Emergence
Thought, passion, love... this internal world we experience, including all the meaning and purpose in our lives, arises naturally from the interactions of elementary particles. This sounds absurd, but it is so. Scientists have attained a full understanding of all fundamental interactions that can happen at scales ranging from subatomic particles to the size of our solar system. There is magic in our world, but it is not from external forces that act on us or through us. Our fates are not guided by mystical energies or the motions of the planets against the stars. We know better now. We know that the magic of life comes from emergence.
It is the unimaginably large numbers of interactions that make this magic possible. To describe romantic love as the timely mutual squirt of oxytocin trivializes the concerted dance of more molecules than there are stars in the observable universe. The numbers are beyond astronomical. There are approximately 100 trillion atoms in each human cell, and about 100 trillion cells in each human. And the number of possible interactions rises exponentially with the number of atoms. It is the emergent qualities of this vast cosmos of interacting entities that make us us. In principle, it would be possible to use a sufficiently powerful computer to simulate the interactions of this myriad of atoms and reproduce all our perceptions, experiences, and emotions. But to simulate something does not mean you understand the thing—it only means you understand a thing’s parts and their interactions well enough to simulate it. This is the triumph and tragedy of our most ancient and powerful method of science: analysis—understanding a thing as the sum of its parts and their actions. We have learned and benefitted from this method, but we have also learned its limits. When the number of parts becomes huge, such as for atoms making up a human, analysis is practically useless for understanding the system—even though the system does emerge from its parts and their interactions. We can more effectively understand an entity using principles deduced from experiments at or near its own level of distance scale—its own stratum.
The emergent strata of the world are roughly recapitulated by the hierarchy of our major scientific subjects. Atomic physics emerges from particle physics and quantum field theory, chemistry emerges from atomic physics, biochemistry from chemistry, biology from biochemistry, neuroscience from biology, cognitive science from neuroscience, psychology from cognitive science, sociology from psychology, economics from sociology, and so on. This hierarchical sequence of strata, from low to high, is not exact or linear—other fields, such as computer science and environmental science, branch in and out depending on their relevance, and mathematics and the constraints of physics apply throughout. But the general pattern of emergence in a sequence is clear: at each higher level, new behavior and properties appear which are not obvious from the interactions of the constituent entities in the level below, but do arise from them. The chemical properties of collections of molecules, such as acidity, can be described and modeled, inefficiently, using particle physics (two levels below), but it is much more practical to describe chemistry, including acidity, using principles derived within its own contextual level, and perhaps one level down, with principles of atomic physics. One would almost never think about acidity in terms of particle physics, because it is too far removed. And emergence is not just the converse of reduction. With each climb up the ladder of emergence to a higher level in the hierarchy, it is the cumulative side-effects of interactions of large numbers of constituents that result in qualitatively new properties that are best understood within the context of the new level.
Every step up the ladder to a new stratum is usually associated with an increase in complexity. And the complexities compound. Thermodynamically, this compounding of complexity—and activity at a higher level—requires a readily available source of energy to drive it, and a place to dump the resulting heat. If the energy source disappears, or if the heat cannot be expelled, complexity necessarily decays into entropy. Within a viable environment, at every high level of emergence, complexity and behavior is shaped by evolution through natural selection. For example, human goals, meaning, and purposes exist as emergent aspects in psychology favored by natural selection. The ladder of emergence precludes the necessity for any supernatural influence in our world; natural emergence is all it takes to create all the magic of life from building blocks of simple inanimate matter. Once we think we understand things at a high level in the hierarchy of emergence, we often ignore the ladder we used to get there from much lower levels. But we should never forget the ladder is there—that we and everything in our inner and outer world are emergent structures arising in many strata from a comprehensible scientific foundation. And we also should not forget an important question this raises: is there an ultimate fundamental level of this hierarchy, and are we close to knowing it, or is it emergence all the way down?
