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March 10th, 2009 by Sean Emergence

I’ve been on vacation the last two weeks. As is my routine, I like to buy an interesting book to read during the down times. It just so happens I stumbled upon a fantastic book that discusses many of the things I find interesting concerning the philosophy of science:

Reinventing the Sacred, by Stuart A. Kauffman

At first I was skeptical, but the author eventually won me over. Not by using some New Age mumbo-jumbo and dangerous thoughts… but by appealing to logic, reason, mathematics, science, and evidence! Fantastic! (On the down side, some areas become very hard to read because it can almost be too technical, and he is very long-winded.)

His argument is against the modern addiction to “reductionism”, which basically says: whatever object we want to study, we just need to take it apart, and study the parts. Kauffman argues against it by giving example after example of emergent properties of complicated systems. These properties are unpredictable. Not because we aren’t smart enough - Kauffman argues they are inherently unpredictable.

One example to demonstrate this is music. For example, your average song is around three minutes long, which is about three megabytes of information when stored in mp3 format. Therefore, given enough time, we could sit and listen to all three minute songs - simply by enumerating all the computer bits on and off, in all combinations. So, on the surface, it looks like there is a limit to our creativity, and reductionism is the winner.

Kauffman’s response is: it’s impossible to actually do that. The numbers are too large. So the only way to move forward is to creatively make new music, because this “listen to every song” experiment is utterly useless.

However, in creating new music, even more music becomes accessible. So there is actually an ebb and flow to this creativity process. Technically speaking, all songs created will fit in our three megabytes… so it’s not like we’re breaking any rules. But this process of creating is insanely important, because it finds the best and most diverse range of songs, in the most efficient matter.

Now, read that all again, but replace “music” with “protein strands”, or “economy”, or “evolution”, and you get the idea of what Kauffman is talking about. Except he is much more scientific, and actually has the data to back it up.

It’s a very interesting read, and I highly recommend it. I may talk more about it latter, if I can compress his ideas down into readable chunks.

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### 7 Responses to “Emergence”

1. Psikillion Says:
   March 11th, 2009 at 12:35 pm

   So are we supposed to study the object as a whole?

   Or is it talking about something else entirely?

   Currently I am confused, but I guess once you have compressed his ideas I could hopefully understand it better…

   And of course ask better questions…

   What you said about creativity sort of reminds me of the addendum of my idea of how we only have perspective truth. I might post it…

2. X-Master Says:
   March 12th, 2009 at 2:03 am

   Studying objects as a whole. Well yes and no, reductionism has a few good points, so it shouldn’t be throwen out entirely, what is needed is a new view, one that will take into account both the parts and the whole, studying them both about whatever it is you are trying to study to get a better understanding of it. At least thats the gist I can derive from up above.

3. Alexander Says:
   March 14th, 2009 at 2:20 am

   Wow… that whole concept of music being limited scared me for a second… like creativity would run out for a second.

   But then I crunched the numbers, and calculated how many possibilities three megabytes hold. The number of combinations would be equal to 2 to the power of the number of bits. And three megabytes translates to twenty-four million bits…

   So…

   Two to the tenth is roughly a thousand.

   Two to the fiftieth is in excess of a quadrillion.

   Two to the 300th… there aren’t that many atoms in the universe. (Atoms, being ridiculously small, and the universe, being ridiculously huge).

   And a three-meg song… Two to the TWENTY-FOUR MILLIONTH possibilities. Don’t try to calculate it, your calculator/computer will freeze up. It’s so ridiculously large, it might as well be infinite. There’s not enough matter in the universe to WRITE that number, for cryin’ out loud!

   So, it’s like they say: Don’t worry, be happy. The potential for creativity will ALWAYS be there. And apparently, so will a gaping hole in reductionsim, for there are two things that can never be reduced to numers: possibility, and people.

4. Alexander Says:
   March 15th, 2009 at 1:03 am

   Oh wait. You *can* write two to the twenty-four millionth… whoops. It has about 7½ million digits, but it’s writable.

   You’ll need a big piece of paper though…

5. GoldenJoe Says:
   April 18th, 2009 at 11:57 pm

   Good argument for experimentation.

6. redefine Says:
   April 24th, 2009 at 10:25 pm

   well i would say because the reductionist view is right. if it were possible to do that, the ‘creativity’ in such is an illusion, the creativity (as we use the term) comes from intelligently choosing different notes for an intended effect, not some inherent property of the music. the music itself is not creative, its the creation of the music that is creative.

   the real question i see is if this is a genuine representation of concious life, or is it just that, a mindless simulation. if it is truly random, i’m inclined to say the first (as i have some theories about true randomness and conciousness), but otherwise, its just a pretty pattern.

   also, i tried on my comp, it defaults to inf after 2^1023, which is 8.98*10^307.

7. Psikillion Says:
   May 19th, 2009 at 7:27 am

   @ X-Master

   Ok, so studying the object as a whole and studying the object split up into parts are not perfect, and we need a new view to combine the two. (repeating what you said in my own words)

   This is too simple!

   You bring together a group of people, some able to see the object as a whole and others being able to see the object in its parts. These people would still have all of their different beliefs, but be united to one cause. The more people, the better the view we get of a particular object!

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