Have you heard about “Emergence”

Just a few days ago a gentleman came into my office and said “I heard you were the Urban Brain, is it true”. I was caught a bit off guard. For although I knew folks were visiting this, site the web does create a form of distance that makes actual meetings a suprise. I replied yes, and he went on to share some nice feedback on the site. He then asked me if I had ever read about the theory of Emergence. I had not so he went on to explain.

It appears that the name I selected for this blog ties in nicely not only to my idea of a collection of thoughts, ideas, opinions, and perspectives about urban life, it also ties in nicely to to this theory. Here is the wikipedia description (a piece anyway) for emergence…

Emergence is a term used in Philosophy, Systems Theory and the Sciences to describe the development of complex organized systems. Like intelligence in the field of AI, or agents in distributed artificial intelligence, emergence is a central concept in complex systems yet very controversial.

“Perhaps the most elaborate recent definition of emergence was provided by Jeffrey Goldstein in the inaugural issue of Emergence.(Goldstein 1999) To Goldstein, emergence refers to “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” The common characteristics are: (1)radical novelty(features not previously observed in systems); (2)coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro “level” (i.e. there is some property of “wholeness”); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is “ostensive” - it can be perceived. For good measure, Goldstein throws in supervenience — downward causation.” (Corning 2002)

The term “emergent” was coined by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes who wrote:
“Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the cooperant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same — their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components in so far as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.” (Lewes 1874-1879)(Blitz 1992)

However, the concept behind the term has been in use since at least the time of Aristotle.[1] John Stuart Mill[2] and Julian Huxley[3] are just some of the historic luminaries who have written on the concept.

In the brief summary he shared with me, there is a tie in to how the brain is structured and the development of civilizations from ant colonies to our urban cities. He recommended a book to read, and I researched and have ordered a few more to learn. He said these are sort of trippy thinker books (my words not his) that provoke some deep ideas. Cool.

So my question to all of you, and please share your comments because just my perspective is certainly not enough, is if any of you have heard of this and perhaps a dialogue of the Emergence idea. And how does this portal, as he mentioned, have the possiblity of facilitating this idea. I am a newbie to this, perhaps a later post can go into a deeper discussion.

Regards.

Want to read more, check out…

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

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