Emergence - A Different Universe - Robert B. Laughlin

Laughlin's "A Different Universe" provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.  Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain.

Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin.

Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about the nature of emergence, along with a host of examples (most of which require a post-doctoral understanding of physics to understand). Let's assume we have a system S (quantum mechanics for example) and an "emergent" system E (classical physics, for example).

• What we know about S will shed little light or no light on phase transitions in E. For example, quantum physics cannot explain why water freezes into 11 different crystal configurations.
• Attempts to "explain" emergent phenomena in E using the laws of S are often wild goose chases. They tend to absorb huge amounts of time and money, yielding nothing useful. Laughlin uses the example of DNA transcription in the ribozom, where the "alphabet" of DNA is magically transcribed into actual proteins, the building blocks of life. This can be seen as an emergent boundary, where admittedly complex but straightforward DNA chemistry is translated into the domain of biochemistry. Laughlin claims that nobody has the foggiest idea how this works and it's such a huge problem that nobody wants to go near it.
• The boundaries between S and E tend to be chaotic, in the sense that, using what we know about S, we can't predict behavour in E. Characteristically, such efforts produce, at best, multiple "explanations" or "explanations" that could equally well describe behavior other than the one observed.
• Laughlin goes further to guess that this "chaotic" boundary is the doorway to the "higher" state. For example, he thinks that the ribozom depends on chaos to work.

Laughlin's theme is to cast doubt on our idea that there are "fundamental" laws in the universe, such as the "Theory of Everything". This is a serious issue since some scientists and a few science writers think we are on the verge of closing the book on new discoveries. To sustain this view, one must arbitrarily classify some discoveries (usually the laws of quantum mechanics) as "fundamental" and the rest as "derived". This ignores the fact that actual derivation of laws describing behavour of emergent systems famously resist "explanation" in terms of more "fundamental" law.

In fact, Laughlin gives many examples of the fact that "fundamental" law is inferred from experiments at the classical, "human" scale (how could it be otherwise?). Strictly speaking, the world of quantum mechanics does not exist except for the effects it supposedly has on systems of vastly greater scale.

I was particularly interested in Laughlin's offhand dismissal of Evolution as a "law" in the emergent world of biology. It's not that he thinks evolution is not real. He's saying that evolution doesn't explain everything and that biologist tend to regard it as the basis for their entire discipline. This is not so far from the teachings of Stephen J. Gould, a Darwinian fundamentalist, who nonetheless insists that there are many reasons other than evolution to "explain" the morphology and behavior of actual animals.  This is to say that evolution is always at work but it's not the only thing at work.

Another one of Laughlin's one-sentence dismissals refers to "socialism". Laughlin treats human society as a system emergent from the nature of individual human beings. Obviously, many different societies can "emerge" from the same group of humans. Just which society emerges is almost impossible to predict (it can depend on one charismatic person, for example). It's also obvious that the form that emerges is insensitive to a vast array of factors, such as the lives and wishes if most of the people involved. This is typical of an emergent system. What Lauglin is claiming is that "socialism" is not one of these possible arrangements of society. He does so without offering the slightest evidence, but he leaves us with the interesting idea that society is, in fact, an emergent system and that some systems will be "stable" and others not. The "laws" governing an emergent society will depend on exactly which society emerges. Interestingly, the "phase change" - the change from one form to another in the same group of people - is bound to be chaotic. For example, the French revolution flipped around through many configurations, eventually returning to a monarchy. Millions died in the process.

Laughlin has few kind words to say about undergraduate education in his own field. He views the common perception of quantum mechanics as a hoax, leading to apparent paradoxes such as Shrodinger's Cat and collapse of the wave function.  Bottom line, matter is not a "wave" and a "particle". It's just a wave.  Particles lack most of the properties we associate with matter, most notably a specific position.His discussion of how quantum events are detected at the human level is instructive, but leaves the reader hungry for more detail.