Why do wild flowers have such magnificent and diverse colors? If you look at most wild flora it’s quite an anomaly yet at the same time a very consistent anomaly. Most plants are green yet very few flowers are green. Why is this?
The answer is: because of emergence. Bees and other pollinating insects have color vision. Hence, flowers with attractive colors have a reproductive advantage in being able to attract the insects they depend on for pollination.
Bees get color vision, wild flowers become colorful. This is emergence: a mindless, long-lasting, open process based on positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops are behavioral circular actions in a system where the output of one part becomes the input of another part.
Bees see (input of A) the color of flowers (output A) and are attracted. Bees carry the pollen of flowers (output B) to other plants (input of B). This creates a positive feedback loop: the more pollen bees spread the more the genes responsible for colorful flowers spread. And because bees are attracted to colorful flowers almost all flowers are colorful.
The same goes for primates and the color of fruits: primates are one of the few mammals that have developed color vision. When colorful fruits gets eaten by a primate and its seeds sometime later end up in a nice pile of fertilizer, this is a very good outcome for the plant.
The most important aspect of emergence is that it’s mindless. Emergence describes complicated systems that arise out of very simple but often repeated actions. Emergence can be best compared to choreography.
The opposite of emergence is central control: the mindful orchestration of processes. Central control is very expensive: systems are custom-build out of parts that need to be made to work together. That is why central control can only work when there are minds around.
Yet minds often have a will of their own and make mistakes. Central control – what arises out of mindful orchestration – has to compensate for the flawed minds it depends on.
Central control leads to a complexity limit: a level above which mindful complexity cannot rise without becoming extremely expensive yet yielding diminishing returns. Central control also leads to investment traps: built systems may not be as good as they could be, only the cost of building them prevents the minds from starting over again. Nuclear energy is a good example of both a complexity limit and an investment trap.
Both complexity limits and investment traps require mindful beings like us to resort to emergence to establish complex systems. This leads to the mindful paradox: the smarter we become, the more we choose to rely on mindless emergence.
Central control however – because it’s mindful – is based on values. Emergence – because it’s mindless – is value-free. This is the big problem proponents of central control have with emergence: it can’t be controlled. Without control there is no power so the point of central control is to concentrate as much power as possible by getting as much control as possible.
Until humans came along nature – as far as we know – has always relied on emergence. We are nature’s first experiment in central control. Yet at the same time we’re also extending nature’s emergence capabilities. The effects that can be achieved through the emergence over a global network of interconnected computers are amazing.
What has changed in recent years is this: the best and cheapest way to build a global communication network appeared to be through emergence. If such a feat can be achieved by humans through emergence, what else is possible?
The key insight of emergence – which is demonstrated by the Internet every day – is that each participant in a emergent system has to bear her own costs in order to profit from the benefits. That’s why there has to be a positive feedback loop: for each participant the output (cost) has to yield a substantial input (benefit).
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