(2020-07-30) Conway Freedom is an Emergent

Mel Conway says Freedom is an Emergent (Phenomenon). What does politics have to do with emergence, and what is emergence anyway? That’s what this essay is about. Here is my deeper agenda: There is an important missing conversation that needs to be happening between social scientists and systems scientists...I will show that there is a single structural pattern that describes a large variety of group cohesion behaviors, some human, some not.

Today’s big problems, for example, poverty, climate change, and pandemics, are behaviors of large interconnected systems. We experience these systems, not in their details, but in the effects they manifest, for example social disorder and global warming. (Grand Challenge, collapse)

These manifested effects are emergents

The introduction of the concept of two levels of description is a liberating characteristic of our view of the world.

Aggregating phenomena into multiple levels of description (not of reality) is our brains’ invention for making sense of an otherwise incomprehensible world. (sense-making)

So, given this confession of vulnerability, we are free to come up with stories that work for us.

Science is one of the best processes we have going for generating stories that work for us.

Fig. 2 is this graphic, applied here to the people/government distinction we started with.

Fig. 3, a relabeling of Fig. 2, shows the generic Emergence Process design pattern

The vertical arrow labeled “Local Interactions” is the crux of this pattern that ties the two levels together. You will be seeing this applied in different contexts repeatedly below

An emergent phenomenon is a phenomenon at the emergent level of description that arises from specific combinations of Local Interactions that occur at the individual level of description.

A well-trained infantry is a living example of emergence

Our story begins in classical Greece

The hoplite citizen infantries of classical Greece developed the hoplite phalanx formation

The primary duty of each man on the line was to keep the line from breaking

A common element with other emergent systems is that each man had only to maintain integrity with his immediate neighbors.

Fig. 6 shows the pattern for flocking of starlings. This NPR article cites research showing that each bird navigates relative to 6 or 7 near neighbors.

OTHER COMMON EXAMPLES OF EMERGENCE A. Science

Science advances one funeral at a time. --Max Planck

scientific knowledge is a thing unto itself, but it lives in the minds of a lot of people

Scientists can have trouble changing their basic ideas, but when the people get replaced the science can change.

Scientific knowledge is a distributed thing that lives in the minds of a lot of people, but it’s neither the people nor their minds. What is it?

Scientific knowledge is an emergent phenomenon arising from the activity of a bunch of people we call “scientists”. Science is the name we give to the whole two-level process.

B. An epidemic In Fig. 8 an epidemic is an emergent phenomenon

C. Water and Milk

ice and liquid phases of water

curdling of milk looks similar

D. The spatial dynamics of infection

Fig. 12 is a map from the CDC website that shows the total cumulative cases of COVID-19 for each count

At the beginning of the year there would have been only one color in this map

Someone who follows the news might imagine an animation of the daily progress of this map beginning around March 1 that would show the dark areas spreading from the coasts toward the interior.

What is this dark thing we’re watching move across the country? If this were an America-shaped Petri dish we would say it’s a bacteria colony;

So let’s call it a “COVID colony”

What’s important, and what I’m missing in the public conversation, is that the evolution of the colony is what we need to understand in order to model the future of living with this virus.

This film clip from the cold war suggests that our propagandists seem to have had a better handle on the concept than our public-health experts

HOW IS FREEDOM AN EMERGENT?

Here is John Lewis’s modified quotation again.

“Freedom is not a state; it is an [emergent].*

My view is that everything in our experience is an emergent. Usually, saying “everything is an X” makes X meaningless. In this case however, there is a structure that comes along with X that makes it worth examining in some cases.

A. Emergents can be parts or attributes of other emergents

One of our first examples has been unit cohesion, with the Greek hoplite phalanx front line as the example. But the phalanx itself is an emergent; the front line is part of that, and cohesion is an attribute of the front line.

B. Emergents can have life cycles

C. Emergents can undergo transformation

D. Is intervention into transformation of emergents possible?

If the present approach has a message, it is to look to the Local Interactions if you want to intervene in an emergence process

Two questions arise

1 of 2: If there is a natural cycle, where are the feedback loops in the Local Interactions?

2 of 2: We are learning that it’s a lot easier to break freedom than build it. Building I believe, involves intervening at the Local Interactions level, probably in multiple emergence processes over multiple generations

The transition from democracy to tyranny, particularly in Europe in the 1930s, has been well studied. Exceptionally useful in “On Tyranny” is @TimothyDSnyder’s enumeration of 20 individual interventions at the Local Interactions level

We do need a theory that describes the sensitivity of the “Freedom ↔ Tyranny” emergent to the details of Local Interactions. Developing this will be a long and difficult process. Snyder’s list is an excellent starting point

In the first Twitter thread of Part Two I have begun exploring this Conjecture: Civic coherence is an emergent arising from signaling within interpersonal negative feedback loops whose effects are to align the individuals’ behaviors

This hypothesis suggests that loss of coherence might be associated with disruption of feedback loops.

I have been using the general term “social clumping” for people and animals in general to use interpersonal signaling to align individual behaviors in order to form emergents

Now that we have a pattern, we have new questions. 1. What are the major pathways over which interpersonal signaling occurs that significantly affect political integration/disintegration?

2. How do we draw causal connections between the psychologies of individuals and interpersonal signaling?