The vast community that is Us

There’s an interesting way to look at how intelligence arises called emergent complexity, or simply emergence. Not usually used to describe how intelligence works, but that’s where I’d like to go today.

Look at a flock of birds or school of fish and you’ll pick right up on what emergence is about. Simply put, organisms (or any object that can interact with its surroundings), when following simple rules in concert with others, come together to form a  greater whole that behaves in ways the individual parts can’t do on their own.

Here is a computerized model of flocking birds called Boids, programmed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. Even though each boid is only a few triangles on the screen, when they move and interact we immediately see the whole as a recognizable flock. Schools of small fish do this too, packing themselves close enough together to look like one big fish that scares away medium size predators. And when one large enough to attack this seemingly big fish tries to take a bite, the individuals dart out of the way, the school splits in half, and the predator gets a mouthful of water. After it’s passed through, the school joins ranks and once again appears as a big fish.

Artificial intelligence systems have used emergence in general, and Reynolds’ work on Boids in particular, for quite a while. A new example of this is from an LA Times article on a robot programmed to mimic how babies learn language. Computers and robots are increasingly exhibiting what we would call “intelligence”, and I think this can give us clues to our own makeup.

In my previous post I looked into some of the sub-organisms that make us up. Added to the somewhat independent microbes inhabiting our bodies are the cells making up what we usually consider our bodies to be. Looking just at the brain, which has roughly one hundred billion neurons, we can see the laws of very large numbers combining with emergent complexity to make – us! Or rather, the “me” we each have. Now, how about all of these “me”s interacting – what larger whole emerges from that?