EMERGENCE.

An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the low-level interactions, these might be interactions between components of the system or the components and their environment.

In our epic introduction we focus a lot on the concept of self-organisation, complex systems, cellular automata and strong vs weak emergence. In the main show we discuss this in detail with Dr. Daniele Grattarola and cover his recent NeurIPS paper on learning graph cellular automata.

Featuring;
Dr. Daniele Grattarola
Dr. Tim Scarfe
Dr. Keith Duggar
Prof. David Chalmers
Prof. Ken Stanley
Prof. Julian Togelius
Dr. Joscha Bach
David Ha
Dr. Pei Wang

[00:00:00] Special Edition Intro: Emergence and Cellula Automata
[00:49:02] Intro to Daniele and CAs
[00:57:23] Numerical analysis link with CA (PDEs)
[00:59:50] The representational dichotomy of discrete and continous at different scales
[01:05:21] Universal computation in CAs
[01:10:27] Computational irreduciblity
[01:16:33] Is the universe discrete?
[01:20:49] Emergence but with the same computational principle
[01:23:10] How do you formalise the emergent phenomenon
[01:25:44] Growing cellula automata
[01:33:53] Openeded and unbounded computation is required for this kind of behaviour
[01:37:31] Graph cellula automata
[01:43:40] Connection to protein folding
[01:46:24] Are CAs the best tool for the job?
[01:49:37] Where to go to find more information

Thanks to our patrons!

VIP patrons;
Alex McNamara
Ebonia Elliott-Lewis

All access patrons;
John Mitchell
Konstantinos Barmpas

And also;
Federico Rios
Francesco Puddu
Ian Finley
John
Lukas Segelmark
MarkMc
Paul Oreto
Philip Leggier
Timothy O’Hear
Łukasz Stafiniak

References;

(intro)
Strong and Weak Emergence [Chalmers]

Weak Emergence [Bedau]

Complexity - a guided tour [Melanie Mitchell]

The Case for Strong Emergence [Sabine Hossenfelder]

The Future of Artificial Intelligence is Self-Organizing and Self-Assembling [Sebastian Risi]

Thanks to marknzed from Discord

(main show)

Learning Graph Cellular Automata [Grattarola]

Grattarola article on GCA

Dwarf Fortress

Growing Neural Cellular Automata [Alexander Mordvintsev]

AlphaFold [Deepmind]

Mandlebrot set

FDM/PDE

A new kind of science [Wolfram]

Wofram physics project

Game of life clock

AlphaFold

Michael Levin

Emergent garden

The edge of chaos

Computation at the edge of chaos: Phase transitions and emergent computation [Langton]

Lenia

Slackermanz

Daniele doing a talk on his work

Smarter podcast (Daniele’s pod!)

[danielegrattarola]

Thanks for having me on, I had a really great time chatting with you guys. The work you do with the channel is absolutely insane, such a high production value!!!

[granthawkins]

Your introductions are so spectacular. Really sets MLST apart. Thank you!

[mattbabik]

One of my favorite topics as a junior neuroscientist. Finding simplicity in the unexplainable

[neuronwave]

Heading off to the Santa Fe Institute in June to study and can't think of a better talk to listen to prior to going. Thank you.

[GBlunted]

Wolfram has been on Lex Friedman's podcast 3 times in which they go into depth on CA and Wolfram's theory of everything, all of which are good to listen to to try and understand Wolfram's grasp of languages and various stuff he's into! 👍🏽

[CristianGarcia]

Love this! I was into Complex Systems before ML started booming and took over. Talks from the Santa Fe Institute are amazing.

[ianfinley]

Man what an incredible episode! I'm going to have to watch it a few more times because it is packed to the brim with information.

[federicodidio]

Loved the attitude of Dr. Grattarola: modesty, curiosity and striving for semplicity over this-is-how-it-works and my-method-is-key.

[ConnoisseurOfExistence]

Very interesting! Need to come back to rewatch properly. Emergence can be boiled down to the very basics of even the mathematics set theory: if a set has no elements, will also have no properties at all; if you add 1 element, now the set has more properties; if you add 1 more element, new properties emerge; 3, 4, 5 elements... properties increase exponentially. 'Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes'...

[dr.mikeybee]

Hearing about Sebastian Risi, I'm immediately reminded of spooky action at a distance. Contrary to the idea of localization where self-assembly is based solely on local interactions. How might a system with an object that has a property read by two separate functions operate? Now you have cellular automata but only when not in opposition to a map like DNA. Moreover, the map is evolved over generations.

[patrickcooperai]

Great video guys! Initially I found the idea of Chalmers viewing consciousness as strongly emergent to be counterintuitive at first, but when you parse in the role of supervenience it becomes clear his proposed dualism and emergence from the physical are not contradictory. I thought this distinction was well handled here.

[stevengill]

Absolutely fascinating! I'd wondered what happened to CAs since Life in the 1980s. So excited to see the new developments.
David Bohm's implicate and explicate orders keep popping into mind, I wonder why? Thank you....

[michaelwangCH]

Watch out, Dalle2 becomes imaginative and more human like. We are close to reach general intelligent. It is great work to understand human intelligence.

[anonymoushandle]

Great video! This feels a bit uncanny, especially the work on neural cellular automata, since, through sheer coincidence, I was talking with someone yesterday about how the nodes in Hopfield networks can be thought about _like_ cellular automata.

[danielaronoff]

Hayek describes the program of the Scottish Enlightenment - which founded the modern disciplines of economics, legal and linguistic studies and evolutionary biology - as the study of emergent phenomena grounded in the basic units of analysis. In the humanities the point of view was summarized by Adam Ferguson’s phrase “ the result of human action but not of human design.”

[oncedidactic]

Tons and tons of stuff in this amazing episode, thanks!! One thing I kept thinking of as it applies to all the topics in some sense, but did not quite come up- concept of Boltzmann brains and ergodicity. General observation and the random brain idea seem to point that real world systems are not truly ergodic and this is another mark against infinity in reality, more in the time dimension I suppose? Anyway the Boltzmann brain question really makes you wonder though if a lesser form of proto life would (must?) arise on the basis of large scale state space exploration via correct seeding somewhere in the system. This gets to guest’s comments on CA rules vs state encoding the behavior.

Great stuff!!

[mobiusinversion]

Are there any analogues to the continuum hypothesis when it comes to the informal notion of emergence “levels”?

[hannesstark]

Fantastic! Another episode that is really inspiring for digging deeper. Thank you!

There is a typo at 28:42 I think.

[keithallpress]

At 12:25 the discussion cut short, but there is a connection between organisations and brains none-the-less.. The rules at the lower level in a company are a combination of fixed and adaptive, the employees have autonomy and will evolve a response, and it will involve middle management regulation plus employee initiative. By analogy the brain injury also has a response, not so much to top-down objectives but the analogy would be cognitive demand, where neighboring brain areas will pick up the demand, something we'll known as "plasticity". I can well imagine that this feature would evolve under selection pressure. If neural networks are to become biologically inspired then the language of description will need to evolve to embrace more organisational concepts.

[StormOrMelody]

I think you all would really enjoy having Michael Levin on the show (one of the co-authors of the "Growing Neural Cellular Automata" paper). He has plenty of talks on youtube, and also recently gave a talk at ICLR in the workshop "From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning Across Scales" if you want to check out some of his work.