This is an amazing video. They even carry off the skull and backbone! Ants are amazing. And let me emphasize that nobody "ordered" these ants to eat the gecko, each ant reacted to local stimuli and made predictable decisions based on those stimuli, resulting in large scale patterns - emergence! I'm boggling my mind right now thinking about how each thought i am having, including this one, is being produced in a similar way. But instead of ants reacting to pheremonal stimuli to eat a whole gecko, my neurons are reacting to chemical stimuli to develop ideas for a blog post! You're BLOWING MY MIND RIGHT NOW science, blowing my MIND.
Showing posts with label emergence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emergence. Show all posts
22 September 2011
07 September 2010
A Return to Patternicity, and its Mortal Enemy: Stochasticity
In a recent blog post (Emergence, Patternicity and the Wave) I touched briefly on the human tendency to seek out patterns. Like when we imagine feudal ant societies as the basis for ant colony behavior. The ants can be explained by simple rules governing individual ants--which isn't pure randomness--but sometimes we even insist on seeing order and organization where there really is nothing. And it doesn't help that randomness tends to be so organized-looking, following natural statistical laws that produce triple lottery winners, record breaking craps rolls, and identical twins separated at birth who marry women with the same name. But if you do the math, all of these phenomena are well within the boundaries of chance. In fact, with all the random people in the world doing all the random stuff they do every day, the chance of this kind of stuff just happening randomly is downright probable.
Randomness was the subject of a recent episode from WNYC's Radiolab (if you haven't heard a Radiolab episode yet, get on it, it's awesome). Jad and Robert chose to go with the more obscure and fancy sounding word for randomness: stochasticity. Stochasticity is, according to my dictionary, "the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan." It is what believers in luck and conspiracy and destiny laugh off. It is governed only by statistics, and has made several Las Vegas entrepreneurs disgustingly wealthy. You can kiss those dice as many times as you want, but stochasticity is not convinced.
The Radiolab episode had several fascinating stories, but the one that caught my ear (and inspired this post) was about a woman with Parkinson's disease named Ann who was addicted to gambling. And I don't mean that she lost a paycheck or two at online poker, I mean she was crippled by the need to gamble, morning, afternoon, and night. A high school English teacher on a state employee's salary, Ann lost more than $200,000 in a year. That's $200,000 dollars in quarters. Ann was genuinely, hopelessly, physically addicted to playing slots.
Ann describes her mindset as a continual, compulsive search for the secret to winning: she got three lemons in a row before winning last time, so maybe lemons had something to do with it. "The trick of a one-armed bandit," Read Montague, a professor of neuroscience at Baylor University, told The Boston Globe, "is that it provides us with the illusion of a pattern. We get enough rewards so that we keep on playing. Our cells think they'll figure out the pattern soon. But of course they won't." So Ann's gambling problem boiled down to her compulsion to see patterns where there were none--her natural patternicity. Patternicity is a word I borrowed from Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptic's Society. Allow me to quote from the blog post where I introduced patternicity, to save you clicking time:
Patternicity, argues Shermer, is a reaction that humans evolved in order to protect ourselves. The example he gives is that of a rustle in the grass, which may or may not be a deadly predator. Although it is far more likely that the rustle is just a trick of the wind, assuming the existence of the predator is a safer bet if you don't want to end up as somebody else's dinner.
And this natural, built-in tendency to see patterns around us is of course controlled by a natural, built-in chemical: the neurotransmitter dopamine. High levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia and other serious psychological disorders. Dopamine also just happens to be associated with body movement control, and low levels of it are the primary cause of Parkinson's symptoms. Aha! The pieces are starting to fit together, aren't they…
Ann was on a drug to control her Parkinson's symptoms, and this drug worked by imitating dopamine. No wonder Ann's patternicity was on a rampage! And she wasn't alone; The Boston Globe article cited recent medical studies that found that anywhere from 3 to 13 percent of patients on medication like Ann's develop severe gambling addictions or related compulsions.
This kind of overambitious patternicity is markedly different from the delusions of government conspiracy popularly associated with other dopamine related psychological disorders, but it seems quite possible that they both boil down to chemical imbalances that screw with our pattern recognition software. Our body is incredibly complicated, and as far as I can tell there is no part of our own anatomy more baffling and full of surprises than the brain. Tinker with its chemistry just a smidgen, and all kinds of crazy shit happens. And you thought you were in control...
Randomness was the subject of a recent episode from WNYC's Radiolab (if you haven't heard a Radiolab episode yet, get on it, it's awesome). Jad and Robert chose to go with the more obscure and fancy sounding word for randomness: stochasticity. Stochasticity is, according to my dictionary, "the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan." It is what believers in luck and conspiracy and destiny laugh off. It is governed only by statistics, and has made several Las Vegas entrepreneurs disgustingly wealthy. You can kiss those dice as many times as you want, but stochasticity is not convinced.
The Radiolab episode had several fascinating stories, but the one that caught my ear (and inspired this post) was about a woman with Parkinson's disease named Ann who was addicted to gambling. And I don't mean that she lost a paycheck or two at online poker, I mean she was crippled by the need to gamble, morning, afternoon, and night. A high school English teacher on a state employee's salary, Ann lost more than $200,000 in a year. That's $200,000 dollars in quarters. Ann was genuinely, hopelessly, physically addicted to playing slots.
Patternicity, argues Shermer, is a reaction that humans evolved in order to protect ourselves. The example he gives is that of a rustle in the grass, which may or may not be a deadly predator. Although it is far more likely that the rustle is just a trick of the wind, assuming the existence of the predator is a safer bet if you don't want to end up as somebody else's dinner.
And this natural, built-in tendency to see patterns around us is of course controlled by a natural, built-in chemical: the neurotransmitter dopamine. High levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia and other serious psychological disorders. Dopamine also just happens to be associated with body movement control, and low levels of it are the primary cause of Parkinson's symptoms. Aha! The pieces are starting to fit together, aren't they…
Ann was on a drug to control her Parkinson's symptoms, and this drug worked by imitating dopamine. No wonder Ann's patternicity was on a rampage! And she wasn't alone; The Boston Globe article cited recent medical studies that found that anywhere from 3 to 13 percent of patients on medication like Ann's develop severe gambling addictions or related compulsions.
This kind of overambitious patternicity is markedly different from the delusions of government conspiracy popularly associated with other dopamine related psychological disorders, but it seems quite possible that they both boil down to chemical imbalances that screw with our pattern recognition software. Our body is incredibly complicated, and as far as I can tell there is no part of our own anatomy more baffling and full of surprises than the brain. Tinker with its chemistry just a smidgen, and all kinds of crazy shit happens. And you thought you were in control...
08 July 2010
Emergence, Patternicity and "The Wave": Are we all crazy?
After reading Emergence by Steven Johnson, I was left wondering why we have so much trouble abandoning the watchmaker metaphor--which Johnson refers to as "the myth of the ant queen"--and accepting the idea that nature can regulate itself. Patterns occur in nature because individuals make decisions based on what's right next to them, and these decisions average out into big trends. Take ants (of course) for example: one forager ant meets five other ants that smell like foragers, and she decides to switch to nest maintenance. This tiny decision, when scaled up, creates an enduring ratio of foragers to nest maintenance workers in the colony that can last for decades. Yet we still can't drop the image of the dictatorial queen!
My own graduate work is on how people conceptualize things that are really, really big. So of course my first guess for what obstacle might be keeping our brains from accepting emergence was the scale necessary for the phenomenon to be possible. For example, let's say that one forager ant met five forager ants by accident, and she switched to nest maintenance unnecessarily. On a local level, that ant is going against the pattern. But when decisions about what job to do are made by hundreds or even thousands of ants, a stable ratio emerges. In the same way, there are always a dozen or so drunk baseball fans who throw up their arms too early or too late as "The Wave" moves around Dodger Stadium. But on a scale of thousands of Dodgers fans deciding individually when to throw their hands up, a stable wave pattern emerges that moves fluidly through the stands. We struggle to extrapolate this phenomenon to nature because, outside of sporting events, we don't usually hang around with tens of thousands of other humans.
My own graduate work is on how people conceptualize things that are really, really big. So of course my first guess for what obstacle might be keeping our brains from accepting emergence was the scale necessary for the phenomenon to be possible. For example, let's say that one forager ant met five forager ants by accident, and she switched to nest maintenance unnecessarily. On a local level, that ant is going against the pattern. But when decisions about what job to do are made by hundreds or even thousands of ants, a stable ratio emerges. In the same way, there are always a dozen or so drunk baseball fans who throw up their arms too early or too late as "The Wave" moves around Dodger Stadium. But on a scale of thousands of Dodgers fans deciding individually when to throw their hands up, a stable wave pattern emerges that moves fluidly through the stands. We struggle to extrapolate this phenomenon to nature because, outside of sporting events, we don't usually hang around with tens of thousands of other humans.
29 June 2010
Emergence: It's not just about ants, but sperm, and cities, and flowers, and computer programming and...
I don't often ponder theology, especially not publicly. But my obsession with social insects has led me to start reading about a phenomenon that I find, well, somewhat divine. And yet at the same time this phenomenon is utterly mundane--the epitome of designerlessness. It's called "emergence."
Emergence is the invisible hand described by Adam Smith, at work not only in free markets, but in the organization of almost everything in the natural world. (I highly recommend the book Emergence by Steven Johnson. He lays out several fascinating examples of emergence in nature, and talks about how the phenomenon will apply to our technology in the future. The book was written before social networking and Wikipedia, so it could use a second edition, but it is fascinating nonetheless.)
Emergence guides the development of a fetus, dictates when the cherry blossoms appear, and creates thoughts from electrical impulses. And, of course, emergence is at the heart of why ants are so darn cool. Enduring systems of positive and negative feedback on a very local scale will inevitably create structure on very large scales, and that's it. The system itself is the designer, with each component doing his (or more likely her) part. The power of creation is not outside of nature, but within it.
Emergence is the invisible hand described by Adam Smith, at work not only in free markets, but in the organization of almost everything in the natural world. (I highly recommend the book Emergence by Steven Johnson. He lays out several fascinating examples of emergence in nature, and talks about how the phenomenon will apply to our technology in the future. The book was written before social networking and Wikipedia, so it could use a second edition, but it is fascinating nonetheless.)Emergence guides the development of a fetus, dictates when the cherry blossoms appear, and creates thoughts from electrical impulses. And, of course, emergence is at the heart of why ants are so darn cool. Enduring systems of positive and negative feedback on a very local scale will inevitably create structure on very large scales, and that's it. The system itself is the designer, with each component doing his (or more likely her) part. The power of creation is not outside of nature, but within it.
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