The Game of Life

Game of Life: Play here

[F]ive helpful criteria for emergence drawn from Jaegwon Kim:

1. Systems with a higher level of complexity emerge from the coming together of lower-level entities in new structural configurations.

2. Higher-level systems exhibit higher-level emergent properties arising from the lower-level properties and relations of its constituent parts.

3. Emergent properties are not predictable from information about lower-level conditions.

4. Emergent properties are not explainable or reducible to the lower-level conditions.

5. Emergent properties have novel causal powers of their own.

These “physical laws” place constraints on what can take place..., but do not tell us what will take place... In order to get that, we need two other structures of possibility or constraint. On the one hand, we need historical possibility. Historical possibility will consist of the initial conditions with which the Game of Life begins. Note that the physical structure of the game of life tells us nothing about these initial conditions, but only the constraints on whatever conditions happen to obtain. Initial conditions, in contrast to the structure of physical possibility, are instead randomly selected by the player at the beginning of the game. Historical conditions are thus constrained by the structure of physical possibility, but are not determined by this structure. The manner in which the game evolves will depend on these initial conditions. You will get entirely different patterns depending on these initial conditions. In evolutionary biology it is often said that were we to completely rewind the emergence of life on earth, it would turn out entirely different. This is because, under this scenario, historical conditions would differ. For example, had the asteroid not hit the Earth, the world might still very well be dominated by dinosaurs.

Finally...we have biological constraints. The Game of Life develops through the instantiations of the rules constraining physical possibility from moment to moment. The arrangement of ON and OFF blocks at any particular moment defines what is “biologically possible” for the patterns at any given point in time. You can’t simply leap from one form of organization to another within the game, but must pass through a series of intermediaries defined by the physical constraints of the system. Similarly, while I no doubt have plenty of bonobo monkey genes in my genotype, it is biologically impossible for me or my offspring to leap to bonobo monkey phenotypes in a single bound as a whole series of transitional states would have to first occur in order for this to take place.

(via)