Emergence, Consciousness and the Promise of the Sun Reborn
Path Notes #8
I’m sitting here in the darkness of the winter solstice dawn. There’s a faint glow on the eastern horizon.
I’m listening to a beautiful modern version of one of the oldest known songs in the English language.
And I’m thinking about emergence.
It’s probably the most important, perhaps the simplest and generally the least understood of all the complexity properties.
Emergence is how the complex unfolds from the simple. The coherent from the chaotic. The future from the present.
And as the light of the solstice sun suddenly streams across the ragged mountains, it brings to mind so many layers of emergence - from the physical to the biological to the cultural.
We’ll often talk about catalyzing emergence as a kind of adaptive strategy or deliberate leadership intervention. It’s an oblique and potent form of systems influence for working in situations of high complexity. By working with key variables - relationships, boundaries, connections, constraints, rewards, attractors etc. – leaders are creating the conditions that can result in the emergence of new innovations, processes, patterns or even whole system states. Such an approach often begins with bringing a new level of curiosity, attention and appreciation to a complex system – particularly at its margins and fertile ‘edges’. To see and learn from it with new eyes. To cultivate a new quality of awareness.
Because the future is always alive somewhere in the system.
Catalyzing emergence can be a way of working with nature – something that has been understood and described in different ways by virtually every cultural tradition at one point or another. The Tao Te Ching represents one of the earliest attempts to write down the principles of such a Way – while also acknowledging the inherent paradox of that task.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know.
With that in mind, I’d like to step back from emergence as yet another instrumental strategy in the complexity leader’s toolkit, and just sit with some of its mysteries for a while.
As I have come to understand it, emergence is a way to describe the mysterious and beautiful process by which new patterns and structures arise in self-organizing systems and new levels of complexity arise from multiple simple interactions. It is the core dynamic by which life evolves and complexifies. adrienne maree brown articulates it beautifully in her book Emergent Strategy:
Cells may not know civilization is possible. They don’t amass as many units as they can sign up to be the same. No—they grow until they split, complexify. Then they interact and intersect and discover their purpose—I am a lung cell! I am a tongue cell!—and they serve it. And they die. And what emerges from these cycles are complex organisms, systems, movements, societies.
It's worth sitting with that for a while. It catches something of the way in which ‘higher’ patterns of order emerge from ‘lower’ ones. They are not designed and created from above – they emerge from the living relationships between the ‘parts’ of a system.
You’ve watched this process unfold many times. And yet, from the perspective of so many explanatory frameworks - from monotheism to dialectical materialism - it’s a deeply radical and even unsettling idea.
Because in many ways, emergence represents the precise opposite of both creationism and central planning.
The Creator as an emergent property of Creation!
This phenomenon – unplanned patterns and properties emerging from a web of relationships – is everywhere! Some years ago I read complexity scholar Benyamin Lichtenstein’s mighty tome of a book Generative Emergence where he identified eight distinct patterns of emergence within systems from the sub-atomic to the social:
- Relational properties: phenomena like temperature or pressure that emerge from the interaction of molecules. A classic example is the wetness of water – which cannot be predicted from the properties of either hydrogen or oxygen atoms.
- Exo-organization: when high energy is pushed/directed into a contained system, it can result in new degrees of order such as laser light or dissipative structures like whirlpools.
- Computational order: ordered patterns and stable structures that are not programmed but emerge due to simple rules for action and interaction such as moving screen savers.
- Autocatalysis: the building block of life – from DNA replication to snowflake formation – where the product of a particular reaction catalyzes further reaction. It’s how patterns of order emerge within chemical and biological systems. Form begets form.
- Symbiogenesis: the biological version of a successful corporate merger. Here one organism envelops another to create a new biological form such as the creation of eukaryotic cells - which make up all life forms with DNA - through an earlier process of enveloping of mitochondria within them. As a result, cellular functions – such as photosynthesis - became far more efficient.
- Collaborative emergence: dynamic structures that arise through the interaction of many agents/organisms guided by simple rules such as V-patterns of migrating geese, complex flocking behaviours exhibited by birds and fish, termite hills or vehicle traffic. It also describes the improvisational patterns in a jam band or a group of jazz musicians. The meta-level emergence is an unplanned result of purely local interaction.
- Generative emergence: some form of social entity or stable pattern arises that offers value - strategies, products, services, offerings, adaptations etc. valued by others. An example would be Wikipedia that generated an new way for collectively creating and engaging with knowledge.
- Collective action: if I understand Lichtenstein correctly, this is a form of generative emergence characterized by intentionality where systems agents (leaders/collectives) attempt to catalyze patterns of emergence that lead to creation and change within social systems.
I find Lichtenstein’s taxonomy of emergence interesting and insightful. But it also warns us of the kind of hubris that we humans so often display when we try to manipulate things we don’t really understand. Because our collective actions intended to lead to positive system outcomes, invariably result in some form of unplanned and unforeseen emergent.
It’s been said before but it’s such a central idea that it’s worth reiterating. We can’t control complex living systems; we can only disturb them! Our interventions (leadership moves/experiments) disrupt the existing relational dynamics and new things start to happen.
Emergent outcomes.
And sometimes they turn out to be the exact opposite of whatever we were trying to do in the first place!
Secularism for example could be seen as an unplanned emergent outcome of the Protestant Reformation. The War on Drugs led to more potent and easily transported narcotics and the rise of more ruthlessly efficient cartels. The list is long…China’s One Child policy, the Bolshevik revolution, Prohibition, standardized educational testing, social media platforms designed to build more connection….it’s an almost endless list.
Much of the heavy lifting we are called to do in these strange and dangerous days involves dealing with the unplanned and emergent outcomes set into motion by those who came before us!
It's why awareness and learning are so critical to any form of systems intervention.
Which brings us to consciousness.
At risk of grotesque over-simplification, we could say that contemporary theories of consciousness run along a spectrum.
In the left corner we have the materialists. Materialist theories of mind propose that human consciousness is an emergent property of the human brain, the body and the wider environment. Consciousness arises from complex interactions between non-conscious physical components and is thus a novel property that is not present in the base constituents.
Over in the right corner, we have the panpsychics who believe that consciousness - or proto-consciousness - is fundamental to all matter. Mind as a basic property of the universe. In some cases, complex consciousness can be seen as emergent property that arises from the relationships between simpler but still conscious elements (constitutive panpsychism).
You’ll notice of course that emergence is a throughline here - one that doesn't dismiss the importance of either matter or mind. While both perspectives still struggle with the so-called hard problem of consciousness (why do we subjectively experience consciousness the way we do?) an emergence lens reminds us that subjective experience is neither wholly reducible to physical processes as some strict materialists claim, nor wholly independent of them. It invites a holistic view. It might, for example, suggest that the universe has the potential for consciousness "built in," but it only manifests in complex systems like brains. But perhaps most importantly, emergence invites us to ask some different questions.
One of those would be a question of scale. What thresholds of complexity or organization are necessary for consciousness itself to emerge? A good one for the evolutionary neurophysiologists.
Its social equivalent, which will be important to anyone trying to support worldview shift at scale (or model it as a form of phase transition), is something like what thresholds of complexity or organization are necessary for new patterns of consciousness to emerge or consolidate?
A third question that I’m sitting with here on this solstice morning invites us to redraw the boundaries that seem to define the isolated human persona. What if the subjective experience of human consciousness is not so much a problem to be solved but an emergent property of an ever complexifying universe that is becoming aware of itself?
What if your consciousness, arising as it does like a brief and beautiful wave rolling in from the sea of existence, is part of how the increasingly complex fabric of creation develops sentience and comes to know itself.
It would suggest that the quality of your awareness has a significance that is almost beyond comprehension.
It doesn’t necessarily resolve the hard problem of consciousness.
But it does, of course, raise what we might call the really hard problem of consciousness.
Really hard because an expansive recalibration of consciousness invariably requires a commensurate recalibration of culture. If you’re conscious of something, it takes an effort to become unconscious again. If, for example, you truly see all people as your relatives, it becomes unthinkable to enslave or harm them. Such an awareness has reshaped entire empires.
If you no longer experience yourself as being separate from the world but rather as an integral part of the earth’s emergent sentience and living fabric, such an awareness might ask much of you. It’s the kind of awareness that, as David Whyte writes in his poem Sometimes, can make or unmake a life.
So as the world turns around the hinge of this the shortest day, let me express my gratitude for all of you who read these posts and for this astonishing world we’re all so privileged to call home.
Something beautiful is emerging out there in the fertile darkness my friends.
And I believe the nature of our awareness and being matter in ways that are literally world-shaping.
Deep peace to you all!
Julian