In fact, much of the order that we see around us, from buying patterns at delis to the orderly progression of a forest fire through a national park, is a result of just such massively parallel processes. Resnick s work challenges us to do a lot of rethinking. No entity instructs ants to forage for food. Yet because of the local actions of individual ants, randomly following simple rules, the overall pattern of foraging emerges. They are not even collections of entities.
Cars move in and out of jams.
The jams remain, emergent phenomena consisting not of individual entities but of interactions. In this view, consciousness would not itself be an entity, any more than a traffic jam is. But it would be no less real. One delightful characteristic of Resnick s book is that it mirrors the very phenomena that he describes. It is one of the clearest, simplest books that you will ever read, and yet its ideas are astonishingly powerful.