Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Here’s real emergent complexity: Start with one ant. It wanders aimlessly on the field. As do ten of them. A hundred interact with vague hints of patterns. But put thousands of them together and they form a society with job specialization, construct bridges or rafts out of their bodies that float for weeks, build flood-proof underground nests with passageways paved with leaves, leading to specialized chambers with their own microclimates, some suited for farming fungi and others for brood rearing. A society that even alters its functions in response to changing environmental demands. No blueprint, no blueprint maker.[2] What makes for emergent complexity? —There is a huge number of ant-like elements, all identical or coming in just a few different types. —The “ant” has a very small repertoire of things it can do. —There are a few simple rules based on chance interactions with immediate neighbors (e.g., “walk with this pebble in your little ant mandibles until you bump into another ant holding a pebble, in which case, drop yours”). No ant knows more than these few rules, and each acts as an autonomous agent. —Out of the hugely complicated phenomena this can produce emerge irreducible properties that exist only on the collective level (e.g., a single molecule of water cannot be wet; “wetness” emerges only from the collectivity of water molecules, and studying single water molecules can’t predict much about wetness) and that are self-contained at their level of complexity (i....