BOTTOM-UP NETWORKING AS A UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE AND EXPLANATORY MODEL
What are the organizing principles of complex systems? What can insect colonies teach us about the human mind? Can the vast and complex be explained from the bottom up by the very small and very simple? When neuroscience and philosophy join with modern physics to ask the questions, unexpected answers are thrown up, pointing towards new models of perception and identity.
Guy Simpson 2008
What are the organizing principles of complex systems? What can insect colonies teach us about the human mind? Can the vast and complex be explained from the bottom up by the very small and very simple? When neuroscience and philosophy join with modern physics to ask the questions, unexpected answers are thrown up, pointing towards new models of perception and identity.
Guy Simpson 2008
Social life
Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia temple in Barcelona is one of the great man-made wonders of the world. It looks almost crumbly. As if it were made of chocolate, or mud. Its architecture is more than just original, it is truly organic, Gaudí having designed many of the geometric forms of the columns and stress-bearing arches based on his studies of trees and other forms found in nature.
Bearing a curious resemblance to this huge work-in-progress (125 years haven’t sufficed to complete it) is one of the most striking features of the African savannahs: the giant mud “cathedrals” made by the termite Macrotermes bellicosus. Compare them:
Bearing a curious resemblance to this huge work-in-progress (125 years haven’t sufficed to complete it) is one of the most striking features of the African savannahs: the giant mud “cathedrals” made by the termite Macrotermes bellicosus. Compare them:
 Sagrada Familia temple |
 Termite mound |
These mounds, towering up to six metres above the ground and excavated below, have cooling vents that the termites open and close to regulate the temperature. In this way, the insects maintain a habitat in which to farm the fungus on which they feed. While outside temperatures range from near-freezing at night to 104° Fahrenheit by day, the sensitive fungus grows happily at its preferred, constant temperature of 87 degrees.
The mounds inspired another building, unlike Gaudí’s in appearance, but technically mimetic. Architect Mick Pearce took the principles of the termite mound from the savannah to the city. For Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, he designed the Eastgate building, the country’s largest office block and shopping centre, following the same air-vent strategy as the termites.
The result was a building that needs no air conditioning, minimal heating, and a reduction on construction costs of 3.5 million dollars, not to mention savings on future electric bills.
The mounds inspired another building, unlike Gaudí’s in appearance, but technically mimetic. Architect Mick Pearce took the principles of the termite mound from the savannah to the city. For Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, he designed the Eastgate building, the country’s largest office block and shopping centre, following the same air-vent strategy as the termites.
The result was a building that needs no air conditioning, minimal heating, and a reduction on construction costs of 3.5 million dollars, not to mention savings on future electric bills.
Eastgate building design
|
Termite mound design
|
So how do termites manage to create such a sophisticated environment? Because their achievement is extraordinary for an obvious reason: here there is no architectural mastermind, no Supermite directing the work. A single worker termite on its own is a tiny, blind, helpless creature. It is, quite simply, millions of these little insects acting together as a social entity that produces such astounding results.
It is not the ants, but the colony, that makes the mounds; and their colossal structures bear witness to the success of a social system with a fossil record going back 50 million years.
The temptation lingers to think of the individual insects as taking their cue from some kind of central, virtual brain. But the reality is altogether neater and simpler. Termites, like ants, are strictly limited creatures whose behaviour is determined by local information. The colony is a decentralized system. As Peter Miller, writing in National Geographic,[1] says: “No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do.” Instead, an ant will wait until it has enough chemical cues from fellow ants before venturing out of the nest to forage. It waits for enough patroller ants to touch antennas with it no more than ten seconds apart — indicating that it is safe to go out. “A forager won’t come back until it finds something,” observed Stanford University biologist Deborah Gordon. “The less food there is, the longer it takes the forager to find it and get back. The more food there is, the faster it comes back. So nobody’s deciding whether it’s a good day to forage. The collective is, but no particular ant is.” In this way, Miller’s study shows, “even complex behaviour may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions.”
Birds, bees, fish, herd animals and other creatures living in colonies behave similarly. In 1986, computer graphics researcher Craig Reynolds provided a clear insight into the beautiful simplicity of behavioural patterns with his boids: graphic objects representing birds. Reynolds arranged his computerised boids as if they were a flock on the ground or perched on the ledges of a building. He programmed them with three instructions. “1) avoid crowding other boids, 2) fly in the average direction of other boids, and 3) stay close to nearby boids.” When the program was initiated, the boids enacted a remarkable impression of bird-like scattering and flocking that mimicked the unpredictability of the living creatures.
Peter Miller describes how innovative businesses have since made significant improvements to their delivery systems by learning from this “swarm intelligence,” as it is known. Firms like American Air Liquide and South West Airlines put logistical operations in the hands of a computer model programmed with an algorithm for ant-like strategies. The result: both initiatives have been resounding success stories.
The whole and its parts
The cooperative nature of the social system of colonies has implications that go beyond technological applications. Swarm intelligence, the self-organizing principle behind decentralized, complex collective behaviour, has emerged as a model to explain the functioning of other systems, both organic and inorganic, including that most complex of all: the human brain.
Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga’s “split brain”[2] experiments in the 1980s, carried out with patients whose right and left brain hemispheres had been surgically separated (to mitigate severe epileptic attacks) led them to draw unexpected conclusions. To begin with, they found that the right brain could recognize objects and draw them, but was unable to name them. It was the left brain that took care of language. Certain areas of the brain had a predisposition to perform particular tasks; they were, so to speak, genetically programmed for that activity. These and other findings about the operation of memory led Gazzaniga to develop a modular model of the brain’s cognitive system.
Instead of a single unit, functioning from a centre, he posited a number of modules, functioning in parallel – in a collective activity that is cooperative in nature. In this model, the brain is a networking organ with no central command. “The mind is made up of a constellation of independent or semi-independent agents,” says Gazzaniga. The implication is that our conscious sense of identity, our sense of singular selfhood, is in fact the projected interpretation of multiple perception and memory centres working in concert. It represents a challenge to our image of ourselves of a magnitude comparable in its day to the Copernican assertion that the Sun did not circle the Earth.
Gazzaniga suggests that a system in the left brain performs the role of “interpreter” and that this may be how our sense of self comes about. The relatively independent and numerous cognitive systems either communicate their perceptions to a verbal consciousness centre in the left hemisphere, or else react by directly controlling bodily behaviour, which is subsequently interpreted in the left brain. It is Gazzaniga’s contention that the strings of perception are pulled together by the left brain, which is the only area capable of making inferences. “In the human brain,” writes Gazzaniga in The Social Brain, “there is a special capacity, a special system, located in the left brain, which interprets the different behaviour of these modules and, by means of interpretations, forms beliefs. The left brain is constantly constructing theories about the causal relationships between the fundamental events taking place inside and outside our heads.”[3]
We all know how adept we are at explaining our actions in retrospect. Justifying them, attempting to clothe them with sense and meaning. We like to think that the actions we take are logical and coherent, but the explanation that we offer ourselves and others comes after the event. Lending it a kind of narrative inevitability.
Gazzaniga suggests that the interpreter with whom we identify ourselves may be a convenient fiction, and its role may be that of a teller of tales: the story being us. But if my story includes you and yours includes me, where do I start and you finish? To what extent is experience a shared and collective narration? Where are the boundaries of consciousness?
Who are we?
As human beings, we are well aware that we are social animals; evolution has made us what we are. But when it goes beyond that, when there is a strong sense that our existence is inextricably bound up with others —that it is in relationship that we exist— then it requires some kind of explanation. Are we “shared stories” with our fellow human beings? And if so, how?
Central to the me I feel myself to be are the “interpreter” and its thought processes, so let us consider the following from neuropsychologist Paul Broks, writing in New Scientist magazine [4]: “these words you are now reading, whose are they? Yours or mine? The point of writing is to take charge of the voice in someone else's head. This is what I am doing. My words have taken possession of the language circuits of your brain. I have become, if only transiently, your inner voice. Doesn't that mean, in a certain sense, that I have become you (or you me)? It's a serious question.”
For physicist David Bohm, who made important contributions to the science of neuropsychology, thought is not a private phenomenon but a system that we all participate in and share: “It's all one process; somebody else's thoughts become my thoughts, and vice versa.” And awareness of this process is vital since thought is such a powerful tool, one that can usurp consciousness: “Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.”[5]
Thought here has an existence that is semi-independent, objective, outside of us. It belongs in Karl Popper’s “World 3”: the body of human knowledge expressed in its myriad forms, which for Popper had an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects.[6] Echoing Teilhard de Chardin’s intimation of a “noosphere”, Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra took this idea a step further by proposing an exocerebro, a virtual, external brain common to mankind, whilst conceding that he was speaking metaphorically. Yet what neuroscience is discovering is that the brain, like its operator, is essentially social. If I think your thoughts, I also feel your feelings, as the discovery of mirror neurons has demonstrated.
And if the human brain is social, our life and being must be so also. For Gazzaniga, mental life (the life of the interpreter) is the reconstruction of the independent operations of many brain systems. And these systems have genetic predispositions which predate the individual, being inherited like Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious. There is no single, organizing entity at the centre. No self, in an objective sense. Instead, there are modules working in parallel that interact with the environment to project holographic images, one of which is an illusionary identity.
The philosophical perspective that corresponds to this neuroscientific model is that no one, single, objective reality exists; that, subjectively, we go about creating reality in collaboration with our environment. By looking, we create our reality in the same way that a laser creates a hologram. There are many visions and versions of reality and the perceptual event is species-specific. A white piece of wood lies in the grass. For an ant it is an obstacle, for a human being it is a chess piece. With the ant I share dimensionality; with the human being I share dimensionality and culture. Culture being a reflection of shared experience, of those shared models of perception that are the mental constructs of our brains. For a baby, the chess piece is a chew. With the baby I share a past and a future. We learn from each other. The interesting thing is to be aware that our particular experience is by no means the arbiter or last word on reality. As the same wind blows to make a sail billow, or a tree to sway, to be a haunting whistle down an alley, or relief to a perspiring body, our individual experience is but one interpretation of what is.
What does this mean to our everyday lives? Our the mental horizons could be dramatically and fascinatingly redrawn. If I define myself as a Frenchman and you take away France, the mental schemata readapt; but take away the core self – capsize my lifelong assumption that there is an irreducible private self, which is real and must be defended– and it is suddenly a liberating idea. If nothing else, it provides a good reason not to take our selves so seriously. Paul Broks points the way to “an era of self-dispersion when ego is deemed constrictive,” where we will acknowledge ourselves less as human beings —single, unified, psychological entities— and more as social processes partaking of human being: where life itself is recognized as social. It would mean progressively reforming the grammar of perception and interaction from First to Third Person to reflect the new paradigm; “I am hungry” yielding to “there is hunger”, in belated comprehension of the Buddha’s teaching of no-self.
Such a paradigmatic shift, which would mean developing sensitivity to a newly evolved stage in human consciousness, is a fertile subject of debate for contemporary thinkers. The challenge may be as old as Buddha: the new development consists in the support it receives from scientific sources such as neurology and quantum physics.
Of termites and tigers
So may another dimension exist in which we all share and participate? Conjoined in a union of which we commonly unaware? David Bohm thought so. To the unexplained phenomenon of “action at a distance”, known in physics as quantum entanglement, when a change in the spin of one of a pair of sub-atomic particles flying away from each other causes an instantaneous and opposite change in its twin —in apparent defiance of Einstein’s law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light— Bohm reminded us of how limited we are as perceptual beings of five senses. He proposed a far richer reality, an explicate order, of which we naturally perceive only a restricted part, or implicate order. In the explicate order, the twin sub-atomic particles are intimately linked in another dimension and only seen as separated by limited human perception. Bohm developed this viewpoint to suggest a holonomic model of the consciousness and the brain, in which consciousness and matter share a common ground. Each one of us being a lens that casts a different light on experience and truth.
It is not the ants, but the colony, that makes the mounds; and their colossal structures bear witness to the success of a social system with a fossil record going back 50 million years.
The temptation lingers to think of the individual insects as taking their cue from some kind of central, virtual brain. But the reality is altogether neater and simpler. Termites, like ants, are strictly limited creatures whose behaviour is determined by local information. The colony is a decentralized system. As Peter Miller, writing in National Geographic,[1] says: “No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do.” Instead, an ant will wait until it has enough chemical cues from fellow ants before venturing out of the nest to forage. It waits for enough patroller ants to touch antennas with it no more than ten seconds apart — indicating that it is safe to go out. “A forager won’t come back until it finds something,” observed Stanford University biologist Deborah Gordon. “The less food there is, the longer it takes the forager to find it and get back. The more food there is, the faster it comes back. So nobody’s deciding whether it’s a good day to forage. The collective is, but no particular ant is.” In this way, Miller’s study shows, “even complex behaviour may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions.”
Birds, bees, fish, herd animals and other creatures living in colonies behave similarly. In 1986, computer graphics researcher Craig Reynolds provided a clear insight into the beautiful simplicity of behavioural patterns with his boids: graphic objects representing birds. Reynolds arranged his computerised boids as if they were a flock on the ground or perched on the ledges of a building. He programmed them with three instructions. “1) avoid crowding other boids, 2) fly in the average direction of other boids, and 3) stay close to nearby boids.” When the program was initiated, the boids enacted a remarkable impression of bird-like scattering and flocking that mimicked the unpredictability of the living creatures.
Peter Miller describes how innovative businesses have since made significant improvements to their delivery systems by learning from this “swarm intelligence,” as it is known. Firms like American Air Liquide and South West Airlines put logistical operations in the hands of a computer model programmed with an algorithm for ant-like strategies. The result: both initiatives have been resounding success stories.
The whole and its parts
The cooperative nature of the social system of colonies has implications that go beyond technological applications. Swarm intelligence, the self-organizing principle behind decentralized, complex collective behaviour, has emerged as a model to explain the functioning of other systems, both organic and inorganic, including that most complex of all: the human brain.
Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga’s “split brain”[2] experiments in the 1980s, carried out with patients whose right and left brain hemispheres had been surgically separated (to mitigate severe epileptic attacks) led them to draw unexpected conclusions. To begin with, they found that the right brain could recognize objects and draw them, but was unable to name them. It was the left brain that took care of language. Certain areas of the brain had a predisposition to perform particular tasks; they were, so to speak, genetically programmed for that activity. These and other findings about the operation of memory led Gazzaniga to develop a modular model of the brain’s cognitive system.
Instead of a single unit, functioning from a centre, he posited a number of modules, functioning in parallel – in a collective activity that is cooperative in nature. In this model, the brain is a networking organ with no central command. “The mind is made up of a constellation of independent or semi-independent agents,” says Gazzaniga. The implication is that our conscious sense of identity, our sense of singular selfhood, is in fact the projected interpretation of multiple perception and memory centres working in concert. It represents a challenge to our image of ourselves of a magnitude comparable in its day to the Copernican assertion that the Sun did not circle the Earth.
Gazzaniga suggests that a system in the left brain performs the role of “interpreter” and that this may be how our sense of self comes about. The relatively independent and numerous cognitive systems either communicate their perceptions to a verbal consciousness centre in the left hemisphere, or else react by directly controlling bodily behaviour, which is subsequently interpreted in the left brain. It is Gazzaniga’s contention that the strings of perception are pulled together by the left brain, which is the only area capable of making inferences. “In the human brain,” writes Gazzaniga in The Social Brain, “there is a special capacity, a special system, located in the left brain, which interprets the different behaviour of these modules and, by means of interpretations, forms beliefs. The left brain is constantly constructing theories about the causal relationships between the fundamental events taking place inside and outside our heads.”[3]
We all know how adept we are at explaining our actions in retrospect. Justifying them, attempting to clothe them with sense and meaning. We like to think that the actions we take are logical and coherent, but the explanation that we offer ourselves and others comes after the event. Lending it a kind of narrative inevitability.
Gazzaniga suggests that the interpreter with whom we identify ourselves may be a convenient fiction, and its role may be that of a teller of tales: the story being us. But if my story includes you and yours includes me, where do I start and you finish? To what extent is experience a shared and collective narration? Where are the boundaries of consciousness?
Who are we?
As human beings, we are well aware that we are social animals; evolution has made us what we are. But when it goes beyond that, when there is a strong sense that our existence is inextricably bound up with others —that it is in relationship that we exist— then it requires some kind of explanation. Are we “shared stories” with our fellow human beings? And if so, how?
Central to the me I feel myself to be are the “interpreter” and its thought processes, so let us consider the following from neuropsychologist Paul Broks, writing in New Scientist magazine [4]: “these words you are now reading, whose are they? Yours or mine? The point of writing is to take charge of the voice in someone else's head. This is what I am doing. My words have taken possession of the language circuits of your brain. I have become, if only transiently, your inner voice. Doesn't that mean, in a certain sense, that I have become you (or you me)? It's a serious question.”
For physicist David Bohm, who made important contributions to the science of neuropsychology, thought is not a private phenomenon but a system that we all participate in and share: “It's all one process; somebody else's thoughts become my thoughts, and vice versa.” And awareness of this process is vital since thought is such a powerful tool, one that can usurp consciousness: “Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.”[5]
Thought here has an existence that is semi-independent, objective, outside of us. It belongs in Karl Popper’s “World 3”: the body of human knowledge expressed in its myriad forms, which for Popper had an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects.[6] Echoing Teilhard de Chardin’s intimation of a “noosphere”, Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra took this idea a step further by proposing an exocerebro, a virtual, external brain common to mankind, whilst conceding that he was speaking metaphorically. Yet what neuroscience is discovering is that the brain, like its operator, is essentially social. If I think your thoughts, I also feel your feelings, as the discovery of mirror neurons has demonstrated.
And if the human brain is social, our life and being must be so also. For Gazzaniga, mental life (the life of the interpreter) is the reconstruction of the independent operations of many brain systems. And these systems have genetic predispositions which predate the individual, being inherited like Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious. There is no single, organizing entity at the centre. No self, in an objective sense. Instead, there are modules working in parallel that interact with the environment to project holographic images, one of which is an illusionary identity.
The philosophical perspective that corresponds to this neuroscientific model is that no one, single, objective reality exists; that, subjectively, we go about creating reality in collaboration with our environment. By looking, we create our reality in the same way that a laser creates a hologram. There are many visions and versions of reality and the perceptual event is species-specific. A white piece of wood lies in the grass. For an ant it is an obstacle, for a human being it is a chess piece. With the ant I share dimensionality; with the human being I share dimensionality and culture. Culture being a reflection of shared experience, of those shared models of perception that are the mental constructs of our brains. For a baby, the chess piece is a chew. With the baby I share a past and a future. We learn from each other. The interesting thing is to be aware that our particular experience is by no means the arbiter or last word on reality. As the same wind blows to make a sail billow, or a tree to sway, to be a haunting whistle down an alley, or relief to a perspiring body, our individual experience is but one interpretation of what is.
What does this mean to our everyday lives? Our the mental horizons could be dramatically and fascinatingly redrawn. If I define myself as a Frenchman and you take away France, the mental schemata readapt; but take away the core self – capsize my lifelong assumption that there is an irreducible private self, which is real and must be defended– and it is suddenly a liberating idea. If nothing else, it provides a good reason not to take our selves so seriously. Paul Broks points the way to “an era of self-dispersion when ego is deemed constrictive,” where we will acknowledge ourselves less as human beings —single, unified, psychological entities— and more as social processes partaking of human being: where life itself is recognized as social. It would mean progressively reforming the grammar of perception and interaction from First to Third Person to reflect the new paradigm; “I am hungry” yielding to “there is hunger”, in belated comprehension of the Buddha’s teaching of no-self.
Such a paradigmatic shift, which would mean developing sensitivity to a newly evolved stage in human consciousness, is a fertile subject of debate for contemporary thinkers. The challenge may be as old as Buddha: the new development consists in the support it receives from scientific sources such as neurology and quantum physics.
Of termites and tigers
So may another dimension exist in which we all share and participate? Conjoined in a union of which we commonly unaware? David Bohm thought so. To the unexplained phenomenon of “action at a distance”, known in physics as quantum entanglement, when a change in the spin of one of a pair of sub-atomic particles flying away from each other causes an instantaneous and opposite change in its twin —in apparent defiance of Einstein’s law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light— Bohm reminded us of how limited we are as perceptual beings of five senses. He proposed a far richer reality, an explicate order, of which we naturally perceive only a restricted part, or implicate order. In the explicate order, the twin sub-atomic particles are intimately linked in another dimension and only seen as separated by limited human perception. Bohm developed this viewpoint to suggest a holonomic model of the consciousness and the brain, in which consciousness and matter share a common ground. Each one of us being a lens that casts a different light on experience and truth.
Tyger, tyger Burning bright In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? William Blake, 1794 [7] |
If this greater dimensionality is real —and we move with trepidation in the realm of speculation— the question arises: how would it come about? We now know that William Blake’s tiger was not made by an “immortal hand or eye”, but by evolutionary forces and circumstances; and the fact that it was a series of incremental interactions that gave rise to such a majestic beast fills us with no less wonder, just as we marvel at the termites’ elaborate high-rises.
Might it be, then, that a “higher” dimension is a remarkable collective phenomenon? Owing its existence, like a termite mound or ant colony, to countless but simple reactions at a scale unimaginably smaller and busier than any termite or ant. Maybe the immeasurably small provides the explanation to the immeasurably vast. If so, there is a sense in which physical reality itself is social. |
This model conjectures a new dimension as the result of the irrepressible neuronal activity of human consciousness reaching a critical mass and birthing it into networked existence. Where every single contribution and each person counts, since in a collective existence the centre is nowhere and everywhere.
In this model, simple actions, with their power to transform a local reality, are the ones that matter; as typified by the experiment in a hypermarket that demonstrated that a single smile can be passed on from one tired shopper to another and spread, like ants passing on pheromones. Every action counts: each one of the millions of neurons firing in the brain and the billions of clicks on the external brains we call computers.
Maybe it is no accident, in the context of this challenge to the Western tradition of individualism, that the paramount cultural phenomenon of our time is an anonymous, collective enterprise that links people outside of country, colour, creed, gender, race, age or other separation. Perhaps at deeper levels than we have hitherto realized, we are the Web.
References
[1] Miller, Peter National Geographic, July 2007
[2] Graphic demonstration by Gazzaniga on Youtube
[3] Gazzaniga, Michael The Social Brain, Basic Books 1985, p.260
[4] Broks, Paul New Scientist, 18 November 2006
[5] Bohm, David Thought as a System Routledge 1994
[6] Popper, Karl in Wikipedia
[7] William Blake’s beautiful original plate for The Tyger in Wikipedia
This article was first published in Myriades1 magazine, Buenos Aires, February 2008
In this model, simple actions, with their power to transform a local reality, are the ones that matter; as typified by the experiment in a hypermarket that demonstrated that a single smile can be passed on from one tired shopper to another and spread, like ants passing on pheromones. Every action counts: each one of the millions of neurons firing in the brain and the billions of clicks on the external brains we call computers.
Maybe it is no accident, in the context of this challenge to the Western tradition of individualism, that the paramount cultural phenomenon of our time is an anonymous, collective enterprise that links people outside of country, colour, creed, gender, race, age or other separation. Perhaps at deeper levels than we have hitherto realized, we are the Web.
References
[1] Miller, Peter National Geographic, July 2007
[2] Graphic demonstration by Gazzaniga on Youtube
[3] Gazzaniga, Michael The Social Brain, Basic Books 1985, p.260
[4] Broks, Paul New Scientist, 18 November 2006
[5] Bohm, David Thought as a System Routledge 1994
[6] Popper, Karl in Wikipedia
[7] William Blake’s beautiful original plate for The Tyger in Wikipedia
This article was first published in Myriades1 magazine, Buenos Aires, February 2008
