A word recently has been in my thoughts; that word spends a lot of time in my mind. In fact, I had been seriously toying with the idea of honoring one of the letters in CARVE, acronym for key parts of my dispute resolution model, by letting it stand for the word.
Then when I heard the word a number of times last week at the annual Association for Psychological Science, the matter was decided, the deal was done. Emergence is a very popular topic right now, deservedly so, and that's what the "E" in CARVE now stands for.
I had been thinking about emergence because it describes well the criticism and impatience I have with much of what is being said by popularizers about neuroscience, including some of the people talking about the brain and its role in conflict resolution. Their approach to neuroscience is reductionist, and goes something like this: We know "A" about the brain and so this happens, and we know "B" about the brain and so that happens. Because of "A," people do this, and because of "B," people do that. If only it were that simple! And if only we knew as much about "A" and "B" as these people put forth with such certainty.
Emergence adds another layer of complication with which we must contend and wrestle: another layer, another twist, about which we may or may not learn as more about the brain is discovered. Using our example of "A" and "B", emergence simply means that "A" and "B" together may create "C" and that "C" may not be predictable or intended or consistent. It is not as simple as 2 + 3 = 5; more like 2 +3 = 7 today, and 4 tomorrow, and nothing on Wednesday.
Let's look at what a couple of the speakers at the APS conference had to say.
One of the presentations was a very lively, informative, and entertaining conversation between New York Times columnist David Brooks and psychology professor Walter Mischel. Brooks said that once he began to study psychology, he found it a "great mystery" that not everyone is interested in the field's work, and that "it changes the way you see the world." Brooks mentioned several important things he had learned, including the importance of context and of relationship. He wonders "why psychologists are so removed from policy making and economists are so prominent."
Brooks made two statements that are related to this post. First, the more he "got into" neuroscience, the less helpful it was because it is "not very advanced." Even so, neuroscience today carries more weight than psychology. (He briefly described the research where simply including a brain scan in a writing gives it more credibility than one without the scan, even if the scan is not related to the writing's topic.)
And Brooks talked about emergence. In a discussion about why findings from psychology are sometimes not of practical value for policymakers, he said it is because of the "concept of emergence." "Most problems are emergent" and not solvable at any one level.
Psychology professor Michael Gazzaniga gave a talk called "We Are the Law: The Human Mind, Free Will, and the Limits of Determinism." I hope I will have the time to do a blog post [added later: click to read that post] just on his program because, as you might imagine from the title, it was truly thought-provoking and in places unexpected. For purposes of this post, I will tell you what he said about emergence. Gazzaniga contrasted determinism with emergence and said that emergence tells us "we may be on the wrong level of analysis." Life may not be as determined as people would prefer to think, and the idea of emergence is therefore often not liked.
Emergence. Think about it. Really think about it and learn more about it. The concept has been been around for thousands of years, "since at least the time of Aristotle," but it seems to be gaining attention; more people are thinking and talking about emergence. Emerge is the word.
In applying neuroscience to processes such as dispute resolution, I am hopeful that more and more people will realize things are not as simple as it first seemed to some who jumped on the neuroscience-of-conflict-resolution bandwagon. Emergence is complicated. Neuroscience is complicated.
For my concluding words about the above-described complexity and about pop neuroscience trying to make it easy, I am going to borrow from Dr. Peter Freed at Neuroself:
In short, neuroscience is really, really complicated. So why are we letting our fantasy that understanding the brain might be a piece of cake lead us to expecting any one person – even a Rhodes Scholar [Jonah Lehrer] – to figure it out?
One person can’t do it. Because I think we’re at the end of anyone seriously thinking they, alone, can understand the brain. None of us is a neuroscientist. Not Jonah Lehrer, not me, not even Antonio Damasio. It’s going to have to be a team effort from here on out. Nobody will ever understand the whole brain – conceptually, maybe, but not at the neuroscience level – the level of its physical structure. That sucker has 100,000,000,000 neurons, each connected to 10,000 others, each firing around 100 times a second. That thing is exponentially harder to understand than any other phenomenon in science – some people say the universe.
And that’s where we, the consumers of pop neuroscience, need to get real. Really, really, really real. ...
Real, real, real, real's the word.
*With thanks to The Trashmen and "The Surfin' Bird."
Note (added June 2, 2011): In e-mail discussion with my friend and colleague Irene Sanders, director and founder of the Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, she sent me an excellent definition of emergence. I post it here with her permission:
Emergence is a key concept from complexity science.
Many people use it without understanding what it means and how, if they understood it, they would have greater insight into problems, systems and influence points.
Emergence is an ongoing dynamic process that represents a higher level of order in complex systems—brain, forests, organizations, economies, etc.—resulting from the nonlinear interactions of the systems parts and the larger context or environment in which is operates. Emergent behavior often surprises us because it is nonlinear and small influences (Butterfly Effect) can often shift the system in a dramatic new direction….
Scientists have really only understood and been able to define emergence in the last 25 years…with the study of complex adaptive systems…Santa Fe Institute started in 1984.
Not understanding the concept of emergence is one of the reasons the CIA was surprised by what happened in Egypt and the whole “Arab Spring.”
Click to read my interview of Sanders from a few years back. I have asked her if I may interview her again, and am hoping she will say yes. Stay tuned. Irene is extremely knowledgeable, and is able to say things in a way that is easily understood (a gift), so the interview would be highly informative and educational.
Added: Irene has consented to the interview. Watch for it some time this summer. And thanks, Irene.
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