Let’s start with what wouldn’t count as emergent complexity. Put a beefy guy in a faux military uniform carrying a sousaphone in the middle of a field. His behavior is simple—he can walk forward, to the left, or to the right, and does so randomly. Scatter a bunch of other instrumentalists there, and the same thing happens, all randomly moving, collectively making no sense. But toss three hundred of them onto the field and out of that emerges a giant Michael Jackson moonwalking past the fifty-yard line during the halftime performance.[*] There are all these interchangeable, fungible marching
...more
