Emergence

The Devil’s Advocate™ Go Premium 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 Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Emergence
/ɪˈməːdʒ(ə)ns/ (n.)

A property of a system or aggregated whole which is not shared by components of the system or the constituents of that body.

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. The golden egg returns

So, “wetness” is a property of water, but not of a molecule of H₂0. “Consciousness” is a property of a brain, but not the neural activity that comprises it. “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 influence the individual interactions so that a different property emerges, even though each of those interactions, of itself, is not obviously deficient.

Which is why top-down attempts to change culture are so frequently fail. You cannot command a tide to retreat, or water not to be wet. We all know of institutions who, with optimistic spirit, have instituted “bureaucracy hotlines” where staff could, in essence, denounce bureaucracy whenever they encountered it, or “see it, say it, fix it” programmes. These do not work. Oh, you can see it, for sure; saying it takes a bit more spleen, or disregard for one’s onward trajectory; fixing it falls foul of the pragmatist’s prayer. For every particular there is always some kind of special pleading that 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 so deeply into the fossil record of the organisation that excavation is impossible. In any case, these things are beyond any individual’s ability to fix, or even influence. All the levers they can control recommend the same course: do what we have always done.

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.

Nor can you remove bureaucracy from an organisation by telling the workers to be less bureaucratic, while keeping the hierarchy structure under which being conservative and doing what you have always done is the safest course of action. Every individual action 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, but 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.

Off the diving board into the pool of ill-considered speculation

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!