Emergence Part II

Last week’s readings were again from Steve Johnson’s Emergence book. Chapters 3 and 4 dealt with concepts of “The Pattern Match” and “Listening to Feedback”.

In Chapter 3, Johnson proclaims that “like any emergent system, a city is a pattern in time” (104). He believes that a complex system always exhibits repeated behavior (as individual components) that ultimately produces collective behavior (as a whole). A city is an example of this, as generations of people continuously go through the life stages (birth to death), while growing and making new developments.

In Chapter 4, Johnson discusses that a negative feedback always provides a complex system with adaptation. In a negative feedback, the system produces a result in the opposite direction as the stimuli. This stabilizes the system, and it is therefore able to adapt to its surroundings. Johnson gives another way to understand negative feedback systems, as he says it is like “comparing the current state of a system to the desired state, and pushing the system in a direction that minimizes the difference between the two states
(140). This definition was fairly easy for me to understand. He then gives examples of negative feedback systems found within our bodies, and focuses on the relationship between our bodies and our minds. Our sleep cycles are an illustration of a negative feedback system because our bodies’ circadian rhythm compared to humans’ circadian rhythm are different, yet when combine forces, stabilize each other.

This reading touched on a great deal of information and concepts, so it was a little difficult to focus on a couple concepts. However, like I previously mentioned in other blogs, I find Johnson’s writing to be humorous and at some times enjoyable, as he (for the most part) succeeds in portraying somewhat difficult concepts in “ordinary” language.