The emergence at the beginning of the passage shifted focus to complexity and then to organized complexity, which then draws a parallel with Davidson's iPod experiment. Patterns are at the core of understanding this complexity, whether it be for the "pattern-amplifying machine" Engels analyzed or the "information in noisy communication channels" that Shannon and Turing worked on. The look into complexity continues with Alan Turing and his work on emergence with respect to computer science and mathematics. The one sentence which really resonated with me was, "The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions." It succinctly described for me the charm of the great metropolises of the world, how the bustling energy of a bazaar in New Delhi lent to not only its complexity, but its rich and vibrant personality. Johnson goes on to use the word emergent to introduce complexity. The pacemakers he believes are the "liberal industrialists, the Manchester 'bigwigs'". Engels, however does not believe that this organization is completely without "pacemaker". He supports this by citing how Manchester had no real urban planning and by quoting Friedrich Engels, who finds that the separation of the classes in the city seems highly systematic, but at the same time natural. Johnson then delves into an example of how Manchester is an example of an emergent system.
She is a student, in other words, of a particular kind of emergent, self-organizing system." From here on out, Johnson takes the role of the student and shows various kinds of emergent systems. He introduces Deborah Gordon and writes that she, "focuses on the connection between the microbehavior of individual ants and the overall behavior of the colonies themselves, and part of that research involves tracking the life cycles of individual colonies, following them year by year as they scour the desert floor for food, competing with other colonies for territory, and-once a year-mating with them. Johnson introduces this novel idea of emergent behavior with the example of ant colonies.
Johnson uses the word "emergent" throughout his essay as the basis for the various places his ideas and research take him. Johnson's essay, The Myth of the Ant Queen revolves around the idea of systems that are self-organizing and "emergent".
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