September 2, 2026: Salus Forum

Now, I want to talk about some of the recent work that’s been done on emergence. It has yielded some very interesting ideas. So, what we’re about to introduce, and then Jack’s expanding on, are some ideas that are actually quite radically new. This stuff is not out there in the world yet.

A lot of it comes from a group called the Santa Fe Institute. The Santa Fe Institute was originally composed of scientists who were building the hydrogen bomb. If you saw the movie on Oppenheimer, you would know something about that. Well, many of these scientists decided they wanted to beat the swords into plowshares. So, they moved into Santa Fe and started the Santa Fe Institute, which is one of the extraordinary think tanks in the world. They’re dealing mostly with what might be called complex systems.

Well, one of the things that’s emerged recently is looking at the issue of emergence.  I want to talk about two distinctions that have been drawn. One has been drawn by the people at the Santa Fe Institute, and the other is based on a conversation with Jack. The first distinction has to do with the difference between soft emergence and hard emergence. Soft emergence is essentially when a system– say a healthcare system, because that’s what we’re going to spend a lot of time on today–has some process that it’s operating under. And suddenly, there’s a major change that occurs. But the change is occurring in a way that still makes use of the underlying process.

The example that’s in the write-up thing I sent to you was that we look at the flocking of birds, or the swarming of fish. If you look at birds that are flocking, they’re flocking all the time. It’s not as if this is some radical thing. But suddenly, the hawk comes in. The flocking becomes an extraordinary defense system for the birds, because the hawk is swooping into the birds. And there’s so many birds swirling around and swarming that the hawk can’t concentrate on any one bird. So they go straight through the whole thing and never get the bird, unless there’s an outlier, a bird that somehow was outside the system. The outlying bird is fair game for the hawk.

The same thing occurs in the swarming of fish. The fish are swarming all the time. However, the swarming, movement, and keeping together is itself becomes a defensive structure, if in fact there’s an attacking predator fish.

First, it should be noted with regard to the flocking of birds and swarming of fish, that there is no lead bird. There’s no lead fish. This is extraordinary, if you think about it. The extraordinary movement that’s occurring. This remarkably coordinated activity is called the neighborhood effect. That is, the bird and the fish move quickly, depending on the movement of the neighboring fish or bird. The neighboring effect is very powerful, and it occurs in many systems.

There’s a whole school called agent-based modeling that’s built around that effect. This effect is observed in the way people move through the airports, and what happens in neighborhoods that suddenly become all black or all white. The neighborhood effect is extremely important. So that’s the nature of what’s called soft emergence. I think there’s many examples of what’s going on in soft emergence in systems that are occurring today.