Emergent Behaviour
How complex behaviour can arise out of seemingly simple rules? Is there anything special that causes emergent behaviour?
- Ant simulations
- Mold simulations
- Community dynamics
Interesting to think about in context of single agents in multi-agent systems. How does consciousness arise? Is it just because of the rules itself (a reductionist approach) or is there something larger at play?
Gall’s law: simple alphabets produce behaviors. Even simple rules like Conway’s game of life can be Turing Complete!
How does this fit into low bandwidth communication?
# Emergentism
Once a certain level of complexity is reached, there is a kind of qualitative leap where completely new sorts of physical laws can “emerge”—ones that are premised on, but cannot be reduced to, what came before
- In this way, the laws of chemistry can be said to be emergent from physics: the laws of chemistry presuppose the laws of physics, but can’t simply be reduced to them.
- In the same way, the laws of biology emerge from chemistry: one obviously needs to understand the chemical components of a fish to understand how it swims, but chemical components will never provide a full explanation.
- In the same way, the human mind can be said to be emergent from the cells that make it up.
# Combination Problem
How do microlevel experiences combine to form macrolevel ones?
“Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence”
Panpsychist response
Mental properties belong only to genuine individuals, not to mere aggregates
Then, what is the boundary of the genuine individual? This is a problem of embodiment. To be a genuine individual is not simply to be a particular (as opposed to a conglomerate or universal) but also a system that has some kind of bounded organizational unity through autopoiesis – this is a body
Their own emergence problem: how do genuine individuals emerge from particular that aren’t individuals/subjects of experience? It doesn’t solve the problem of accounting for the place of consciousness in nature, it just relocates it