“In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole” (Wikipedia, retrieved October 2021).
With varying degrees of success, futurists and inventors throughout the twentieth century, including Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, and Viktor Schauberger, sought to harness and modulate nature’s emergent synergy. Bucky Fuller’s patent lawyer, Donald W. Robertson, alluded to the structural tensegrity (tensile integrity) that emerges from the highly functional shapes of geodesic geometry:
“The mind of the viewer, more often than not, is distracted by the picture so that he is not piqued into asking, “Why geodesic, what does that mean?”. The more visual questions are, “How big is it?”, and “What is it made of?” Big enough to cover a football field or even a city. And a geodesic dome can be made of just about anything – steel, aluminum, plastics, wood, even paper. It has in fact been built of all these materials. But a more truly revealing answer, once explained, is that a geodesic dome is really made of “geometry” (1974, p. 16).
In a paper titled “Dynamical Independence: Discovering Emergent Macroscopic Processes in Complex Dynamical Systems” (August 2021), cognitive scientists Lionel Barnett and Anil Seth delve more deeply into the notion of emergence. They suggest that beyond its synergistic properties, there can also arise a dynamical independence, where a phenomenon can display a “life of its own”, having attributes which give the impression of some new behaviour, structure, or organism:
“When we observe a large murmuration of starlings twisting, stretching and wheeling in the dusk, it is hard to escape the impression that we are witnessing an individuated dynamical entity quite distinct from the thousands of individual birds which we know to constitute the flock” (2021, p. 1).
Emergent dynamical independence at macroscopic scales is observed to evolve over time by its own rules, distinct and apart from those operating at its sometimes invisible microscopic level, on which it nonetheless supervenes or derives from (Barnett & Seth, 2021). Could the perspectival aspect of emergence perhaps speak to its more pervasive and parsimonious properties which are not often otherwise observed? What other phenomena exhibit emergent dynamical independence? Does this remind us of nature’s vast, interconnected dynamism more generally? Philosopher David Hume wonders, as:
“Every individual is perpetually changing and every part of every individual, and yet the whole remains, in appearance, the same. May we not hope for such a position, or rather be assured of it, from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter, and may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is the universe?” (1779, p. 47).
Barnett, L. & Seth, A. K. (August 2021), Dynamical Independence: Discovering Emergent Macroscopic Processes in Complex Dynamical Systems (pp. 1- 40). [PDF document] retrieved October 2021 from arvix:2106.06511v2 [nlin.AO] 6 Aug 2021
Hume, D. (1779), Design and God from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, reprinted in Minton, A. J. & Shipka, T. A. (Eds.), Philosophy: Paradox and Discovery Third Edition (1990), (pp. 36-48). New York, United States: McGraw-Hill.
Robertson, D. W. (1974) The Mind’s Eye of Buckminster Fuller. New York, United States: St. Martin’s Press.