Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00193)

Just finished a great book I'm sure many of you out
there have stumbled across. "Complexity: Life at the
edge of chaos" By Roger Lewin (1992) (but I have the
1999 version). I have a quote from this book cited off
pages 152-3. I am sure some of you will find parts of
this quote familiar:

""I'm convinced consciousness is a bottom-up, emergent
phenomenon," said Chris [Langton], beginning to
sketch. He was drawing versions of his favourite
diagram, which shows global properties arising from
local interaction, the iconic image of emergence in
complex systems.

"OK, so I think consciousness is probably five or six
levels up," he said, drawing more diagrams. You mean
you have a series of systems, each producing some kind
of global property, and these global proerties
interact with each other to generate another level of
emergent properties, and so on through five or six
levels? "That's what I mean. It's heirarchical, many
levels up, and you have extremely distributed
properties." That looks horribly complicated I said,
difficult to get a handle on. "I'm sure it is, and it
may be impossible to describe the behavour at the
highest level. We may need to know the behaviours of
parts at some of the lower levels.""

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