September 29, 2003
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Last night the PBS station ran all the episodes of a really interesting series called 'Sacred Balance.' It reminded me a lot of 'Cosmos,' a show that really grabbed me way back when. But whereas 'Cosmos' was astronomical in scope, 'Sacred Balance' comes from the perspective of biology and systems theory.
The basic thing Dr. Suzuki's trying to get across is that the more science you know, the more you begin to understand how all science overlaps, and when you begin to understand that, you start seeing that all of life really is one, and that all we really have is each other. And he does this from the perspective of science, not new-agey spiritual woo-woo.
Worth checking out if you're interested in such things. I found myself thinking things like, "Yeah, Pacific northwest riparian zones get their nitrogen from dead salmon. AND? Oh yeah. Ignorant viewing public. Preach it Dr. Suzuki!" The episode on emergence was really interesting, with the example of an ant hill managing itself through both the instinctual nature of the ants, and an emergent 'higher' order (a whole ant society that can't be accounted for by instinct) arising out of very simple inputs.
This sort of thing gets me thinking about what sort of complexity could result from the simple output of, say, my 'blog, or simply walking down the block, or spending a dollar.
Economists can answer the question about the dollar; they've spend lifetimes trying to figure out how to map science onto spending patterns or valuation or what-have-you. A google search shows me that economists like to talk about the emergence of markets or technologies. For instance, Stone Age Economics: The Origins of Agriculture and the Emergence of Non-Food Specialists posits that the transition of human economy from hunter-gatherer to agriculture necessitated that there be people whose skills weren't directly involved in creating food, leading to whole new areas of trade. However, I don't see a lot of economists trying to predict what the next big emergent shift will be. I suppose it's not profitable to guess. Neolithic economists probably wouldn't have guessed that plants and agricultural implements would be the Next Big Thing.
Comments (5)
Not profitable to guess wrong, but sometimes very profitable to guess right. Read via Google about venture capitalists (e. g., Esther Dyson), instead of economists, for a different -- perhaps even a profitable -- perspective.
The point being that if all you know about ants is that one starts working when touched by other one, you wouldn't guess that they'd make an orderly functioning society. Likewise, I can't predict that spending a dollar will change the face of economics in a certain way.
If someone could game emergence, they could get rich, but at the moment the science only generally predicts the emergent outcome within a wide range of variability. That's why economists want to sail the calm waters of the known rather than predict, say, another industrial revolution. Venture capitalists want to invent the next industrial revolution, which isn't the same as predicting it.
Esther Dyson has a blog, BTW.
Thanks for the correction. I shouldn't have waited so long to post the quote.
If I had capital to venture, I'd put it into desalinizing plants.
no, but someone has to take the big leap.
if someone was offering a graduate degree to study emergent phenomena, i'd be all over it. feology gives you an excellent smorgasboard of science backgrounds to knit togehter... and i have such grand fun knitting...
particularly emergent sociocultural phenomena....
If you enjoy chaos theory. Read "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly. My favorite on emergence.
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