Johnson Reading

Emergent behavior rules out the idea of free will from intelligence. Johnson is saying that by having enough complexity in the rules, intelligence just falls out from the interactions between these rules. The “uncoordinated local actions” all add up to the complexities of observable intelligence. These uncoordinated local actions could be the same as lines in a computer program or thoughts in a person’s mind. He also extends this idea to things beyond just instructions. Music is also just a mess of complex patterns. Things that seem irrational and cultural are really just emergent behavior. Shannon worked on the border between random noise and useful information. Though encrypted messages would often seem to be random; they, in fact, held enough information that they could be decoded plus the message itself. Like those encrypted, intelligence might seem like random movement or thoughts when seen at the local level, but when the aggregate is taken together they show how complexity can build out of the noise. There are also different types of complexity: simple systems, disorganized complexity, and grey area between the other two. Simple systems are easy to predict the product of each individual part. Disorganized complexity is when the problem seems too complex to deal with individual particles in the system. By modelling the system statistically, the complex interactions between the particles becomes worthless and the bigger picture can be predicted with useful results. This is similar to intelligence in how individual neurons (or ants) are basically worthless to understanding the whole product of their intelligence, only by looking at the whole picture can the intelligence be seen as a whole.