From flocks of birds, synchronization of fireflies, colonies of ants to cosmic origins, and evolution of life, we live in an emerging world. David Pines, co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, wrote in 2014 that the dream of complex science research is to create a unified theory of complex science that allows complexity to be defined and quantified, and that emergent research will be a unified paradigm for achieving that dream. He reviewed the Santa Fe Institute's contribution to emergent research and called for greater responsibility for research and replication of emergence.
Written by | David Pines
Translate | Guo Ruidong
Review | Liu Zhihang, Liang Jin
When electrons, atoms, individuals, or societies interact with each other or with their environment, the collective behavior of the whole differs from some of its behavior, and we call this result emergence. Thus, emergence refers to a collective phenomenon or behavior in a complex adaptive system that does not exist in a single part of them.
Examples emerge all around us, from flocks of birds, fireflies synchronizing, ant colonies, and fish flocks to individuals organizing themselves to form communities in cities. All these phenomena have no leader or central control. Emergent phenomena also include the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies and stars and planets, the evolution of life on Earth from its origin to the present, protein folding, cell composition, crystallization of liquid protons, superconductivity of electrons in certain metals, global climate change, and the development of infant consciousness.
In fact, we live in an emerging universe. In this universe, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify existing interesting scientific problems or socio-economic phenomena that arise from non-emergence.
Figure 1. The complex interaction of matter and energy produces the emergence properties of our universe, including the formation of stars, such as this cosmic nebula with neutron stars. | Image source: Dreamstime.com
1. From emergence to complexity to emergence
The Santa Fe Institute began exploring emergent behavior in science and society at its 1984 founding symposium, Emerging Syntheses in Science. During this time, each speaker deals with an aspect of emergent behavior while looking for the organizational principles that lead to this behavior [1]. In the early days of the Santa Fe Institute, members often devoted themselves to defining and understanding the complexity of these systems, rather than focusing on the principles that these systems demonstrate that can organize emergent behavior. In fact, some Santa Fe Institute members dream of creating a unified theory of complex science that allows complexity to be defined and quantified to classify complex systems in some grand hierarchical way.
In 1993, the Santa Fe Institute organized a major workshop to define complex adaptive systems and assess the state of their initial exploration of complex science. As the resulting collection of papers, Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality, suggests, the dream of a unified theory of complexity was abandoned. As it turns out, we may have noticed what our friend, the great mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, said before his death in 1984, when the Santa Fe Institute was just founded. He has discarded the predecessor of complex science, nonlinear science, and called it "non-elephant research"—he meant that nonlinearity is not a useful description because everything is nonlinear (and also complex). At the end of the workshop, participants agreed that while complexity is difficult to define, and perhaps there is no unified science of complexity, they agree that it is useful to make efforts to design models of various systems and explore the extent to which the ideas behind a model that describes complex behavior apply to understanding another system.
In achieving this goal, we support emergence as a common theme in the Santa Fe Institute's pursuit of science, but without using the language of emergence. In the words of Molière's "Noble Fan": "Oh my God! I've been talking about prose unconsciously for over forty years. "We've studied emergent behavior in complex adaptive systems over the years, but haven't explicitly stated how to do so.
Figure 2. The swarm behavior of birds, the collective movement of birds during flight, is the behavior of individual birds that emerges in accordance with simple rules when there is no coordination and leadership.
But our vocabulary began to change within a few years. In perhaps the first book to focus on emergent behavior, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland, one of the santa fe institute's early intellectual leaders, wrote that a relatively simple set of rules in some systems (such as games, simple molecules, and so on) contributed to emergence behavior. In the later publication of The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, Harold Morowitz, an early knowledge leader at the Santa Fe Institute, elaborated on emergence behavior from the perspective of a theoretical biologist. He described the emergence of systems of those rules unknown, from the Big Bang to the emergence of humans on Earth and the development of agriculture.
Another point about emergence, contributed by the Santa Fe Institute, comes from theoretical physicists and can be found in two papers aimed at general scientific readers. A very prescient paper, More is different, written more than a decade before the santa fe institute was founded, in which Philip Anderson (who gave a speech when the santa fe institute was founded in 1984) and later collaborated with Nobel laureate Ken Anderson. Ken Arrow, who co-chaired the Institute's initial exploration of economics, questioned the way many scientists describe basic research, and he also discussed the role of hierarchical relationships and symmetries in complex systems. Twenty-eight years later, I wrote another related article with Stanford physicist R.B. Laughlin, The Theory of Everything. Both papers highlight the limitations of using reductionist methods to study complex systems, where people try to explain complex systems by studying their components in more detail.
Laughlin and I point out that the dream of some reductionists in the 20th century was to discover a "theory of everything" whose equations would allow people to derive all the properties of matter. But such dreams are futile and should be replaced by a focus on emergent behavior. Richard · Richard Feynman famously said, "Life is nothing more than the wobbling and shaking of atoms." "We don't think this perspective tells us how atoms produced LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of living matter, let alone the evolution of the subsequent 3.5 billion years."
While we know the simple equations that govern the current world, we find that these formulas can hardly tell us anything about emergents, whether we are working on a scientific frontier or seeking to understand and change family or social behavior. We conclude the article by writing:
"In our time, the central task of theoretical physics is no longer to write the ultimate equation, but to classify and understand emergent behavior in a number of ways, including the underlying life itself. We think of this next century (21st century) physics as a complex adaptation of the study. For better or worse, we are now witnessing a shift from past science (essentially reductionism) to the study of complex adaptive systems that is firmly built on experimentation. We hope it will provide a starting point for new discoveries, concepts, and wisdom. ”
2. Emergence as a unified paradigm
What is a substitute for reductionists to understand emergent behavior in physics, biology, and the social sciences? The short answer is a new starting point: recognizing that understanding emergent behavior requires attention to the emergent collective characteristics that can characterize the system as a whole and look for their origins. It means identifying emerging collective patterns and laws through experimentation or observation, and then designing models that embody the concepts and principles of collective organization to explain them. These patterns, principles, and models are the path to the emergent behavior observed in the system under study. Only by studying these intermediate paths can we hope to grasp emergent behavior on a large, unified scale.
Figure 3. Nanowires, such as those produced by atomic growth on silicon crystals in the figure, are new man-made materials with emergent properties. | Image credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology
For physicists or chemists studying the behavior of electrons emerging in quantum matter or the turbulent phenomena in fluids, this intermediate path may include growing and studying new materials, as well as developing new detectors to measure fluctuations, from which universal scale laws, or new coherent states and ordered states that may compete with each other, may be revealed. The concept of candidate organization that accompanies these intermediate paths typically includes the introduction of an efficient field to describe emergent interactions, and may include the possibility that there is a protected behavior independent of the details and governed by higher organizational principles.
For biologists, biophysicists, or ecologists who study living systems, the components of a collective begin with proteins, neurons, or species, and then cells, brains, and dysbiosis. Candidate organizational concepts include self-organization, an energy landscape, a chemical engine that provides energy, and most importantly evolution and replication— as biological systems tend to move away from equilibrium. Because evolution has optimized the earlier principles of organization of organisms, this makes research more difficult. As a result, what we can observe is usually remnants of many interacting evolutionary processes.
Scientists who study human and animal behavior or social and economic systems explore patterns in human development, social behavior, and economic and urban data. For them, candidate organizational concepts include self-organizing groups/communities/societies and the role of the environment (whether climate change, new technologies, or social rules) in enabling emergent behavior. Research tools typically include the Santa Fe Institute's pioneering of subject-based and group-based modeling.
So the scientific strategies employed by physicists, biologists, ecologists, cognitive scientists, and archaeologists are very similar:
Use experiments or observations to determine the patterns of behavior that emerge in the system as a whole.
Decide what might be the most important connection or interaction between objects, individuals, or groups.
Construct and solve a simple model that incorporates these connections into an organizational concept that may explain the observed emergent behavior. (In doing so, it is often helpful to consider the organizational concepts used in models previously shown to explain the emergent behavior of other systems.) ）
Compare your results and predictions to experiments or observations.
3. Recent developments in the Santa Fe Institute on emerging
Recent books and articles written by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, as well as the Institute's new online courses and workshops, have greatly increased our understanding of emergent phenomena. Complexity: A Guided Tour is a Phi Beta Kappa award-winning work by computer scientist Melanie M. Melanie Mitchell introduces the public to the field of complex science and its methodology, as well as many examples of emergent behavior. The open online course Introduction to Complexity (complexityexplorer.org) explains many of the basic modules used to understand emergent behavior.
In Spin Glasses and Complexity, Dan Stein, co-chair of the Santa Fe Institute, and his co-author, Charles Newman of the University of California, Irvine, provide us with an important path to emerging behavior in science and society, namely spin glass, a system of random distribution of magnetically interacting particles. As Stein's doctoral thesis advisor, Phil Anderson, noted in a lecture at a symposium founded by the Santa Fe Institute in 1984: Areas where the concept of spin glass is an important component include statistical mechanics, computer science, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and perhaps protein structure and the immune system. A later book review in the journal Physics Today[7] expanded the list to communications, economics, and engineering. Frustration is a key concept in spin glass, and Peter Wolynes and his collaborators recently published a review, Frustration in Biomolecules, which provides a comprehensive review of the concept and many of its applications.
Figure 4. Different snowflakes | Image credit: Wilson Bentley
The Santa Fe Institute held two workshops that explicitly discussed how a general approach to understanding emergent behavior can be adopted. A workshop on Emergent Behavior Models in Complex Adaptive Systems, co-organized by Simon Levin, Carl Simon of the University of Michigan, and me (December 2007), invited Philip Anderson and John Hopfield, two early leaders of the Santa Fe Institute, and introduced their future chair, Jerry Sabloff. The conference was co-hosted by ICAM (Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter), an online distributed body. ICAM's goal is to study emergent behavior in quanta, soft matter, and living systems, and its research strategies are inspired by the Santa Fe Institute and the aforementioned paper co-authored by Laughlin and me. In September 2013, ICAM co-hosted a follow-up workshop with the Santa Fe Institute, "The Middle Way to Emerging Behavior in Science and Society," organized by four members of the Santa Fe Institute's Scientific Committee, namely John Holland, Simon Levin, Don Saari, and I.
These workshops raise many big questions about emergence for the scientific community. One of the important issues is the science-based "emergence" approach to solving social problems. The ultimate challenge is to establish an emergent-based framework for dealing with major social issues – an agreement or strategy that can inform policy and help design and evaluate experiments that solve the major problems facing our society. This is urgently needed so that science can more effectively inform decision-making when we face unprecedented social and environmental challenges.
4. Emergence, the Unification of the Santa Fe Institute and Science
In the first half of the 20th century, there was a constant effort to find a broader unity in science and to link the natural sciences and the humanities. Philipp Frank, a prominent scientist and philosopher who was a leading figure in his commitment to this, organized a conference by Frank's former doctoral student and Harvard colleague Gerald Holton to commemorate his retirement from Harvard University in 1957, entitled "Science and the Modern Worldview: Toward a Shared Understanding of Science and the Humanities," which Holton described in his 2004 memoirs.[9]
"In a speech at that conference, unlike most, Robert Oppenheimer perhaps had the foresight, perhaps prematurely, predicted that the goal of unifying science is now elusive: 'It may be a question of whether there is a way to achieve broader unity in our time.'" This unity can only be built on a structure that is completely different from what most of us imagine when talking about cultural unity ... The unity we can seek actually exists in two things. One is that knowledge that comes to us at such a terrible non-human speed has a certain order. The second is simple, we can eat together. What we ourselves, and through our conversations, can create is not a grand architecture of a global perspective, but a vast and complex web of intimate relationships, intellectual enlightenment, and understanding. ’”
More than half a century later, we are now able to respond to Oppenheimer (who is my mentor), and while there are many forms of order in scientific knowledge, scientists in the 21st century do have a unified paradigm and a common goal: to understand emergent behaviors that emerge in different forms. The ideas we share about emerging, and the way we acquire and utilize knowledge, bind us together and provide a way to bridge the gap between scientists and humanists. We, the scholars of the Santa Fe Institute, can be said to be one of Oppenheimer's legacies and can continue to work to make what he describes a "dinner conversation" a reality, to make the Santa Fe Institute a platform for collaboration, to a unified network of "intimacy, enlightenment, and understanding."
5. Postscript: The Emergence of Everyone
As we introduce ourselves, our colleagues, and the public at large to emerging, I would like to present two challenges to the Santa Fe Institute that relate to its potential role as the world's leader in science education.
First, given the importance of emergence as a paradigm for scientific unity, can the Santa Fe Institute disseminate information about emergence to learners of different ages around the world? For example, can we create an online course that introduces middle school students to how to learn science by studying emergent behavior and help them develop an emergent-based perspective on the world around them? Can we start with our Middle School program to increase the focus on emergent behavior in existing education and inject that perspective into the Santa Fe Institute's iconic summer school?
Second, can we create an online "portal encyclopedia"? It will be an easy-to-understand, non-jargonal archive of existing organizational concepts and principles, containing concepts and principles that have been successfully integrated into models that explain emergent behavior, and then can be continuously updated as new concepts are discovered.
I believe that the Santa Fe Institute has a responsibility for future scientists and future generations to collect and document what we have learned about emerging knowledge.
About the author
David Pines is a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a co-founder, past chairman of the Board of Trustees, and honorary co-chair of the Scientific Committee at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences and has made pioneering contributions to understanding quantum states of matter and international scientific collaborations.
bibliography
[1] D. Pines (ed.). 1988. Emerging Syntheses in Science. Addison-Wesley.
[2] G. Cowan, D. Pines, & D. Meltzer (eds.). 1994. Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality. Westview Press.
[3] P.W. Anderson. 1972. More is Different. Science 177: 393.
[4] R.B. Laughlin & D. Pines. 2000. The Theory of Everything. PNAS 97: 28.
[5] According to Wikipedia, reductionism can mean (a) a way to understand the nature of complex things by reducing them to their constituent parts, or simpler or more basic things; or (b) a philosophical view that a complex system is nothing more than the sum of its parts, and that the description of a system can be reduced to a description of its components.
[6] S. Boettcher (review). 2014. Spin Glasses and Complexity. Physics Today 67(1): 48.
[7] D.U. Fereiro, E.A. Komives, & P.G. Wolynes. 2013. Frustration in Biomolecules. arxiv.org 1312.0867.
[8] Gateways to Emergent Behavior in Science and Society. 2013. Participant posters and slides from the ICAM/SFI Workshop: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/events/workshops/index.php/Gateways_to_Emergent_Behavior_in_Science_and_Society
[9] G. Holton. 2004. Philip Frank at Harvard (lectures at Philip Frank conferences in Prague and Vienna)
This article is reprinted with permission from the WeChat public account "Jizhi Club", and this article is translated from medium.com.
Original link:
https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st-century-science-4324ac0f951e
Special mention
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