Emergence Explained Entities 09.25

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Emergence Explained: Entities and Functionality

Russ Abbott
Department of Computer Science, California State University, Los Angeles
and
The Aerospace Corporation
Russ.Abbott@GMail.com
Abstract. We apply the notions developed in the preceding paper ([1]) to discuss issues
such as: the nature of entities, the fundamental importance of interactions between entit-
ies and their environment, the central and often ignored role (especially in computer sci-
ence) of energy, and the aggregation of complexity.
1 Introduction
In [1] we characterized emergent phenomena as phenomena that may be described inde-
pendently of their implementations.1 We distinguished between static emergence (emer-
gence that is implemented by energy wells) and dynamic emergence (emergence that is
implemented by energy flows). We argued that emergence (of both forms) produces ob-
jectively real phenomena (because they are distinguishable by their entropy and mass
characteristics) but that interaction among emergent phenomena is epiphenomenal and
can always be reduced to the fundamental forces of physics. Our focus in that paper was
on the phenomenon of emergence itself. In this paper we explore the entities that arise as
a consequence of the two types of emergence, focusing especially on dynamic emer-
gence.
2 Material Entities
As human beings we seem naturally to think in terms of entities—things or objects. Yet
the question of how one might characterize what should and should not be considered an
entity remains philosophically unresolved. (See, for example, [Boyd], [Laylock],
[Miller], [Rosen], [Varzi Fall ‘04].) We propose to define a material entity as any instance
of emergence. What is fundamental to material entities is that one can identify the force
or forces of nature that bind them together and that cause them to persist in a form that al-
lows one to distinguish them from their environments—because of their distinguishable
entropy and mass properties.
Some material entities (such as an atom, a molecule, a pencil, a table, a solar system, a
galaxy) are all instances of static emergence. These entities persist because they exist in
energy wells. Biological entities (such as you and I) and social entities (such as a social
club, a corporation, or a country) are instances of dynamic emergence. These entities per-
sist as a result of energy flows.
1
In [1] we credited Anderson with being one of the first prominent physicists to argue that new laws of
nature, i.e., laws not derivable from physics, exist at various levels of complexity. While re-reading [Schrodinger]
we found the following. “[L]iving matter, while not eluding the 'laws of physics' … is likely to involve 'other laws
of physics,' hitherto unknown, which … will form just as integral a part of [the] science [of living matter] as the
former.” As we pointed out in the earlier paper, there are indeed new laws (such as the theory of computability),
which, while consistent with the laws of physics are not reducible to them.
Emergence Explained 1/33

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On the other hand, what might be considered conceptual (or Platonic) entities—such as
numbers, mathematical sets (and other mathematical constructs), properties, relations,
propositions, categories named by common nouns (such as the category of cats, but not
individual cats), and ideas in general—are not (as far as we know) instances of emer-
gence.2 Nor are intellectual products such as poems and novels, scientific papers, or com-
puter programs (when considered as texts). Time instances (e.g., midnight December 31,
1999), durations (e.g., a minute), and segments (e.g., the 20th century) are also not in-
stances of emergence. Neither are the comparable constructs with respect to space and
distance. Since by definition every material entity is an instance of emergence, all materi-
al entities consist of matter and energy arranged to implement some independently de-
scribable abstraction. Since none of the preceding conceptual entities involve matter or
energy, none of them satisfy our definition of a material entity.
2.1 Static material entities

Statically emergent material entities (static entities for short) are created when the funda-
mental forces of nature bind matter together. The nucleus of any atom (other than simple
Hydrogen, whose nucleus consist of a single proton) is a static entity. It results from the
application of the strong nuclear force, which binds the nucleons together in the nucleus.
Similarly any atom (the nucleus along with the atom’s electrons) is also a static entity. An
atom is a consequence of the electromagnetic force, which binds the atom’s electrons to
its nucleus. Molecules are also bound together by the electromagnetic force. On a much
larger scale, astronomical bodies, e.g., the earth, are bound together by gravity, as are sol-
ar systems and galaxies.
Static entities, like all instances of emergence, have properties which may be described
independently of how they are constructed. As Weinberg [W] points out, “a diamond
[may be described in terms of its hardness even though] it doesn't make sense to talk
about the hardness … of individual ‘elementary’ particles.” The hardness of a diamond
may be characterized and measured independently of how diamonds achieve that prop-
erty—which, as Weinberg also points out, is a consequence of how diamonds are imple-
mented, namely, their “carbon atoms … fit together neatly.”
A distinguishing feature of static entities (as with static emergence in general) is that the
mass of any static entity is strictly smaller than the sum of the masses of its components.
This may be seen most clearly in nuclear fission and fusion, in which one starts and ends
with the same number of atomic components—electrons, protons, and neutrons—but
which nevertheless converts mass into energy. This raises the obvious question: which
mass was converted to energy? The answer has to do with the strong nuclear force, which
implements what is called the “binding energy” of nucleons within a nucleus. For ex-
ample, a helium nucleus (also known as an alpha particle, two protons and two neutrons
bound together), which is one of the products of hydrogen fusion, has less mass than the
2
We simply do not understand how ideas as subjective experience come into being. When we learn how
subjective experience is connected to the brain, we may find that ideas (or at least their physical realizations) are in
fact instances of emergence and that one can identify the forces that hold ideas together. For now, though, we can’t
say that an idea as such is an instance of emergence since we don’t know how ideas are implemented physically.
Even if we did know how ideas are implemented in the mind, the physical instantiation of an idea would still not be
the same thing as the referent of the idea. (My thinking of the number 2 is not the number 2—assuming there is
such a thing as the number 2 as an abstraction.) So we maintain the position that concepts as such are not material
entities, and we do not discuss them further.

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sum of the masses of the protons and neutrons that make it up when considered separ-
ately.3 The missing mass is released as energy.
The same entity-mass relationship holds for all static entities. An atom or molecule has
less mass (by a negligible but real amount) than the sum of the masses of its components
taken separately. The solar system has less mass (by a negligible but real amount) than
the mass of the sun and the planets taken separately. Thus the entropy of these entities is
lower than the entropy of the components as an unorganized collection. In other words, a
static entity is distinguishable by the fact that it has lower mass and lower entropy than its
components taken separately. Static entities exist in what is often called an energy well;
they require energy to pull their components apart. Static entities are also at an energy
equilibrium.
Manufactured or constructed artifacts also exhibit static emergence. The binding force
that holds manufactured static entities together is typically the electromagnetic force,
which we exploit when we use nails, glue, screws, etc. to bind static entities together into
new static entities. A house, for example, has the statically emergent property number-of-
bedrooms, which is a property of (a way of describing) the house from a perspective that
sees it as an entity. A house implements the property of having a certain number of bed-
rooms by the way in which it is constructed from its components.
A static entity consists of a fixed collection of components over which it supervenes. By
specifying the states and conditions of its components, one fixes the properties of the en-
tity.
But static entities that undergo repair and maintenance, such as houses, no longer consist
of a fixed collection of component elements thereby raising the question of whether such
entities really do supervene over their components. We resolve this issue when we discuss
Theseus’ ship.
2.2 Dynamic entities

Dynamic entities are instances of dynamic emergence. Dynamic emergence occurs when
energy flows through and modifies an open system in a persistent way. As in the case
with all emergence, dynamic emergence results in the organization of matter in a way that
differs from how it would be organized without the energy flowing through it. That is,
dynamic entities have properties as entities that may be described independently of how
those properties are implemented. Dynamic entities include biological and social entities
—and, as we discuss below, hurricanes.
For dynamic entities its very existence—or at least its persistence as an entity—depends
on a flow of energy. Most dynamic entities appear to be built upon a skeleton of one or
more static entities. The bodies of most biological organisms, for example, continue to
exist as static entities even after the organism ceases to exist as a dynamic entity, i.e.,
after the organism dies. When those bodies are part of a dynamic entity, however, the dy-
namic entity includes processes to repair them. We discuss this phenomenon also when
we examine the puzzle of Theseus’ ship.
3
It turns out that iron nuclei “lack” the most mass. Energy from fusion is possible for elements lighter than
iron; energy from fission is possible for elements heavier than iron.

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2.3 Dissipative structures

Somewhat intermediate between static and dynamic entities are what Prigogine [Prigo-
gine] (and elsewhere) calls dissipative structures. A dissipative structure is an organized
pattern of activity that occurs when an external source of energy is introduced into a con-
strained environment. A dissipative structure is so named because in maintaining its pat-
tern of activity it dissipates the energy supplied to it.
Typically, a static entity becomes dissipative when a stream of energy is pumped into it in
such a way that the energy (a) disturbs the internal structure of the entity but (b) dissip-
ates before the static entity’s structure is destroyed. Musical instruments offer a nice
range of examples. Some are very simple (direct a stream of air over the mouth of a soda
bottle); others are more acoustically complex (a violin). All are static entities that emit
sounds when energy is pumped into them. Another commonly cited example is the col-
lection of Rayleigh-Bénard convection patterns that form in a confined liquid when one
surface is heated and the opposite surface is kept cool. (See Figure 1.)
For a much larger example, consider how water is distributed over the earth. Water is
transported from place to place via processes that include evaporation, atmospheric
weather system movements, precipitation, groundwater flows, ocean current flows, etc.
Taken as a whole, these cycles may be understood as a dissipative structure which is
shaped by gravity and the earth’s fixed geographic structure and driven primarily by solar
energy, which is pumped into the earth’s atmosphere.
Our notion of a dissipative entity is broad enough to include virtually any energy-con-
suming device. Consider a digital clock. It converts an inflow of energy into an ongoing
series of structured activities—resulting in the display of the time. Does a digital clock
qualify as a dissipative entity? One may argue that since the design of a digital clock lim-
its the ways in which it can respond to the energy inflow it receives it should not be char-
acterized as a dissipative entity. But any static entity has only a limited number of ways
in which it can respond to an inflow of energy. We suggest that it would be virtually im-
possible to formalize a principled distinction between Rayleigh-Bénard convection cycles
and the structured activities within a digital clock.4, 5
Just as emergent phenomena are typically limited to feasibility ranges, dissipative entities
also operate in distinct ways within various energy intensity ranges. Blow too gently into
a recorder (the musical instrument) and nothing happens. Force too much air through it,
and the recorder will break. Within the range in which sounds are produced, different in-
tensities will produce either the intended sounds or unintended squeaks. Thus dissipative
entities exhibit phases and phase transitions that depend on the intensity of the energy
they encounter. The primary concern about global warming, for example, is not that the
temperature will rise by a degree or two—although the melting of the ice caps is poten-
tially destructive—but the possibility that a phase transition will occur and that the over-
all global climate structure, including atmospheric and oceanic currents, will change dis-
4
Another common example of a dissipative structure is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, which in
some ways is a chemical clock. We design digital clocks to tell time. We didn’t design BZ reactions to tell time. Yet
in some sense they both do. That one surprises us and the other doesn’t shouldn’t mislead us into putting them into
different categories of phenomena.
5
In all our examples, the form in which energy is delivered also matters. An electric current will produce
different effects from a thermal energy source when introduced into a digital clock and a Rayleigh-Bénard device.

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astrously. When energy is flowing through it, a dissipative entity is by definition far from
equilibrium. So a dissipative entity is a static entity that is maintained in a far-from-equi-
librium state.
The sorts of dissipative structures we have been discussing are not fully qualified dynam-
ic entities, however, because they do not include mechanisms to repair their static struc-
tures. Their static structures are maintained by other forces than those produced by the
energy that flows through them. In particular, dissipative structures do not cycle material
through themselves as all fully qualified dynamic entities do. As we will see below, one
consequences of this fact is that dynamic entities do not easily supervene over their ma-
terial components. Static entities and dissipative structures do.
2.4 Hurricanes as dynamic entities

Most dynamic entities are biological or social, but there are some naturally occurring dy-
namic entities that are neither. Probably the best known are hurricanes. A hurricane oper-
ates as a heat engine in which condensation—which replaces combustion as the source of
heat—occurs in the upper atmosphere. A hurricane involves a greater than normal pres-
sure differential between the ocean surface and the upper atmosphere. That pressure dif-
ferential causes warm moist surface air to rise. When the moisture-laden air reaches the
upper atmosphere, which is cooler, it condenses, releasing heat. The heat warms the air
and reduces the pressure, thereby maintaining the pressure differential.6 (See Figure 3.)
Hurricanes are objectively recognizable as entities. They have reduced entropy—hur-
ricanes are quite well organized—and because of the energy flowing through them, they
have more mass than their physical components (the air and water molecules making
them up) would have on their own. Hurricanes illustrate the case of a dynamic entity with
no static structure. When a hurricane loses its external source of energy—typically by
moving over land—the matter of which it’s composed is no longer bound together into an
organized structure. The hurricane’s entropy rises and its excess mass dissipates until it
no longer exists as an entity.
2.5 Petty reductionism fails for dynamic entities—for all practical pur-
poses
Petty reductionism is another way of saying that an entity supervenes over the matter of
which it is composed: fixing the properties of the matter of which an entity is composed
fixes the properties of the entity.7 Hurricanes illustrate a difficulty with supervenience and
petty reductionism for dynamic entities.
The problem is that from moment to moment new matter is incorporated into a hurricane
and matter then in a hurricane leaves it. Define as what we might call the hurricane’s su-
pervenience base the smallest collection of matter over which a hurricane supervenes.
Since matter cycles continually through a hurricane, a hurricane’s supervenience base
6
A characterization of a hurricane as a vertical heat engine may be found in Wikipedia. (URL as of
9/1/2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane.) The preceding hurricane description was paraphrased from
NASA, “Hurricanes: The Greatest Storms on Earth,” (URL as of 3/2005
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Hurricanes/.)
7
Recall that a set of higher level predicates is said to supervene over a set of lower level predicates if a
configuration of truth values for the lower level predicates determines the truth values for the higher level predic-
ates. We are using the term supervene loosely to say that an entity supervenes over its components.

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consists of the entire collection of matter that is part of a hurricane over its lifetime. It
would seem that a hurricane’s supervenience base must be significantly larger than the
amount of matter that constitutes a hurricane at any moment. Because a hurricane’s su-
pervenience base is so much larger than the matter that makes it up at any moment the
fact that a hurricane supervene over its supervenience base is not very useful. Other than
tracking all the matter in a hurricane’s supervenience base, there is no easy reducibility
equation that maps the properties of a hurricane’s supervenience base onto properties of
the hurricane itself.
Furthermore, the longer a hurricane persists, the larger its supervenience base—even if
the hurricane itself maintains approximately the same size during its lifetime. Much of
the matter in a hurricane’s supervenience base is likely also to be included in the super-
venience bases of other hurricanes. Like Weinberg’s example of quarks being composed
(at least momentarily) of protons, hurricanes are at least partially composed of each other.
Thus just as Weinberg gave up on the usefulness of petty reductionism in particle physics,
we must also give up on the usefulness of petty reductionism and supervenience for dy-
namic entities as well.
2.6 Minimal dynamic entities

In [Kauffman] Kauffman asks what the basic characteristics are of what he calls
autonomous agents. He suggests that the ability to perform a thermodynamic (Carnot en-
gine) work cycle is fundamental. In what may turn out to be the same answer we suggest
looking for the minimal biological organism that perpetuates itself by consuming energy.
Bacteria seem to be too complex. Viruses and prions don’t consume energy. Hurricanes
aren’t biological. Is there anything in between? Such a minimal entity may help us under-
stand the yet-to-be-discovered transition from the inanimate to the animate.
Since self-perpetuation does not imply reproduction (as hurricanes illustrate), simple self-
perpetuating organisms may not be able to reproduce. That means that if they are to exist,
it must be relatively easy for them to come into being directly from inorganic materials.
Self-perpetuating organisms may not include any record—like DNA—of their design (as
hurricanes again illustrate). One wouldn’t expect to see evolution among such organisms
—at least not evolution that depends on modifications of such design descriptions.
2.7 Biological and social dynamic entities

Biological and social entities also depend on external energy sources. Photosynthesizing
plants depend on sunlight. Other biological entities depend on food whose energy re-
sources were almost always derived originally from the sun. Social entities may be organ-
ized along a number of different lines. In modern economies, money is a proxy for en-
ergy. Economic entities persist only so long as the amount of money they take in exceeds
the amount of money they expend. Political entities depend on the energy contributed—
either voluntarily, through taxes, or conscription—of their subjects. Smaller scale social
entities such as families, clubs, etc., depend on the contributions of their member. The
contributions may be voluntary, or they may result from implicit (social norms) or expli-
cit coercion. No matter the immediate source of the energy or the nature of the compon-
ents, biological and social entities follow the same pattern we saw with hurricanes.

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• They have reduced entropy (greater order) than their components would have on their
own.
• They depend on external sources of energy to stay in existence. Because of the energy
flowing through them, the have more mass than their components would on their
own.
• The material that makes them up changes with time. Their supervenience bases are
generally much larger than the material of which they are composed at any moment.
The longer a dynamic entity persists, the greater the difference. Petty reductionism
either fails entirely, or it becomes a historical narrative. One can tell the story of a
country, for example, as a history that depends in part on who its citizens are at vari-
ous times. One would have a difficult time constructing an equation that maps a coun-
try’s supervenience base (which includes its citizens over all time) to its state at any
moment unless that mapping were in effect a historical record.
• Most biological and social entities have other dynamic entities as components. These
component entities have “divided loyalties” in some sense—to themselves and to oth-
er dynamic entities of which they are also components.
Even though dynamic entities persist in time, and even though the properties of dynamic
entities are a function of the properties of their components at any moment, since the
components of which a dynamic entity is composed change from time to time, there is no
direct way to map the properties of the components a dynamic entity will have over its
lifetime to the moment-to-moment properties of the entity itself except as a narrative, i.e.,
a story which describes which elements happen to become incorporated into the dynamic
entity at various moments during its lifetime.
All entities are subject to the effect of interactions with elements they encounter in their
environments. Dynamic entities are doubly vulnerable. They are also subject to having
their components replaced by other components. To persist they must have defenses
against infiltration by elements which once incorporated into their internal mechanisms
may lead to their weakening or destruction. Social entities are more vulnerable still.
Some of their components (people) are simultaneously components of other social entit-
ies—often resulting it divided loyalties.
2.8 Theseus’ ship

The notion of a social dynamic entity can help resolve the paradox of Theseus’s ship, a
mythical ship that was maintained (repaired, repainted, etc.) in the harbor at Athens for so
long that all of its original material was replaced. The puzzle arises when one asks wheth-
er the ship at some time t is “the same ship” as it was when first docked-or at any other
time.
This becomes a puzzle when one thinks of Theseus’ ship as identical to the material of
which it is composed at any moment, i.e., that the ship supervenes over its components.
Since any modification to the ship, e.g., new paint, will change the material of which the
ship is composed, it would seem that the repainted ship is not “the same ship” as it was
before it was repainted. The repainted ship consists of a different set of components. If
supervenience holds, the repainted ship cannot be the same ship as it was before being re-

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painted since by supervenience, its properties are fixed by the properties of its compon-
ents, and its components are different from what they were before.
This cycling of material through an entity wasn’t a problem when we were discussing
hurricanes or social or biological entities—we had already given up on the usefulness of
petty reductionism and supervenience for dynamic entities. In those cases we thought of
the entity as including not only its momentary physical components but as also including
the energy that was flowing through it along with means to slough off old material and to
incorporate new material into its structure.
To apply the same perspective to Theseus’ ship, think of the physical ship along with the
maintenance process as a social entity—call it the Theseus ship maintenance entity. That
social entity, like all social entities, is powered by an external energy source. (Since the
maintenance of Theseus’ ship is a governmental or societal function, the energy source is
either voluntary, conscripted, or taxation.) The Theseus ship maintenance entity uses en-
ergy from its energy source to do the maintenance work on the ship. Just as the material
that makes up a hurricane changes from time to time and the people who are employed by
a business change from time to time, the physical ship also changes from time to time.
But like a hurricane and a company, the ship maintenance entity persists over time.
2.9 Thermodynamic computing: nihil ex nihilo

In Computer Science we assume that one can specify a Turing Machine, a Finite State
Automaton, a Cellular Automaton, or a piece of software, and it will do its thing—for
free. Turing machines run for free. Cellular Automata run for free. The Game of Life runs
for free. Software in general runs for free. Even agents in agent-based models run for
free.8
Although that may be a useful abstraction, we should recognize that we are leaving out
something important. In the real world dynamic material entities require energy. To run
real software in the real world requires a real computer, which uses real energy. The prob-
lem is that the real energy that drives software is not visible to the software itself. Soft-
ware does not have to pay its own energy bill.
A theory of thermodynamic computation is needed to bring together the notions of energy
and computing. Until we find a way to integrate the real energy cost of running software
into the software itself, we are unlikely to build a successful model of artificial life.
2.10 Self-perpetuation
The key to any entity is its means of self-perpetuation. Static entities are easy. They are
held together by their status in energy wells. Dynamic entities are more complex. Each
has its own way of holding itself together.
Frank X’s Life of the Cell is a wonderful discussion of how cells work. Apparently we
don’t know how to create cells. They copy themselves. We don’t know where the first
one came from. But hurricanes are created all the time. We have invented means to create
economic entities (corporations), but they too require at a minimal a yearly fee to persist.
8
Many agent-based and artificial life models acknowledge the importance of energy by imposing an artifi-
cial price for persistence, but we are not aware of any in which the cost of persistence is fully integrated into the
functioning of the entity.

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Social organizations have their own self-perpetuating designs. It is partly custom, partly
charter and rules of organization, and partly built into us as social beings.
Evolution and self-organization (from scratch) is not fundamental to entities. What is fun-
damental is the existence of a design which is capable of perpetuating itself.
3 Entities and functionality

Once—but not before—one has established the notion of an entity, it becomes possible to
talk about the interaction. This is a critical step. Until we establish that entities can be dif-
ferentiated from their environments—and hence also from each other—it makes no sense
to talk about an interaction either between an entity and its environment or among entit-
ies. But once one has established the possibility of distinguishable entities it then makes
sense to talk about how they interact.
3.1 Interaction among/between entitles

In the earlier paper, we argued that all interactions are epiphenomenal. Is that consistent
with the position that entities can interact at all? If all interactions are simply combina-
tions of primitive forces, what does it mean to say that an entity as such interacts at all?
In our earlier example, we talked about the interaction between patterns in the Game of
Life. Similarly, one can talk about the interaction between Newtonian objects, e.g., two
(ubiquitous) Newtonian billiard balls. When two Newtonian objects interaction, the entit-
ies that exist after the interaction are almost never identical to the entities that existed pri-
or to the interaction. If one looks carefully enough, the post-reaction entities, will almost
certainly have more or fewer atoms or molecules than the pre-interaction entities. Yet the
post- reaction entities will have enough in common with the pre-reaction entities that we
are comfortable identifying them with each other. This is true of Newtonian entities, and
it is true of almost all interacting entities, static or dynamic.
Like interaction among static entities interactions among dynamic entities also depends
on the entities. Two obvious examples are interactions among people. Sex between biolo-
gical organisms (including people) is successful only when the participants are the appro-
priate organisms. This is the case at all levels—ranging from the physical (in which vari-
ous physical parts must fit together) to the cell level at which the gamete and the egg
must combine properly. Sex would not occur if only the components—e.g., organs or mo-
lecules, etc.—of the sexual partners were left along in a darkened room no matter how
sweetly the romantic music was playing.
Similarly symbolic interaction works only between entities that are capable of operating
at the symbolic level. Science is not in a position to explain how people operate at a con-
ceptual/symbolic level. Yet it is clear that we do. It is also clear that as symbolic entities
we interact with each other symbolically through language. We each are capable (to some
reasonably good approximation) of communication to each other what ideas are occur-
ring in our consciousness.
3.2 The reductionist blind spot

As suggested by our definition of emergence, there are two ways to describe an entity.

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1. By giving an “external” description: by describing its functional/phenomenological

properties.9
2. By giving an “internal” description: by describing its structure and internal operation,
i.e., its implementation or how it works.
The traditional scientific agenda—i.e., the agenda of petty reductionism10—has been
(a) to observe nature, (b) to identify likely categories of entities, i.e., aspects of nature
that can be described independently of how they are implemented, and (c) to seek to ex-
plain the observed functionality/phenomenology of those entities by understanding their
structure and internal operation. In some cases we find that task (c) leads us to conclude
that what we had postulated as a type of entity was not, perhaps because we found that
different instances were implemented completely differently.
Once this explanatory task is accomplished, the reductionist tradition has been to put
aside an entity’s functional/phenomenological description and replace it with (that is to
reduce it to) the explanation of how that functionality/phenomenology is brought about.
After all, once one can explain in terms of lower-level mechanisms how some behavior or
appearance comes about one can presumably reproduce that behavior or appearance by
means of those lower-level mechanisms. Of course one then has the task of explaining the
lower-level mechanisms in terms of still lower-level mechanisms, etc. But that’s what sci-
ence is about, peeling nature’s onion until her fundamental mechanisms are revealed.
In the first paper, we argued that contrary to the reductionist tradition, an understanding
of how functionality is brought about does not eliminate the significance of that function-
ality. Our example was the implementation of a Turing Machine on a Game of Life plat-
form. A reductive analysis of a Game-of-Life Turing Machine may help us understand
how the Turning Machine is implemented, but it doesn’t help us understand the function-
ality that the Turing Machine provides.
To illustrate this in terms of natural science, suppose that what will eventually be determ-
ined to be Game of Life Turing Machines (somehow) occurred in nature.11 We will as-
sume that when these creatures are first discovered in the wild, the scientific community
doesn’t know how they function. After we observe them for a while, we find out that they
are capable of transforming inputs into outputs in reliable ways. Specialties within the
fields of biology, zoology, and ecology develop to study these creatures. Scientists study
the functions they compute, how those functions relate to each other, and how those func-
tions relate to the environment and the ecological niches within which the creatures are
known to exist. In fairly short order, it is determined that these creatures compute exactly
the Turing computable functions. They are thereafter known as bioTMs.
The bioTM biologists and microbiologists study how bioTMs function internally. They
examine the bodies of dead bioTMs, and using the newest micro-surgical instruments,
9
As we pointed out in [1], a functional description developed in anticipation of creating an entity to match
it is often known as a requirements specification, an abstract specification, or a functional specification.
10
Recall Weinberg’s characterization of petty reductionism as the “doctrine that things behave the way they
do because of the properties of their constituents.”
11
As a conceptual construct a Turing Machine is not an energy-based entity. There are no forces—either
static or dynamic—that hold Turing Machines together. Furthermore, Turing Machines have no means of reproduc-
tion; so it is even more unrealistic to suppose that they simply “occur” in nature. But as an example, this nicely il-
lustrates our point about reductionism.

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they study the internal processes of live bioTMs. What they find are strange patterns that
pulse through the bodies of bioTMs.
Let’s also suppose that there is a separate science that studies Game of Life patterns. Sci-
entists in that field build catalogs of patterns and study how those patterns interact with
each other. Some interactions create new patterns. Others destroy patterns. Etc. These in-
teractions are called pattern reactions. This discipline is comparable to what we know in
our world as chemistry.
It was soon discovered that bioTMs are built upon Game of Life patterns. A new field of
bioTM biochemistry develops. Scientists in this field study those Game of Life patterns
that are found to be important for bioTMs. In a major breakthrough, scientists discover
that all bioTMs are universal and that each has an encoding of its operation as quintuples
—which themselves are encoded as Game of Life patterns. This is comparable to our dis-
covery of DNA.
Once the biologists understand that Game of Life Turing Machines are all universal, they,
with the help of some of their mathematical colleagues are able to work out Computabil-
ity theory, and they are able to explain many of the features of Turing Machines that they
had previously only just been cataloged.
Let’s now suppose that there is yet another science which investigates the fundamental
nature of the Game of Life. These are the Game of Life physicists. Of course, since the
basic rules are not all that difficult, Game of Life physics soon reached a dead end. Once
the Game of Life physicists had discovered the Game of Life rules, the fundamental rules
underlying how nature works. There was no more to find out.
But once the Game of Life physicists work out the Game of Life theory of everything, the
Game of Life chemists were able to work out how Game of Life patterns come about as a
result of the Game of Life rules, and the Game Turing Machine biochemists were able to
figure out how Turing Machines functionality may be explained strictly in terms of Game
of Life rules.
Now that we know everything there is to know about Game of Life Turing Machines,
does it make sense to discard our understanding of Turing Machines as transducers that
transform input to output according to computability theory? The strict reductionists
claim that it does. After all, once one knows the fundamental facts about the Game of
Life, everything else is just a matter of historical accidents. Given an initial configuration
of what the chemists call patterns, it is only because of the Game of Life rules that the
Game of Life pattern reactions occur. Similarly, it is only because of an extremely un-
likely sequence of circumstances that Game of Life patterns happen to be configured in
such a way that Game of Life Turing Machines come into existence. But given that un-
likely historical event, the entire operation of the resulting Game of Life Turing Machines
is completely explained by the Game of Life rules. Because of the work of the Game of
Life physicists and chemists we now know that Game of Life Turing Machines are noth-
ing but Game of Life cells going on and off according to the Game of Life rules based on
the historical accident of an unusual initial condition.
What’s wrong with this point of view? This perspective throws away everything the
Game of Life biologists, mathematicians, and ecologists learned about Game of Life Tur-

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ing machines. The functionality of Turing Machines as transducers is important on its

own. We still want to know which functions are computable, how those functions interact
with other functions, how they interact with the environment in which they were found,
etc. These are independent facts about functions computed by Game of Life Turning Ma-
chines that cannot be deduced from either a study of Game of Life patterns or Game of
Life rules.
We use the term the reductionist blind spot to refer to the doctrine that once one under-
stands how higher level functionality can be implemented by lower levels of functional-
ity, the higher level is nothing more than a derivable consequence of the lower level.
Significantly, the reductionist tradition does not dismiss all descriptions given in terms of
functionality. After all, what does reductionism do when it reaches “the bottom,” when
nature’s onion is completely peeled? One version of the current “bottom” is the standard
model of particle physics, which consists of various classes of particles and the four fun-
damental forces. This bottom level is necessarily described functionally. It can’t be de-
scribed in terms of implementing mechanisms—or it wouldn’t be the bottom level. The
reductionist perspective reduces all higher level functionality to primitive forces plus
mass and extension. This is not in dispute. As we said in [1], all higher level functionality
is indeed epiphenomenal with respect to the primitive forces.
The difficulty arises because functionality must be described in terms of the interaction of
an entity with its environment. The fundamental forces, for example, are described in
terms of fields that extend beyond the entity. This is quite a different form of descriptions
from a structural and operational description, which is always given in terms of compon-
ent elements. When higher levels of functionality are described, we tend to ignore the fact
that those descriptions are also given in terms of a relationship to an environment. What
the reductionist blind spot fails to see is that when we replace a description of how an en-
tity interacts with its environment with a description of how an entity operates, we lose
track of how the entity interacts with its environment. The functionality of a Turing Ma-
chine is defined with respect to its tape, which is its environment.
This is particularly easy to see with (traditional) Turing Machines when formulated in
terms that distinguish the machine itself from its environment. The functionality of a Tur-
ing machine, the function which it computes, is defined as its transformation of an input,
which it finds in its environment, into an output, which it leaves in its environment.
What other formulation is possible? If there were no environment how would the input be
provided and the output retrieved? It is not relevant whether or not the computational tape
is considered part of the Turing Machine or part of the environment. All that matters is
that the input is initially found in the environment and the output is returned to the envir-
onment. A Turing Machine computes a function after all.
The same story holds for energy-based entities. Higher levels of functionality, the interac-
tion of the entity with its environment, are important on their own. An entity’s higher
level functionality is more than just the internal mechanism that brings it about. As higher
and more sophisticated levels of functionality are created—or found in nature—it is im-
portant to answer questions such as: how are these higher levels of functionality used and
how do they interact with each other and with their environment? Answering these ques-
tions fills in the reductionist blind spot.

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The importance of describing entities from both perspectives was captured nicely by Eric
Jakobsson12 when he characterized biology as being “concerned equally with mechanism
and function.” Below we extend Jakobsson’s perspective beyond biology, but we agree
with his insight that mechanism and function are both significant.
The two most important questions to be answered about higher levels of functionality are
(a) how do they come about and (b) how do they persist? Entities that are a result of static
emergence come about as a result of clumps of matter finding their way into energy
wells. They persist because energy is required to pull them out of their energy wells. En-
tities that are a result of dynamic emergence present a much more complex story—the
short version of which is that dynamic entities persists as long as their functionality en-
able them to acquire from the environment the energy then need to maintain themselves.
The theory of evolution answers the questions about how new functionality comes into
existence and how it persists with respect to biological functionality. We explore these
questions with respect to dynamic entities more generally in the rest of this paper.
The whole plus its environment is more than the sum of the parts plus their environment.
3.3 Functionality and the environment

Are Turing Machines a special case? Is the functionality of other entities also of interest?
To examine that question we first clarify what we mean by functionality. For us, function-
ality will always refer to how an entity interacts with its environment.
A traditional notion of emergence, e.g., [Stanford], is that “emergent entities (properties
or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’
with respect to them.” Or [Dict of Philosophy of Mind Ontario, Mandik] “Properties of a
complex physical system are emergent just in case they are neither (i) properties had by
any parts of the system taken in isolation nor (ii) resultant of a mere summation of prop-
erties of parts of the system.” (But he goes on to dismiss properties which are explain-
able as a result of the interaction of the components as not emergent. So nothing is emer-
gent in this view.)
What does it mean for there to be a new property? A property is an external description
of something. How can there be an external description, which is not defined in terms of
lower level constructs?
The only primitive properties (external properties, which are not described by internal
constructs) are forces (and mass and size and time)? How can there be new properties?
Entropy/order is also primitive? Only makes sense with respect to interaction with entit-
ies in the environment. E.g., catch a mouse? Reflect a glider? API? But API expressed in
what terms?
Functionality is an extension of the notion of force. A force is the functionality of primit-

ive elements that exert forces. Functionality is that same notion, how something acts in
the world, applied to higher level entities. Pheromones and ant foraging. Mouse traps.
Termite nest building. All require interaction with other entities on the same level as the
interacting entity.
12
At the Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, Ill, May
2006.

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Functionalism too, as its name implies, has an environmental focus. As Fodor points out,
[R]eferences to can openers, mousetraps, camshafts, calculators and
the like bestrew the pages of functionalist philosophy. To make a bet-
ter mousetrap is to devise a new kind of mechanism whose behavior
is reliable with respect to the high-level regularity “live mouse in,
dead mouse out.”
For a better mouse trap to be better, the environment must be reasonably stable; mice
must remain more or less the same size.
is that refers to macro-level properties which arise from micro-level elements but are not
reducible to them. construct has a property that its component elements don’t have.
Similarly, the functionality of any entity is defined with respect to its environment. As we
will see later, the interaction of an entity with its environment is particularly important for
dynamic entities because dynamic entities depend on their environment for the energy
that enables them to persist.
More generally, consider the following from Weinberg.
Grand reductionism is … the view that all of nature is the way it is
(with certain qualifications about initial conditions and historical acci-
dents) because of simple universal laws, to which all other scientific
laws may in some sense be reduced.
And this.
[A]part from historical accidents that by definition cannot be ex-
plained, the [human] nervous system [has] evolved to what [it is] en-
tirely because of the principles of macroscopic physics and chemistry,
which in turn are what they are entirely because of the principles of
the standard model of elementary particles.
Even though Weinberg gives historical accidents, i.e., the environment, as important a
role in shaping the world as he does the principles of physics, he does so grudgingly,
seemingly attempting to dismiss them in a throw-away subordinate clause. This is mis-
leading, especially given Weinberg’s example—evolution. Contrary to his implication,
the human nervous system (and the designs of biological organisms in general) evolved
as they did not primarily because of the principles of physics and chemistry but primarily
because of the environment in which that evolution took place and in which those organ-
isms must function.
We would extend Jakobsson’s statement beyond biology to include any science that stud-
ies the functional relationship between entities and their environment—and most sciences
study those relationships. The study of solids, for example, is such a science—even
though solids are static entities. What does hard mean other than resistance to (external)
pressure. Without an environment with respect to which a solid is understood as relating,
the term hard—and other functional properties of solids—have no meaning. Without ref-
erence to an environment, a diamond’s carbon atoms would still fit together neatly, but
the functional consequences of that fact would be beyond our power to describe.

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This really is not foreign even to elementary particle physics. The Pauli exclusion prin-
ciple, which prevents two fermions from occupying the same quantum state, formalizes a
constraint the environment imposes on elementary particles.13
Thus although neither Weinberg nor Fodor focuses on this issue explicitly—in fact, they
both tend to downplay it—they both apparently agree that the environment within which
something exists is important.
In summary, a functional description is really a description of how an entity interacts with
its environment. This is attractive because it ties both sorts of descriptions to the material
world. Emergence occurs when an interaction with an environment may be understood in
terms of an implementation.
3.4 Turing Machines and functionality

A Turing machine is explicitly a description of functionality. The best way to understand
a Turing machine is as a finite state entity interacting with its environment. In that sense a
Turing machine is a minimal model of what it means to interact with an environment. The
entity must be able to: (a) read the environment (b) change the environment (c) traverse
the environment. Computability results with the environment is unbounded. The environ-
ment need be no more complex than a sequence of cells whose contents can be modified.
But the real environment is multi-scalar and hence much more complex than a sequence
of read/write cells.
Also as formulated, a Turing machine interacts with a closed environment. It is only the
Turing machine itself that is able to change the environment. But environments need not
be closed. In an open environment the entity is far from equilibrium with respect to in-
formation flow. This is in addition to the fact that it is far from equilibrium with respect
to energy. PD is an example of how this makes a difference, but what more is there to say
about it? Entity knows more and more about the environment, which enables it to find out
more about where energy is available?
Hurricanes can’t read/write its environment; we do. The real mechanism is that the entity
is shaped by its environment. But the key is that the entity must be shapeable, i.e., it must
be able to change state and direction depending on the environment. Hurricanes can’t be
shaped in that way. So one minimal requirement is that the entity be an FSA. Second re-
quirement is that the entity be mobile and be able to change direction. Third is that the
entity be able to modify the environment.
3.5 Downward entailment of ideas

In the previous paper we discussed downward entailment. An area in which downward
entailment has a significant effect is downward entailment of ideas. We as human beings
are able to develop ideas and then see the world in terms of them. Because we do that we
interact with the world based to a great extent on our ideas. This means that the level of
abstraction within which ideas are generated and used determines to a great extent how
we as human beings affect the world. Considering how significant our role in modifying
the world has become, downward entailment from ideas is one of the most important ex-
amples of downward entailment.
13
This was pointed out to me by Eshel Ben-Jacob [private communication].

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3.6 What dynamic entities do vs. how dynamic entities work

In his talk at the 2006 Understanding Complex Systems Symposium Eric Jakobsson
made the point that biology must be equally concerned with what organisms do in their
worlds and the mechanisms that allow them to do it.
In our definitions, we have insisted on grounding our notions in terms of material objects.
An epiphenomenon is a phenomenon of something. Emergence must be an implemented
abstraction. But the abstraction side has until now been left abstract. What does it mean to
specify some behavior? What does it mean to describe an entity independently of its im-
plementation? At the most basic level, a function is specified in terms of (input/output)
pairs. More generally, functionality is specified in terms of behavior. All of these specific-
ations are given in terms of an environment. Even input/output pairs are defined in terms
of the transformation of some input (in the environment) to some output. That’s how it
works on a Turing Machine. The environment is the tape; the input is found on the tape at
the start of the computation; the output is found on the tape at the end of the computation.
Thus for us emergence is defined in terms of the contrast between the effect of an entity
on its environment and the internal mechanism that allows the entity to have the effect.
3.7 The whole is more than the sum of its parts

The whole plus the environment is more than the sum of its parts plus the environment.
The difference is the functionality the whole can bring to the environment that the parts
even as an aggregate cannot.
3.8 Stigmergy
Once one has autonomous entities (or agents) that persist in their environment, the ways
in which complexity can develop grows explosively. Prior to agents, to get something
new, one had to build it as a layer on top of some existing substrate. As we have seen,
nature has found a number of amazing abstractions along with some often surprising
ways to implement them. Nonetheless, this construction mechanism is relatively ponder-
ous. Layered hierarchies of abstractions are powerful, but they are not what one might
characterize as lightweight or responsive to change. Agents change all that.
Half a century ago, Pierre-Paul Grasse invented [Grasse] the term stigmergy to help de-
scribe how social insect societies function. The basic insight is that when the behavior of
an entity depends to at least some extent on the state of its environment, it is possible to
modify that entity’s behavior by changing the state of the environment. Grasse used the
term “stigmergy” for this sort of indirect communication and control. This sort of inter-
play between agents and their environment often produces epiphenomenal effects that are
useful to the agents. Often those effects may be understood in terms of formal abstrac-
tions. Sometimes it is easier to understand them less formally.
Two of the most widely cited examples of stigmergic interaction are ant foraging and bird
flocking. In ant foraging, ants that have found a food source leave pheromone markers
that other ants use to make their way to that food source. In bird flocking, each bird de-
termines how it will move at least in part by noting the positions and velocities of its
neighboring birds.
The resulting epiphenomena are that food is gathered and flocks form. Presumably these
epiphenomena could be formalized in terms of abstract effects that obeyed a formal set of

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rules—in the same way that the rules for gliders and Turing Machines can abstracted
away from their implementation by Game of Life rules. But often the effort required to
generate such abstract theories doesn’t seem worth the effort—as long as the results are
what one wants.
Here are some additional examples of stigmergy.
• When buyers and sellers interact in a market, one gets market epiphenomena. Eco-
nomics attempts to formalize how those interactions may be abstracted into theories.
• We often find that laws, rules, and regulations have both intended and unintended
consequences. In this case the laws, rules, and regulations serve as the environment
within which agents act. As the environment changes, so does the behavior of the
agents.
• Both sides of the evo-devo (evolution-development) synthesis [Carroll] exhibit stig-
mergic emergence. On the “evo” side, species create environmental effects for each
other as do sexes within species.
• The “devo” side is even more stigmergic. Genes, the switches that control gene ex-
pression, and the proteins that genes produce when expressed all have environmental
effects on each other.
• Interestingly enough, the existence of gene switches was discovered in the investiga-
tion of another stigmergic phenomenon. Certain bacteria generate an enzyme to digest
lactose, but they do it only when lactose is present. How do the bacteria “know” when
to generate the enzyme?
It turns out to be simple. The gene for the enzyme exists in the bacteria, but its expres-
sion is normally blocked by a protein that is attached to the DNA sequence just before
the enzyme gene. This is called a gene expression switch.
When lactose is in the environment, it infuses into the body of the bacteria and binds to
the protein that blocks the expression of the gene. This causes the protein to detach
from the DNA thereby “turning on” the gene and allowing it to be expressed.
The lactose enzyme switch is a lovely illustration of stigmergic design. As we described
the mechanism above, it seems that lactose itself turns on the switch that causes the
lactose-digesting enzyme to be produced. If one were thinking about the design of such
a system, one might imagine that the lactose had been designed so that it would bind to
that switch. But of course, lactose wasn’t “designed” to do that. It existed prior to the
switch. The bacteria evolved a switch that lactose would bind to. So the lactose must be
understood as being part of the environment to which the bacteria adapted by evolving
a switch to which lactose would bind. How clever; how simple; how stigmergic!
• Cellular automata operate stigmergically. Each cell serves as an environment for its
neighbors. As we have seen, epiphenomena may include gliders and Turing Ma-
chines.
• Even the operation of the Turing Machine as an abstraction may be understood stig-
mergically. The head of a Turing Machine (the equivalent of an autonomous agent)
consults the tape, which serves as its environment, to determine how to act. By writ-

DRAFT 10/18/2008
ing on the tape, it leaves markers in its environment to which it may return—not un-
like the way foraging ants leave pheromone markers in their environment. When the
head returns to a marker, that marker helps the head determine how to act at that later
time.
• In fact, one may understand all computations as being stigmergic with respect to a
computer’s instruction execution cycle. Consider the following familiar code frag-
ment.
temp:= x;
x := y;
y := temp;
The epiphenomenal result is that x and y are exchanged. But this result is not a con-
sequence of any one statement. It is an epiphenomenon of the three statements being
executed in sequence by a computer’s instruction execution cycle.
Just as there in nothing in the rules of the Game of Life about gliders, there is nothing
in a computer’s instruction execution cycle about exchanging the values of x and y—or
about any other algorithm that software implements. Those effects are all epiphenomen-
al.
• The instruction execution cycle itself is epiphenomenal over the flow of electrons
through gates—which knows no more about the instruction execution cycle than the
instruction execution cycle knows about algorithms.
In all of the preceding examples it is relatively easy to identify the agent(s), the environ-
ment, and the resulting epiphenomena.
3.9 Design and evolution

It is not surprising that designs appear in nature. It is almost tautologous to say that those
things whose designs work in the environments in which they find themselves will persist
in those environments. This is a simpler (and more accurate) way of saying that it is the
fit—entities with designs that fit their environment—that survive. But fit means able to
extract sufficient energy to persist.
3.10 The accretion of complexity

An entity that suits its environment persists in that environment. But anything that per-
sists in an environment by that very fact changes that environment for everything else.
This phenomenon is commonly referred to as an ever changing fitness landscape.
What has been less widely noted in the complexity literature is that when something is
added to an environment it may enable something else to be added latter—something that
could not have existed in that environment prior to the earlier addition.
This is an extension of notions from ecology, biology, and the social sciences. A term for
this phenomenon from the ecology literature, is succession. (See, for example, [Trani].)
Historically succession has been taken to refer to a fairly rigid sequence of communities
of species, generally leading to what is called a climax or (less dramatically) a steady
state.

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Our notion is closer to that of bricolage, a notion that originated with the structuralism
movement of the early 20th century [Wiener] and which is now used in both biology and
the social sciences. Bricolage means the act or result of tinkering, improvising, or build-
ing something out of what is at hand.
In genetics bricolage refers to the evolutionary process as one that tinkers with an exist-
ing genome to produce something new. [Church].
John Seely Brown, former chief scientist for the Xerox Corporation and former director
of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center captured its sense in a recent talk.
[W]ith bricolage you appropriate something. That means you bring it
into your space, you tinker with it, and you repurpose it and reposi-
tion it. When you repurpose something, it is yours.14
Ciborra [Ciborra] uses bricolage to characterize the way that organizations tailor their in-
formation systems to their changing needs through continual tinkering.
This notion of building one thing upon another applies to our framework in that anything
that persists in an environment changes that environment for everything else. The Internet
provides many interesting illustrations.
• Because the Internet exists at all, access to a very large pool of people is available.
This enabled the development of websites such as eBay.
• The establishment of eBay as a persistent feature of the Internet environment enabled
the development of enterprises whose only sales outlet was eBay. These are enter-
prises with neither brick and mortar nor web storefronts. The only place they sell is
on eBay. This is a nice example of ecological succession.
• At the same time—and again because the Internet provides access to a very large
number of people—other organizations were able to establish what are known as
massively multi-player online games. Each of these games is a simulated world in
which participants interact with the game environment and with each other. In most of
these games, participants seek to acquire virtual game resources, such as magic
swords. Often it takes a fair amount of time, effort, and skill to acquire such re-
sources.
• The existence of all of these factors resulted, though a creative leap, in an eBay mar-
ket in which players sold virtual game assets for real money. This market has become
so large that there are now websites dedicated exclusively to trading in virtual game
assets. [Wallace]
• BBC News reported [BBC] that there are companies that hire low-wage Mexican and
Chinese teenagers to earn virtual assets, which are then sold in these markets. How
long will it be before a full-fledged economy develops around these assets? There
may be brokers and retailers who buy and sell these assets for their own accounts
14
In passing, Brown claims that this is how most new technology develops.
[T]hat is the way we build almost all technology today, even though my lawyers don't want
to hear about it. We borrow things; we tinker with them; we modify them; we join them; we
build stuff.

DRAFT 10/18/2008
even though they do not intend to play the game. (Perhaps they already exist.)
Someone may develop a service that tracks the prices of these assets. Perhaps futures
and options markets will develop along with the inevitable investment advisors.
The point is that once something fits well enough into its environment to persist it adds it-
self to the environment for everything else. This creates additional possibilities and a
world with ever increasing complexity.
In each of the examples mentioned above, one can identify what we have been calling an
autonomous entity. In most cases, these entities are self-perpetuating in that the amount
of money they extract from the environment (by selling either products, services, or ad-
vertising) is more than enough to pay for the resources needed to keep it in existence.
In other cases, some Internet entities run on time and effort contributed by volunteers.
But the effect is the same. As long as an entity is self-perpetuating, it becomes part of the
environment and can serve as the basis for the development of additional entities.
3.11 Increasing complexity increasing efficiency, and historical contin-

gency
The phenomenon whereby new entities are built on top of existing entities is now so
widespread and commonplace that it may seem gratuitous even to comment on it. But it
is an important phenomenon, and one that has not received the attention it deserves.
Easy though this phenomenon is to understand once one sees it, it is not trivial. After all,
the second law of thermodynamics tells us that overall entropy increases and complexity
diminishes. Yet we see complexity, both natural and man made, continually increasing.
For the most part, this increasing complexity consists of the development of new
autonomous entities, entities that implement the abstract designs of dissipative structures.
This does not contradict the Second Law. Each autonomous entity maintains its own in-
ternally reduced entropy by using energy imported from the environment to export en-
tropy to the environment. Overall entropy increases. Such a process works only in an en-
vironment that itself receives energy from outside itself. Within such an environment,
complexity increases.
Progress in science and technology and the bountifulness of the marketplace all exempli-
fy this pattern of increasing complexity. One might refer to this kind of pattern as a meta-
epiphenomenon since it is an epiphenomenon of the process that creates epiphenomena.
This creative process also tends to exhibit a second meta-epiphenomenon. Overall energy
utilization becomes continually more efficient. As new autonomous entities find ways to
use previously unused or under-used energy flows (or forms of energy flows that had not
existed until some newly created autonomous entity generated them, perhaps as a waste
product), more of the energy available to the system as a whole is put to use.
The process whereby new autonomous entities come into existence and perpetuate them-
selves is non-reductive. It is creative, contingent, and almost entirely a sequence of his-
torical accidents. As they say, history is just one damn thing after another—to which we
add, and nature is a bricolage. We repeat the observation Anderson made more than three
decades ago.

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The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws [does

not imply] the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the uni-
verse.
3.12 Evolutionary environments

• Access to a supply of externally provided energy and means for exchanging it.
All such environments are what is commonly known as far from equilibrium sys-
tems in that externally supplied energy continually flows through them. The overall
creative process can be summarized as consisting of finding increasingly innovative
ways of using the available energy. To facilitate this process, mechanisms must be
available to support the fungibility of energy—and its proxies such as money,
power, and attention.
• Standards. New products, services, and other items are almost always created
(composed) from existing products, services, and other items. Composition is
greatly facilitated when the elements to be composed adhere to widely accepted
standards.
• Communication and transportation infrastructures. Communication and trans-
portation infrastructures facilitate the exchange/transfer/flow of (a) information
throughout the environment and (b) energy (in one direction) and (c) products and
services (in the other) among trading partners.
• A reasonable level of confidence in the stability and continuity of the products
and services installed in the environment. Mechanisms must be available to allow
agreements to be made and for installed products and services to be relied upon.
• Minimum overhead. Cultural or other mechanisms must exist to discourage cor-
ruption along with enforcement mechanisms to make it harder to siphon off energy
flows for non-productive uses. More generally, the environment must incorporate
mechanisms that minimize the overhead of participating.
• Both (a) centralized but quasi-democratic and transparent governance of the
overall system, its infrastructure, and the standards making process and (b) decent-
ralized overall control (“power to the edge”) in which as much autonomy as pos-
sible is ceded to environment participants.
• Mechanisms that ensure that a certain amount of the available energy is de-
voted to the exploration of the space of new possibilities.
• Mechanisms that allow new products and services to be developed and in-
stalled in the environment and then made known to other participants in the en-
vironment.
• A (primarily, but perhaps not exclusively) bottom-up (i.e., market-like) means
for allocating energy (or its proxies) according to usefulness: the more (less) use-
ful a product or service is found to be (according to actual usage), the more (fewer)
resources it will have at its disposal. All of the participants in the environment must
be self-sustaining in terms of their overall energy transactions. This is possible be-
cause the environment is based on an available external source of “free” energy.

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• An ability to form communities of interest (formal, informal, voluntary, and fee-

based) to facilitate the sharing of information, experience, and expertise. The value
of shared information is typically enhanced when it is shared in groups.
• Both (a) sufficient stability of the overall environment that participants can estab-
lish regularized modes of participation and (b) (generally collaborative) means to
allow the environment to evolve as conditions change.
4 Entities, emergence, and science

4.1 Entities and the sciences
One reason that the sciences at levels higher than physics and chemistry seem somehow
softer than physics and chemistry is that they work with autonomous entities, entities that
for the most part do not supervene over any conveniently compact collection of matter.
Entities in physics and chemistry are satisfyingly solid—or at least they seemed to be be-
fore quantum theory. In contrast, the entities of the higher level sciences are not defined
in terms of material boundaries. These entities don’t exist as stable clumps of matter; it’s
hard to hold them completely in one’s hand—or in the grip of an instrument.
The entities of the special sciences are objectively real—there is some objective measure
(their reduced entropy relative to their environment) by which they qualify as entities.
But as we saw earlier, the processes through which these entities interact and by means of
which they perpetuate themselves are epiphenomenal. Even though the activities of high-
er level entities may be described in terms that are independent of the forces that produce
them (recall that this is our definition of epiphenomenal), the fundamental forces of phys-
ics are the only forces in nature. There is no strong emergence. All other force-like effects
are epiphenomenal.
Consequently we find ourselves in the position of claiming that the higher level sciences
study epiphenomenal interactions among real if often somewhat ethereal entities.
“Of course,” one might argue, “one can build some functionality that is not a logical con-
sequence of its components.” Fodor’s simplest functionalist examples illustrate this phe-
nomenon. The physics underlying the components of a mousetrap won’t tell you that
when you put the components together in a particular way the result will trap a mouse.
The reason why rules of fundamental physics cannot tell you that is because mice simply
are not a part of the ontology of fundamental physics in the same way as Turing Ma-
chines are not part of the ontology of the Game of Life.
If an object is designed to have a function, then if its design works, of course it has that
function—even if, as is likely, that function is logically independent of the laws that gov-
ern the components.
We build objects with particular functions all the time. It’s called ingenuity—or simply
good software or engineering design. Even chimpanzees build and use tools. They use
stems to extract termites from mounds, they use rocks to open nuts, and perhaps even
more interestingly, they “manufacture” sponges by chewing grass roots until they become
an absorbent mass. [Smithsonian] But of course from the perspective of fundamental
physics, stems are not probes; rocks are not hammers; and roots are not sponges.

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To be clear about this point, when we say that the functionality of a designed element is
logically independent of some lower level domain we are not saying that the higher level
functionality is completely unconstrained by the lower level framework. Of course a Tur-
ing Machine emulation is constrained by the rules of the Game of Life, and the function-
ing of a mouse trap is constrained by the laws of physics. But in both cases, other than
those constraints, the functionality of the designed artifact is logically independent of the
laws governing the underlying phenomena. Typically, the functionality of the designed
artifact is expressed in terms that are not even a present in the ontological framework of
the lower level elements.
The question we pose in this subsection (and answer in the next) is whether such logic-
ally independent functionality occurs “in nature” at an intermediate level, at the level of
individual things. Or does this sort of phenomenon occur only in human (or chimpanzee)
artifacts?
Given the current debate (at least in the United States) about evolution, one might take
this as asking whether the existence of a design always implies the existence of a (pre-
sumably intelligent) designer.
5 Some practical considerations

5.1 Emergence and software
As noted earlier, the computation that results when software is executed is emergent. It is
an epiphenomenon of the operation of the (actual or virtual) machine that executes the
software.
Earlier we defined emergence as synonymous with epiphenomenon. At that time we sug-
gested that formalizable epiphenomena are often of significant interest. We also said that
formalization may not always be in the cards. Software, which one would imagine to be a
perfect candidate for formalization, now seems to be a good example of an epiphenomen-
on that is unlikely to be formalized.
It had once been hoped that software development could evolve to a point at which one
need only write down a formal specification of what one wanted the software to do. Then
some automatic process would produce software that satisfied that specification.
That dream now seems quite remote. Besides the difficulty of developing (a) a satisfact-
ory specification language and (b) a system that can translate specifications written in
such a language into executable code, the real problem is that it has turned out to be at
least as difficult and complex to write formal specifications as it is to write the code that
produces the specified results. Even if one could write software by writing specifications,
in many cases—especially cases that involve large and complex systems, the kinds of
cases for which it really matters—doing so doesn’t seem to result in much intellectual
leverage, if indeed it produces any at all.
This illustrates quite nicely that we often find ourselves in the position of wanting to pro-
duce epiphenomena (epiphenomena, which may be very important to us), whose formal-
ization as an abstraction we find to be either infeasible or not particularly useful.

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5.2 Bricolage as design

The process of building one capability on top of another not only drives the overall in-
crease in complexity, it also provides guidance to designers about how to do good design
work. Any good designer—a developer, an architect, a programmer, or an engineer—
knows that it is often best if one can take advantage of forces and processes already in ex-
istence as part of one’s design.
But even before engineering, we as human beings made use of pre-existing capabilities.
Agriculture and animal husbandry use both plant reproduction and such animal capabilit-
ies as locomotion or material (i.e., skin) production for our own purposes. The exploita-
tion of existing capabilities for our own purposes is not a new idea.
An interesting example of this approach to engineering involves recent developments in
robotics. Collins reported [Collins] that a good way to make a robot walk is by exploiting
gravity through what he called passive-dynamic motion—raise the robot’s leg and let
gravity pull it back down—rather than by directing the robot’s limbs to follow a pre-
defined trajectory.
This illustrates in a very concrete way the use of an existing force in a design. Instead of
building a robot whose every motion was explicitly programmed, Collins built a robot
whose motions were controlled in part by gravity, a pre-existing force.
5.3 Infrastructure-centric development

Building new capabilities on top of existing ones is not only good design, it is highly
leveraged design. But now that we are aware of this strategy a further lesson can be
drawn. New systems should be explicitly designed to serve as a possible basis for sys-
tems yet to come. Another way of putting this is that every time we build a new system, it
should be built so that it becomes part of our environment, i.e., our infrastructure, and not
just a piece of closed and isolated functionality.
By infrastructure we mean systems such as the Internet, the telephone system, the electric
power distribution system, etc. Each of these systems can be characterized in isolation in
terms of the particular functions they perform. But more important than the functional
characterization of any of these individual systems is the fact that they exist in the envir-
onment in such a way that other systems can use them as services.
We should apply this perspective to all new systems that we design: design them as infra-
structure services and not just as bits of functionality. Clearly Microsoft understands this.
Not only does it position the systems it sells as infrastructure services, it also maintains
tight ownership and control over them. When such systems become widely used elements
of the economy, the company makes a lot of money. The tight control it maintains and the
selfishness with which it controls these systems earns it lots of resentment as well. Soci-
ety can’t prosper when any important element of its infrastructure is controlled primarily
for selfish purposes.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) is currently reinventing itself [Dick] to be more
infrastructure-centric. This requires it to transform what is now a
huge collection of independent “stovepipe” information systems,
each supporting only its original procurement specification, to a uni-
fied assembly of interoperating systems.

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The evocative term stovepipe is intended to distinguish the existing situation—in which
the DoD finds that it has acquired and deployed a large number of functionally isolated
systems (the “stovepipes”)—from the more desirable situation in which all DoD systems
are available to each other as an infrastructure of services.
5.4 Service refactoring and the age of services

The process whereby infrastructure services build on other infrastructure services leads
not only to new services, it also leads to service refactoring. The corporate trend toward
outsourcing functions that are not considered part of the core competence of the corpora-
tion illustrates this. Payroll processing is a typical example.
Because many organizations have employees who must be paid, these organizations must
provide a payroll service for themselves. It has now become feasible to factor out that
service and offer it as part of our economic infrastructure.
This outsourcing of internal processes leads to economic efficiencies in that many such
processes can be done more efficiently when performed by specialized organizations.
Such specialized organizations can take advantage of economies of scale. They can also
serve as focal points where expertise in their specialized service can be concentrated and
the means of providing those services improved.
As this process establishes itself ever more firmly, more and more organizations will fo-
cus more on offering services rather than functions, and organizations will become less
stovepiped.
We frequently speak of the “service industries.” For the most part this term has been used
to refer to low level services—although even the fast food industry can be seen as the
“outsourcing” of the personal food preparation function. With our more general notion of
service in mind, historians may look back to this period as the beginning of the age of
services.
Recall that a successful service is an autonomous entity. It persists as long as it is able to
extract from its environment enough resources, typically money, to perpetuate itself.
5.5 A possible undesirable unintended consequence

The sort of service refactoring we just discussed tends to make the overall economic sys-
tem more efficient. It also tends to improve reliability: the payroll service organizations
are more reliable than the average corporate payroll department.
On the other hand, by eliminating redundancy, efficiency makes the overall economic
system more vulnerable to large scale failure. If a payroll service organization has a fail-
ure, it is likely to have a larger impact than the failure of any one corporate payroll de-
partment. This phenomenon seems to be quite common—tending to transform failure
statistics from a Gaussian to a scale free distribution: the tails are longer and fatter. [Col-
baugh] Failures may be less frequent, but when they occur they may be more global.
This may be yet another unintended and unexpected emergent phenomenon—a modern
example of the tragedy of the commons. Increased economic efficiency leads to increased
vulnerability to major disasters at the societal-level.

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On the other hand, perhaps our growing realization that catastrophic failures may occur
along with our ability to factor out commonly needed services will help us solve this
problem as well. We now see increasing number of disaster planning services being
offered.
6 Observations
Our fundamental existence depends on taking energy and other resources from the envir-
onment. We must all do it to stay in existence. Raises fundamental ethical questions: how
can taking be condemned? Supports stewardship notions since we are all dependent on
environment.
Dynamic entities are composed of static and dynamic entities (bodies and societies).
That’s what makes them solid. But those static entity components are frequently replaced.
Competition for energy and other resources justifies picture of evolution as survival of
the meanest. Also justifies group selection since groups can ensure access to resources
better than individuals.
7 Concluding remarks
For most of its history, science has pursued the goal of explaining existing phenomena in
terms of simpler phenomena. That’s the reductionist agenda.
The approach we have taken is to ask how new phenomena may be constructed from and
implemented in terms of existing phenomena. That’s the creative impulse of artists, com-
puter scientists, engineers—and of nature. It is these new phenomena that are often
thought of as emergent.
When thinking in the constructive direction, a question arises that is often under-appreci-
ated: what allows one to put existing things together to get something new—and
something new that will persist in the world? What binding forces and binding strategies
do we (and nature) have at our disposal?
Our answer has been that there are two sorts of binding strategies: energy wells and en-
ergy-consuming processes. Energy wells are reasonably well understood—although it is
astonishing how many different epiphenomena nature and technology have produced
through the use of energy wells.
We have not even begun to catalog the ways in which energy-consuming processes may
be used to construct stable, self-perpetuating, autonomous entities.
Earlier we wrote that science does not consider it within its realm to ask constructivist
questions. That is not completely true. Science asks about how we got here from the big
bang, and science asks about biological evolution. These are both constructivist ques-
tions. Since science is an attempt to understand nature, and since constructive processes
occur in nature, it is quite consistent with the overall goals of science to ask how these
constructive processes work. As far as we can determine, there is no sub-discipline of sci-
ence that asks, in general, how the new arises from the existing.
Science has produced some specialized answers to this question. The biological evolu-
tionary explanation involves random mutation and crossover of design records. The cos-
mological explanation involves falling into energy wells of various sorts. Is there any

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more to say about how nature finds and then explores new possibilities? If as Dennett ar-
gues in [Dennett ‘96] this process may be fully explicated as generalized Darwinian evo-
lution, questions still remain. Is there any useful way to characterize the search space that
nature is exploring? What search strategies does nature use to explore that space? Clearly
one strategy is human inventiveness.
8 Acknowledgement
We are grateful for numerous enjoyable and insightful discussions with Debora Shuger
during which many of the ideas in this paper were developed and refined.
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Figures and Tables
Table 1. Dissipative structures vs. self-perpetuating entities
Dissipative structures Self-perpetuating entities

Pure epiphenomena, e.g., 2-chamber example. Has functional design, e.g., hurricane.
Artificial boundaries. Self-defining boundaries
Imports, stores, and internally distributes
Externally maintained energy gradient.
energy.
Figure 1. Four Rayleigh-Benard convection patterns

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Figure 2. Anatomy of a hurricane. [Image from [NASA].]

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Emergence Explained: Entities and Functionality

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2.1 Static material entities

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2.2 Dynamic entities

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2.3 Dissipative structures

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2.4 Hurricanes as dynamic entities

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2.6 Minimal dynamic entities

2.7 Biological and social dynamic entities

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2.8 Theseus’ ship

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2.9 Thermodynamic computing: nihil ex nihilo

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3 Entities and functionality

3.1 Interaction among/between entitles

3.2 The reductionist blind spot

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1. By giving an “external” description: by describing its functional/phenomenological

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ing machines. The functionality of Turing Machines as transducers is important on its

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3.3 Functionality and the environment

Functionality is an extension of the notion of force. A force is the functionality of primit-

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3.4 Turing Machines and functionality

3.5 Downward entailment of ideas

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3.6 What dynamic entities do vs. how dynamic entities work

3.7 The whole is more than the sum of its parts

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3.9 Design and evolution

3.10 The accretion of complexity

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3.11 Increasing complexity increasing efficiency, and historical contin-

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The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws [does

3.12 Evolutionary environments

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• An ability to form communities of interest (formal, informal, voluntary, and fee-

4 Entities, emergence, and science

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5 Some practical considerations

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5.2 Bricolage as design

5.3 Infrastructure-centric development

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5.4 Service refactoring and the age of services

5.5 A possible undesirable unintended consequence

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Fredkin, E., "Digital Mechanics", Physica D, (1990) 254-270, North-Holland. URL as of

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