Emergent Systems

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In an emergent system, each element plays a dual role; consciously it is a single agent that looks out for its own interests. At the same time it is part of a larger organism—an association that it is barely aware of. The consciousness of this larger whole is the collected behavior of all of its individual members looking out for themselves. Each member’s adaptive behavior is amplified and collected together to achieve a critical mass that forms a group expression that serves the collective’s self-interest and builds a greater organizational complexity than was there before.

As a member of this larger organism, the majority of actions that are taken on by the individual members are still made from the ground-up and reflect a local self interest, never needing a strong hierarchy or chain of command. In an emergent system, agents interact with each other to produce more complicated behavior, even though the consciousness of the individual agents remains largely unchanged.

Johnson, Steven. Emergence. The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, New York: Touchstone, 2001.