Would you like to inspect the original subtitles? These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated:
1
00:00:00,160 --> 00:00:02,560
An ant is pretty stupid.
2
00:00:02,720 --> 00:00:06,520
It doesn't have much of a brain, no will, no plan,
3
00:00:06,520 --> 00:00:10,080
and yet, many ants together are smart.
4
00:00:10,680 --> 00:00:13,720
An ant colony can construct complex structures.
5
00:00:14,320 --> 00:00:21,760
Some colonies keep farms of fungi, others take care of cattle. They can wage war or defend themselves.
6
00:00:22,120 --> 00:00:24,040
How is this possible?
7
00:00:24,040 --> 00:00:28,180
How can a bunch of stupid things do smart things together?
8
00:00:28,180 --> 00:00:30,900
This phenomenon is called emergence,
9
00:00:30,900 --> 00:00:35,220
and it's one of the most fascinating and mysterious features of our universe.
10
00:00:35,920 --> 00:00:43,480
In a nutshell, it describes small things forming bigger things that have different properties than the sum of their parts.
11
00:00:43,920 --> 00:00:51,480
Emergence is complexity arising from simplicity, and emergence is everywhere.
12
00:00:51,480 --> 00:00:58,880
[Intro]
13
00:01:00,900 --> 00:01:06,600
Water has vastly different properties to the molecules that make it up, like the concept of wetness.
14
00:01:06,860 --> 00:01:11,480
Take wet fabric, If you zoom in far enough, there is no wetness.
15
00:01:11,600 --> 00:01:15,600
There are just molecules sitting in the spaces between the atoms of the cloth.
16
00:01:16,160 --> 00:01:18,720
Wetness is an emerging property of water.
17
00:01:18,980 --> 00:01:24,600
Something new only created by a lot of individual interactions between water molecules.
18
00:01:25,200 --> 00:01:33,060
And this is sort of it. Many things interact under a certain set of rules, creating something above and beyond themselves.
19
00:01:33,640 --> 00:01:35,980
It turns out that more is different.
20
00:01:36,080 --> 00:01:43,360
This different property is itself a new thing, and that new thing can couple with other new things to repeat the process.
21
00:01:43,680 --> 00:01:49,560
You can imagine this as layers stacked upon each other every, layer made from more complex parts.
22
00:01:50,040 --> 00:01:51,740
Atoms form molecules.
23
00:01:51,740 --> 00:01:53,740
Molecules form proteins.
24
00:01:53,740 --> 00:01:55,580
Proteins make up cells.
25
00:01:55,580 --> 00:01:57,260
Cells make up organs.
26
00:01:57,260 --> 00:01:59,220
Organs form individuals.
27
00:01:59,220 --> 00:02:01,400
Individuals form societies.
28
00:02:02,180 --> 00:02:05,100
But how can something be more than the sum of its parts?
29
00:02:05,600 --> 00:02:13,460
How do ants form the sort of cloudy entity that is a colony? By following a ruleset that produces order through chaos.
30
00:02:14,060 --> 00:02:18,060
For example, let's look at how an ant colony distributes jobs.
31
00:02:18,260 --> 00:02:23,080
Let's assume that a colony shall have 25% workers, 25% caretakers,
32
00:02:23,080 --> 00:02:26,620
25% soldiers and 25% gatherers.
33
00:02:26,880 --> 00:02:34,760
Ants communicate their current job via chemicals. For example, the worker ant constantly secretes chemicals that say: "I'm a worker".
34
00:02:35,280 --> 00:02:41,500
When ants meet other ants, they smell each other to gather information, telling each other their job and what they're doing.
35
00:02:41,940 --> 00:02:44,400
Both keep track of who they met in the past.
36
00:02:44,700 --> 00:02:51,980
Now, imagine an anteater kills most of the gatherers. If this isn't fixed quickly, the colony will starve.
37
00:02:52,400 --> 00:02:57,280
Many worker ants need to switch jobs, but how do you tell this to thousands of them?
38
00:02:57,860 --> 00:02:59,860
Simple. You don't.
39
00:03:00,320 --> 00:03:06,180
Our worker ant will still meet and smell other ants, but it will encounter almost no gatherers at all.
40
00:03:06,480 --> 00:03:12,980
It counts too few gatherers, until it reaches a critical point, and then it changes its job.
41
00:03:13,440 --> 00:03:20,180
The worker becomes a gatherer. Other ants will do the same, until after a while there are enough gatherers again.
42
00:03:20,640 --> 00:03:23,140
The balance is restored all by itself.
43
00:03:23,580 --> 00:03:30,440
The actions and interactions of an individual are random. You can't plan which ant will encounter which other ant.
44
00:03:30,440 --> 00:03:36,360
But the simple set of rules is so elegant that a colony's many operations emerge as a consequence.
45
00:03:37,420 --> 00:03:45,720
On an even more fundamental level, hundreds of millions of complicated molecules interact to maintain a robust and amazing structure.
46
00:03:45,720 --> 00:03:49,960
A being with vastly different properties than the sum of its dead parts emerges.
47
00:03:50,340 --> 00:03:53,040
The smallest unit of life: a cell.
48
00:03:53,820 --> 00:04:00,160
We still don't have a clear definition of what living things are, we just know they emerge from things that are not alive.
49
00:04:00,920 --> 00:04:05,860
Cells combine and cooperate. They specialize and respond to one another,
50
00:04:05,860 --> 00:04:10,680
and over time, we develop into complex organisms with remarkable capacities.
51
00:04:11,180 --> 00:04:19,660
Your arms and legs and heart are an incredibly complex and complicated system made of trillions of individual stupid things...
52
00:04:20,040 --> 00:04:24,440
...and yet we breathe, digest and watch YouTube videos.
53
00:04:25,240 --> 00:04:27,540
How do your cells know what to do?
54
00:04:28,020 --> 00:04:30,480
Think of the pacemaker cells in your heart.
55
00:04:31,020 --> 00:04:37,160
Billions of them need to send out an impulse just at the right moment to collectively create a heartbeat.
56
00:04:37,320 --> 00:04:43,840
Our cells exchange chemical information with their neighbor cells to see what they're up to, and then decide what to do.
57
00:04:44,120 --> 00:04:51,040
If it's among a lot of cells that are working on the same task, it will start working on that task as well, and sync up with them.
58
00:04:51,720 --> 00:04:59,560
There is no master mind giving commands. Just single units communicating with their neighbors, and acting according to the feedback they get.
59
00:05:00,480 --> 00:05:06,220
What about our most important part? What is the thing that asks these kinds of questions?
60
00:05:07,080 --> 00:05:11,780
Is our consciousness then an emergent property of the cells in our brain?
61
00:05:12,480 --> 00:05:17,540
This question is too big and important, it deserves a video of its own.
62
00:05:18,140 --> 00:05:24,440
Some things that emerge are hard to define. You can't touch an ant colony, only its parts.
63
00:05:24,860 --> 00:05:27,640
It has neither brain nor face, nor body.
64
00:05:28,100 --> 00:05:31,160
And yet the colony interacts with the world.
65
00:05:31,620 --> 00:05:37,360
Just like colonies emerge from ants, things emerge from humans, like Nations.
66
00:05:38,300 --> 00:05:42,020
What actually is a nation, is it its population?
67
00:05:42,020 --> 00:05:47,200
Is it its institutions, its symbols like its flag, colours or anthems?
68
00:05:47,720 --> 00:05:52,360
The physical things it makes like cities, the territory it occupies?
69
00:05:52,580 --> 00:05:54,680
All of these things are fluid.
70
00:05:55,720 --> 00:05:57,840
Populations change and are replaced.
71
00:05:58,300 --> 00:06:02,280
Institutions come and go, cities can be constructed and abandoned.
72
00:06:02,740 --> 00:06:09,140
Borders have changed all the time for most of history, and symbols get replaced by new symbols.
73
00:06:10,060 --> 00:06:14,020
A nation has no face, no brain, no body.
74
00:06:14,560 --> 00:06:21,560
Are nations not real, then? Of course they are, just like ant colonies, nations interact with the world.
75
00:06:22,160 --> 00:06:27,920
They can change landscapes, wage wars, grow or decline, and they can stop existing.
76
00:06:28,100 --> 00:06:32,420
But they only exist because of a lot of humans interacting with each other.
77
00:06:33,040 --> 00:06:38,300
But not just nations. All the complex structures that surround us emerge from us.
78
00:06:38,840 --> 00:06:42,680
Even if we don't intend to, we are constantly creating.
79
00:06:42,680 --> 00:06:47,840
Communities, companies, cities, societies.
80
00:06:47,840 --> 00:06:55,100
All of these things are entities that have fundamentally different properties and abilities than the pretty stupid apes they emerged from.
81
00:06:55,960 --> 00:06:58,280
We don't know why any of this happens.
82
00:06:58,420 --> 00:07:03,060
We just observe it, and it seems to be a fundamental property of our universe.
83
00:07:03,380 --> 00:07:07,980
It may be the most beautiful and wonderous property of our universe.
84
00:07:08,980 --> 00:07:18,580
[Outro]8851
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.