The Game of Life: How Dumb

Particles Become Intelligent

Organisms
Matt Symonds
Feb 6
From Medium

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first
invent the universe”.

— Carl Sagan

Aww, the game of life. So full of wonder and complexity, right?

Actually, no, it’s not anything like that. At least not in British
Mathematician John Conway’s “Game of Life” which I’m going
to use as a segue.

By today’s standards, this game is more like a simulation than

what we would consider a game. It’s quite simple, really. You
have an infinite, two dimensional, orthagonal grid of squares.
Each square is either alive or dead, represented as either white
or black, empty or full, etc. You start with a few alive squares
and set some basic rules that determine the fate of any given
square.
Here is a simple example of Conway’s game.
See how the life and death of squares gives rise
to formations and new behavior?

At the end of this article, I’ll paste a link to where you can
observe this simulation play out, for your self.

As you can see in the above gif, what Conway’s game

accomplishes is effectively emergent organization. larger, more
complex patterns begin to manifest and along with these
patterns, emerges more complex behavior, new sets of rules.
Over time, these novel patterns and emergent behavior can, in
effect, give rise to an entirely new “Game of Life” with new,
more complex rules.

Conway’s game doesn’t work because of some creative idea. It

works because it is a literal example of how the entire universe,
your body and experience, politics, atoms, all things work. The
Game of Life is just an actual manifestation of what is all
around us and even what we are.

Simple, fundamental rules.

Physicists are always trying to unify the macro laws with the
subatomic. Why do so-called particles behave like waves? Why
doesn’t a cow behave like a wave? Okay, I’ve made some
generalizations, there. I’m talking about dumb things. I’ll leave
the smart things to smart people.

But seriously, trying to describe a cow or even something like

gravity using the rules of an electron, simply doesn’t work and
that’s what is so confusing, yet misunderstood. Trying to marry
these layers of reality is exactly the same thing as trying to
describe the emergent behavior in Conway’s game by
describing the rules of a single box. The new behavior is
irreducible to a single box. It doesn’t work when scientists and
philosophers try to marry the subatomic with the macro
because that’s not how any of this works.

Dumb things unintentionally give rise to complex things. They

do this by being simple and exhibiting a finite behavior. Maybe
something is positively charged, so it either attracts or repels
and that’s all it does. Simple “rules” facilitate the organization
of sufficient quantities of simple things giving rise to emergent
qualities and behavior.

Photo by Mehdi Torabi on Unsplash

What is a flower, actually?

If you break down a flower and place it’s pieces under a
microscope, do you just see more tiny flowers? No, of course
not. What you see is nothing like a flower.

Let’s say you’re seeing cells under that microscope. Those cells
look absolutely nothing like a flower and further more, those
cells behave in ways that are totally different from the
behavior of a flower. So, what is a flower?
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A flower grows, it has roots, organs, etc. and it interacts with

vastly different kinds of complexity such as other organisms, a
bee for example or even humans who plant and care for them.

A flower eventually succumbs to entropy and it’s little non-

flower units break apart and get shuffled back into the
microbial soup. These interactions are just another layer of
synergistic interaction with other forms of equal complexity.
The flower, the bees, the soil, the human, all these things
occupy a common order of emergence, a common order of
interactively compatible complexity. These things give rise to
yet further, more complex organization, they give rise to vast
ecosystems that exhibit entirely new characteristics and
behavior. You can not define an ecosystem by describing a cow
or even a pack of cows. The two are qualitatively, vastly
different. Just like the flower is absolutely different than the
synergistic components (cells, etc.) of which it is an emergent
quality.

What is a cell? What is as atom?

Are you beginning to see? There’s nothing there, but emergent
behavior. An atom isn’t made up of smaller atoms. An atom
isn’t anything. An atom vanishes as soon as you observe the
smaller things that make up an atom, the smaller things that
share no qualities or behavior, what-so-ever, with an atom.

It’s all just the same when you try to find yourself. The further
down you go, the less of your “self” you will find. In fact, my
favorite challenge to people is to find where “they” end and
everything else begins. In doing so, you’ll not only fail to find
yourself anywhere, but you’ll arrive at an ocean of subatomic
waves where the meaning of a self, a flower, Trump, all totally
evaporate.

Humans give rise to cultures, markets, economics, religions,

social movements, governments. I would agree that
government is hardly an example of dumb things making an
intelligent thing, but doesn’t it always move towards more
complexity? And isn’t it all obvious? Governments emerge and
interact with one another just like more complex organizations
emerge, exhibiting new behaviors and so, a new, exclusive level
of organization and interaction emerges.

Why would we assume that humans are in any way not also
bound to this fundamental, fractal self-organization through
basic behavior? Aren’t we also driven by basic rules, basic
behaviors and by being so, don’t we also organize into greater
things that can not be described by describing a single
individual?

If you can describe stock market price action using the

psychology of an individual person, I would like to make you
an employment offer.

So, what are your fundamental behavior-

driving rules?
Quite frankly, we fear death and we want to reproduce. There’s
your rules for The Game of Life. The dumb, synergistic
behavior that creates complexity.
There are lots of wild ideas about what the universe is. Many
different religious interpretations, simulation theory, etc. We
can continue to debate about what the purpose may be or if
purpose is even an applicable concept, but we don’t need to
look further than a blade of grass or your self, for that matter,
to find the formula by which the universe, this reality thing
and experience as we know it, are being procedurally
manifested.