Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Use local control instead of global control. Let the behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top down. And while you’re at it, focus on ongoing behavior instead of the final result. As Holland loved to point out, living systems never really settle down. Indeed, said Langton, by taking this bottom-up idea to its logical conclusion, you could see it as a new and thoroughly scientific version of vitalism: the ancient idea that life involves some kind of energy, or force, or spirit that transcends mere matter. The fact is that life does transcend mere matter, he said—not because living systems are animated by some vital essence operating outside the laws of physics and chemistry, but because a population of simple things following simple rules of interaction can behave in eternally surprising ways. Life may indeed be a kind of biochemical machine, he said. But to animate such a machine “is not to bring life to a machine; rather, it is to organize a population of machines in such a way that their interacting dynamics are ‘alive.’” Finally, said Langton, there was a third great idea to be distilled from the workshop presentations: the possibility that life isn’t just like a computation, in the sense of being a property of the organization rather than the molecules. Life literally is a computation.