Wednesday 25 July 2001

Pic of the day: Troll cities in Master of Magic kind of look like anthills, and the trolls kind of look like they have only one brain cell. I'm happy to say that my workplace isn't quite like this ...

Anthill inside

Perhaps it was the mention of "emergent behavior" in the booklet I was reading. Or perhaps simply that I finished reading just as we approached Kristiansand, the city where I work. (Or, as some might prefer to say, "the city where he is employed".) Anyway, I suddenly saw the city differently. Rather than seeing it as a landscape, I saw it as the sum of all the work put into those buildings.

It's not like all these people were trying to build a city. With the notable exception of the Danish king Christian IV, who drew the lines that were to become streets in the sand ... Christian's Sand, later Norwegianized to Kristiansand. But that was in the 1600s, if memory serves. It was certainly well before Denmark lost control of Norway in 1814. Few if any houses from that time remain. Much of the city center now consists of large shop and office buildings. The shop owner thinks of profit; the construction worker thinks of his wage. No one thinks of the city; and still it is the city that grows and thrives, when the shop owner's and the worker's grave markers are covered with moss. And this, my friends, is emergent behavior.

***

A city is often compared to an anthill. But the ants just drag pine needles and stuff home, then drop it. Humans search with purpose, and if they cannot find what they seek, they will trade for it. And they go back, and along with others they build their homes and shops and workshops and churches. And then they die. But their work goes on.

Kristiansand has ca 70 000 inhabitants, plus a few hundred students. By international standards it is hardly even worthy of being called a city. There are cities out there with millions of citizens. The human brain has billions of cells. Can you say "anthill inside"?

***

A neuron is not a small human. It is a cell, living a cell life, doing cell stuff: absorbing nutritients and oxygen, excreting carbon dioxide and other waste products. Energy is provided by burning sugar in mitochondria, small "cell organs" (organelles) that are in many ways cells themselves, with their own DNA and reproduction. (To the best of our knowledge, sperm mitochondria do not reproduce in the egg cell, meaning that all your mitochondria come from your mother. Chose your mother with care.)

When neurons become excited, they send out an electo-chemical impulse. The most common cause of excitement is an incoming impulse. Note that these impulses are not thoughts, any more than a brick is a cathedral. Nor is there any way a brain cell can know what part of a thought its particular signal is, or where it is meant to go. On the Internet, a message may pass through many servers but finally it reaches a machine which recognize the message adress as its own. But nerve impulses don't have an adress.

Thinking even one simple thought is like packing a building site with thousands of blind idiots, so many that they must pile atop each other. Then you hand them bricks, lots and lots of bricks. The blind morons wake up to an excited flurry of activity when given bricks. They pass them on to another blind moron who then passes it on, and so forth. When all the bricks are dropped at last, you have a cathedral. And this, my friends, is emergent behavior.

***

OK, that's not exactly an accurate description. Thoughts are not cathedrals (some of them particularly not) and even your most moronic neighbor has more than one functioning brain cell, believe it or not. But the fact remains: We have different levels, and each seems to make sense when studied at its own level. And yet there is no obvious connection between what happens on one level and the next. The mitochondria do mitochondrious stuff, which somehow makes the cell work. They seem to be serving themselves, but actually they also serve the cell. The cells do cell stuff, which somehow makes the human brain and body work. Again, there is no way the cell could know that. Humans do human stuff, which we know make perfect sense to us. But are we the end of the chain? Are we the top of the pyramid? Are we the goal of all things?

To the best of our knowledge (which is pretty good in this area) we are the only level with self-awareness, or even awareness at all in any traditional sense. (Cells react to stimuli, but in a rather automated way.) There is nothing to indicate that cities or nations or entire civilization can think, only accumulate the thinking of their citizens. And then suddenly you look at places like Macedonia or Palestina, and it looks to all the world like the People sacrifices individual lives without a second thought. I guess to these human brains it makes sense to tell your 10 year old kid to go throw stones at a heavily armed opponent. But from a distance, it looks more like an immune system throwing away white blood cells with reckless abandon, not caring a whit about the individual as long as the body is preserved.

Then again, I may be wrong. I just select the best thoughts I can find from all those who bubble up inside my head ... from the anthill inside.