{"id":101,"date":"2007-12-23T22:11:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-23T22:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2007\/12\/23\/101\/"},"modified":"2015-05-25T15:27:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-25T20:27:42","slug":"101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"On the Border of Order and Anarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been reading some books and articles about \u201cemergence\u201d, the scientific and mathematical concept of how complex things or patterns such as traffic jams, living organisms, stock market crashes and bee hives \u201cemerge\u201d from a lot of stupid little things interacting together, following simple rules with no central commander. (Technically, these &#8220;little things&#8221; are called &#8220;cellular automa&#8221;; they continually decide what to do based on what those around them are doing).  Our minds and our consciousness and intelligence may in fact be just an \u201cemergence\u201d from a lot of neuron cells in our brain acting under simple directives without any central guidance.<\/p>\n<p>These books and articles are very interesting.  But you can\u2019t truly understand something unless you can get your hands on it, play around with it.  When it comes to nuclear fusion, you obviously can\u2019t fool around with it in your kitchen; so most of us will never really understand nuclear fusion.  But emergence does lend itself to simple experiments on one\u2019s home computer.  You can set up some simple \u201cemergence generators\u201d using an MS Excel spreadsheet.  I\u2019ve been fooling around with one lately.<\/p>\n<p>What I\u2019ve learned from my own little emergence experiments is the importance of randomness and unevenness.  Many of us curse randomness and unevenness.  They\u2019re just too unpredictable.  We can\u2019t control randomness, and unevenness just doesn\u2019t seem right.  What good is something that you can\u2019t control and has an uneven mix?  I myself tend to favor law and order.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think you want to hear all the details of my little spreadsheet experiment right now.  However, I do sense a lesson from them, which I will try to share here.  If the universe really does play by these rules, then randomness and disorder are just as necessary for life as law and order are.  Without order, spontaneity would just make a useless mess of things.  Without spontaneity, order would never get anything started.  Opposites really do need each other to make things happen. Paradoxically, randomness causes intermittent clumps of order (e.g., four &#8220;heads&#8221; in a row in a series of 100 coin tosses). The &#8220;emergence machine&#8221; latches on to those clumps and weaves a pattern amidst the background static. <\/p>\n<p>Just as an entertainment, here are some of the patterns that \u201cemerge\u201d on my little spreadsheet, based on slightly different rules.  These are indeed mixes of law and randomness, order and anarchy.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jimgworld.com\/beta\/emerge.gif\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been reading some books and articles about \u201cemergence\u201d, the scientific and mathematical concept of how complex things or patterns such as traffic jams, living organisms, stock market crashes and bee hives \u201cemerge\u201d from a lot of stupid little things interacting together, following simple rules with no central commander. (Technically, these &#8220;little things&#8221; are called [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5432,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/5432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}