Emergence – How Stupid Things Become Smart Together - video Dailymotion

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How can many stupid things combine to form smart things? How can proteins become living cells? How become lots of ants a colony? What is emergence?

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00:00An ant is pretty stupid. It doesn't have much of a brain, no will, no plan.

00:06And yet, many ants together are smart.

00:10An ant colony can construct complex structures.

00:14Some colonies keep farms of fungi, others take care of cattle.

00:19They can wage war or defend themselves.

00:22How is this possible? How can a bunch of stupid things do smart things together?

00:28This phenomenon is called emergence, and it's one of the most fascinating and mysterious features of our universe.

00:36In a nutshell, it describes small things forming bigger things that have different properties than the sum of their parts.

00:44Emergence is complexity arising from simplicity.

00:48And emergence is everywhere.

00:51Water has vastly different properties to the molecules that make it up, like the concept of wetness.

00:57Take wet fabric. If you zoom in far enough, there is no wetness.

01:02There are just molecules sitting in the spaces between the atoms of the cloth.

01:06Wetness is an emerging property of water.

01:09Something new, only created by a lot of individual interactions between water molecules.

01:15And this is sort of it.

01:17Many things interact under a certain set of rules, creating something above and beyond themselves.

01:23It turns out that more is different.

01:26This different property is itself a new thing, and that new thing can couple with other new things to repeat the process.

01:34You can imagine this as layers stacked upon each other, every layer made from more complex parts.

01:40Atoms form molecules.

01:42Molecules form proteins.

01:44Proteins make up cells.

01:46Cells make up organs.

01:48Organs form individuals.

01:50Individuals form societies.

01:53But how can something be more than the sum of its parts?

01:56How do ants form the sort of cloudy entity that is a colony?

02:00By following a rule set that produces order through chaos.

02:04For example, let's look at how an ant colony distributes jobs.

02:08Let's assume that a colony should have 25% workers, 25% caretakers, 25% soldiers, and 25% gatherers.

02:17Ants communicate their current job via chemicals.

02:20For example, a worker ant constantly secretes chemicals that say,

02:24I'm a worker.

02:26When ants meet other ants, they smell each other to gather information, telling each other their job and what they're doing.

02:32Both keep track of who they met in the past.

02:35Now, imagine an anteater kills most of the gatherers.

02:39If this isn't fixed quickly, the colony will starve.

02:43Many worker ants need to switch jobs, but how do you tell this to thousands of them?

02:48Simple. You don't.

02:51Our worker ant will still meet and smell other ants, but it will encounter almost no gatherers at all.

02:57It counts too few gatherers until it reaches a critical point, and then it changes its job.

03:04The worker becomes a gatherer.

03:06Other ants will do the same until, after a while, there are enough gatherers again.

03:11The balance is restored all by itself.

03:14The actions and interactions of an individual are random.

03:18You can't plan which ant will encounter which other ant,

03:21but the simple set of rules is so elegant that a colony's many operations emerge as a consequence.

03:28On an even more fundamental level,

03:30hundreds of millions of complicated molecules interact to maintain a robust and amazing structure,

03:36a being with vastly different properties than the sum of its dead parts emerges.

03:41The smallest unit of life, a cell.

03:44We still don't have a clear definition of what living things are,

03:47we just know they emerge from things that are not alive.

03:51Cells combine and cooperate, they specialize and respond to one another,

03:56and over time, we develop into complex organisms with remarkable capacities.

04:01Your arms and legs and heart are an incredibly complex and complicated system

04:07made of trillions of individual stupid things.

04:10And yet we breathe, digest, and watch YouTube videos.

04:15How do your cells know what to do?

04:18Think of the pacemaker cells in your heart.

04:21Billions of them need to send out an impulse just at the right moment to collectively create a heartbeat.

04:28Our cells exchange chemical information with their neighbor cells

04:31to see what they're up to and then decide what to do.

04:35If it's among a lot of cells that are working on the same task,

04:38it will start working on that task as well and sync up with them.

04:42There is no mastermind giving commands,

04:45just single units communicating with their neighbors and acting according to the feedback they get.

04:51What about our most important part?

04:53What is the thing that asks these kinds of questions?

04:58Is our consciousness then an emergent property of the cells in our brain?

05:03This question is too big and important.

05:06It deserves a video of its own.

05:09Some things that emerge are hard to define.

05:12You can't touch an ant colony, only its parts.

05:15It has neither brain nor face nor body.

05:19And yet the colony interacts with the world.

05:22Just like colonies emerge from ants, things emerge from humans like nations.

05:29What actually is a nation?

05:31Is it its population? Is it its institutions?

05:34Its symbols like its flag, colors or anthems?

05:38The physical things it makes like cities?

05:41The territory it occupies?

05:43All of these things are fluid.

05:46Populations change and are replaced.

05:48Institutions come and go.

05:50Cities can be constructed and abandoned.

05:53Borders have changed all the time for most of history.

05:56And symbols get replaced by new symbols.

06:00A nation has no face, no brain, no body.

06:05Are nations not real then?

06:07Of course they are.

06:08Just like ant colonies, nations interact with the world.

06:12They can change landscapes, wage wars, grow or decline, and they can stop existing.

06:18But they only exist because of a lot of humans interacting with each other.

06:23But not just nations.

06:25All the complex structures that surround us emerge from us.

06:29Even if we don't intend to, we are constantly creating.

06:33Communities.

06:34Companies.

06:36Cities.

06:37Societies.

06:38All of these things are entities that have fundamentally different properties and abilities than the pretty stupid apes they emerged from.

06:46We don't know why any of this happens.

06:49We just observe it and it seems to be a fundamental property of our universe.

06:54It may be the most beautiful and wondrous property of our universe.

Emergence – How Stupid Things Become Smart Together

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