Emergence

Emergence
/ɪˈməːdʒ(ə)ns/ (n.)

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown Martin Sheen as an emergent property of water, yesterday. In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

A property of a system or aggregated whole which is not shared by components of the system or the constituents of that body. So, “wetness” is a property of water, but not of a molecule of H₂0. “Consciousness” is an property of a brain, but not the neural activity in a brain. “Bureaucracy” is an emergent property of a financial services organisation, not the individual communications within that organisation that make up the organisation. Well, not many of them, anyway.

Nonetheless in each case the emergent property is a function not of the system as a whole where it presents, but of its individual components, where it does not.

So changing an emergent property is tricky. You must the nature of the individual interactions so that a different property emerges, even though each of those interactions, of itself, is not obviously deficient.

We know of one institution which instituted a “bureaucracy hotline” where staff could, in essence, denounce examples of bureaucracy whenever they encountered it. Another had a “see it, say it, fix it” programme. Neither worked: for every particular there is always special pleading t hat some other stakeholder can wheel out to justify the status quo, usually by reference to someone or something elsewhere in the hierarchy, or some hypothetical risk, precedent or scar tissue sedimented into the mythological fossil record of the organisation. In any case, beyond any individual’s ability to fix, or even influence. The conditions which needed to changed are generally not ones the employees can influence. The parameters they can control recommend a course of doing what has been done before. No-one got hired for buying IBM.

However tempting it may seem to an administrator, you cannot change the wider system, except by changing each of the individual interactions from which the property emerges. You can’t tell a cup of water to stop being wet. You must change the conditions in which water molecules interact and which makes them combine to create wetness: make it colder, or hotter, or mix other molecules with H₂0.

Likewise, you can’t remove bureaucracy from an organisation while keeping the hierarchy structure under which being conservative and doing what you have always done is the safest course of action. Each individual actions may be explicable — if a bit conservative — viewed in isolation. You can’t see the bureaucracy in it, and the individual may feel she has no alternative, given the hierarchical structures, than to act that way.

Emergence is important component in complex systems, which, as you may know, the JC has a bit of a thing about. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.

Joe Norman with a great example of emergence and irreducibility at Risky Conversations:

If you take a Möbius loop — a one-sided geometric shape created by taking a strip of paper, twisting it one half turn and looping it — and try to reduce it by breaking it into smaller parts, you lose the one-sidedness. Each of its segments has two sides. You can join any of its segments together, and they still have two sides. It is only when you twist the emerging structure and join it back on itself that the second side vanishes.

Off the diving board

Nascent theory: reducibility is to irreducibility as complicatedness is to complexity — only looked at from opposite ends of the telescope. Complication can be predicted, and solved, from first principles or the initial state; complexity cannot.

Likewise, a reducible phenomenon can be atomised into its fundamental components with no loss of essential qualities or properties; an irreducible one cannot — some of those properties emerge at a level of abstraction higher than the smallest components.

See also

• Reductionism
• Möbius loop — one of the JC’s hermeneutically sealed private jokes for one. Oh! There’s another one!