Most of the people that I know, those who occupy prominent places in my social universe, are nothing but words. I've never met them, don't know what they look like, and sometimes don't even know if they are boy, girl or other if you accept the notion that some of the boys are female, and the reverse. So, I end up constructing elaborate images in my mind to flesh them out, like characters in a novel. Indeed, some of them are characters in novels. I smile a bit at nattering about virtual worlds to come since in a sense that's where I live and have always done so.

One of my virtual characters is Cosma, the sloth, who has vowed to be a bit more positive, perhaps even faux cheerful, now and then for variety. His struggle is illuminated by this cheerful account of the thinking of John Holland, on his 80th birthday.

The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking --- and half the trouble with it is that everything we say about it is only rough --- the flip side of the problem of building blocks. Instead of asking how we, or other creatures, carve Nature at the joints, we ask why Nature has those particular joints, or even has joints at all, and is not (to continue with the metaphor) a single undifferentiated hunk of inharmoniously quivering meat, a fleshy compound of chaos and ancient night. Some regularity, someplace far down in the depths where quantum field theory meets general relativity and atoms and void merge into one another, we may take to be given, an empirical fact, not susceptible to any meaningful explanation, in short, the rules of the game: but the rest of the observable, exploitable order in the universe --- benzene molecules, PV = nRT, snowflakes, cyclonic storms, kittens, cats, young love, middle-aged remorse, financial euphoria accompanied with acute gullibility, prevaricating candidates for public office, tapeworms, jet-lag, and unfolding cherry blossoms --- where do all these regularities come from? They're connected to the fundamental physics somehow, just like pawn formations and end-games are connected to the rules of chess, but how do you get from one to the other? Call this "emergence" if you like --- it's a fine-sounding word, and brings to mind southwestern creation myths in an oddly apt way --- that label in itself just marks a mystery, without explaining anything. And whatever answer we come up with had better not just work for the physical universe, for the Realized World, but (as Holland's persistent use of board games as examples makes clear) nearly anything governed by rules.

I suspect that this means something, says something, but in many ways it's like a pop song. I like the music so the lyrics don't have to actually make sense, and it's missing the point of the song to parse them too closely.