here Biologist and Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe wrote in a response to a critique of his book “Just as irreducible complexity would predict, when several steps must be taken at once, natural selection is a poor way to proceed.” I don’t want there to be a science that cannot be governed by mathematical laws, only observed. Admitting that emergence processes cannot be predicted or understood leaves room for the divine. And I don’t find the divine very useful in applied scientific enquiry.