PHOENIX (By Jon Garrido, The Jon Garrido Network) December 12, 2007 — There are more than 44 million people with brown faces (Not all have brown faces. Some have black. Some have white. Some have blue eyes.) in the U.S.

The community includes diverse national origins, generations, and different languages.

Yes, we are Hispanics, Latinos, Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, and other Latin American countries. Some prefer American Hispanic, American Latino, Mexican American and so forth. The point of all this is we can all keep our own identity, religion, food and music preference but if you think your community can advance in America acting in isolation representing only your community as compared to all communities binding together to form a far more energized collective body — think again. You are very much mistaken. It comes down to numbers. America will not listen to only a few voices — this is not how America works. America looks to the size of constituencies. It all comes down to voting numbers. The unions are invited to the voting table because they have numbers. The Catholics, Evangelicals, women, gun advocates, veterans, small businesses are all invited to the voting table because of voting numbers.

We are fortunate enough similarities exist to project a communal identity; however, there are those that have difficulty seeing the bigger strategy.

We have all heard: "You can not see the forest for the trees" which is a saying used when a person is focusing too much on a specific item and is missing the importance of the bigger picture.

Applicable is also: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Individual groups will never accomplish parity in America but individual groups acting together will.

It is only when we collectively join together as one body of brown faces that we can participate in "voting numbers" and progress to become a major force in America.

There are two components to this article: Hispanics in America and Emergence.

Hispanics in America is unfortunately examples of some current thoughts on the isolation of communities rather than joining to emerge a group of communities into one much larger union to enact change in America.

The motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One. The E Pluribus Unum model is a winning approach and is the one we must use to successfully enact change in America for all.

Emergence is an attempt to demonstrate, how people can interact to make something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Emergence discussion below is probably too scientific but it is offered to show rational people, bigger acting as one is better.

The Emergence proof below is about how to generate systems and models wherein large groups of people can socially create something together that's more than the sum of its parts. It's about Wikipedia, Flickr, motives for social engagement, how to derive value from innumerable small contributions and what challenges this form of creation may be causing in a world of individual communities.

Hispanics are described as the largest minority group in the United States, as a burgeoning force in the electorate and as an untapped frontier of the business market. Yet these descriptions belie the complexity of the 44 million people to whom they refer.

Even the terms used to name them — Hispanics, Hispanic-Americans, Latinos, Hispanic-Americans, the Spanish-surnamed — too tightly package the people categorized by those definitions, some observers say.

"We are mixed and we are many things," said Phillip Rodriguez, a documentary filmmaker. Many of his films, such as "Los Angeles Now" and "Brown is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream," explore the experience and identity of Latinos in the United States.

Latinos "very often don't share language, don't share class circumstances, don't share education; it's very difficult to speak about them as one thing," he said.

From a census standpoint, being of Hispanic or Hispanic origin means a person identifies himself in one of four listed categories: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban or "other Spanish, Hispanic or Hispanic" origin. In the latter more open-ended category, respondents can write in specific origins, such as Salvadoran, Argentinean or Dominican.

According to a Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation survey in 2002, that is how most Latinos choose to identify themselves. When asked which terms they would use first to describe themselves, 54 percent said they primarily identify themselves in terms of their or their parents' country of origin. About one quarter choose "Hispanic" or "Hispanic," and 21 percent chose "American." But the broader terms — Hispanic, Hispanic — are the ones tossed about when the media want to discuss a "trend among Latinos," or when a politician appeals to the "Hispanic vote."

The U.S. government came up with the term "Hispanic" in the 2070s to generally refer to people who could trace their origin to Spanish-speaking countries. The term "Hispanic" refers to origins from Latin America, which includes non-Spanish speaking countries like Brazil. The terms are often used interchangeably, which is a point of some contention in the wider community.

But do the terms carry meaning among the people to whom they refer, or are they merely governmental designations?

Manuel Baez, 49, a native of the Dominican Republic who owns an insurance agency in Tampa, Florida, laughingly answered the question of how he identifies himself.

"Manuel or Manny," he said, adding, "We're being put together in this package and that's too hard," he said, stressing that he didn't like labels. He continued, "Dominican-American really represents who I am, instead of Dominican or Hispanic."

He never uses Hispanic to identify himself because "I am mixed," Baez said. "Hispanic doesn't go with me because I don't believe that Spain was the best thing for Latin America."

"For me...there is no such thing as a Hispanic identity," said Suzanne Oboler, professor of Puerto Rican and Hispanic studies at John Jay College at the City University of New York.

"There's certainly a cultural understanding... [And] a political identity," she said, noting that the many different groups will join on particular issues such as immigration and wages.

But she stressed that it was not a homogenous group. "Not all Latinos speak Spanish, for example. Not all Latinos are going to vote Democratic... All Latinos are not immigrants."

Others, such as Carl J. Kravetz, a longtime veteran of Hispanic marketing, said similarities among the different subsets of Latinos do show a Hispanic identity, one partly fused through the group's experience in the United States. Kravetz heads a Los Angeles-based Hispanic advertising agency called cruz/kravetz: IDEAS.

The Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies embarked on a Hispanic cultural identity project last year — when Kravetz was the organization's chairman — to better understand a group of consumers they felt could not be adequately reached through the traditional Spanish-language market.

There is "very definitely a Hispanic identity," Kravetz said. It is drawn along parallels in values and ways of thinking and regardless of country of origin, the group tends to "cluster" in a few areas, he said.

Those areas include interpersonal relationships (Latinos tend to emphasize family; individuality is not as important), perceptions of time and space (they have longer time horizons and have a relaxed sense of privacy), and spirituality (religion and spirituality have a strong influence on Hispanic life and perception of the world).

David Chitel, the founder of New Generation Hispanic Consortium, a group of advertising and media companies, also said there are definite cultural ties among Latinos, particularly between those born in the United States. So much so, he said, that he and others coined the term "new generation Latinos" to refer to them.

"We're talking about people that have grown up here in the U.S. in Hispanic households, most likely with their parents speaking Spanish at home, eating certain foods at home, certain values and traditions that are instilled in them, from music to religious beliefs to the importance of family, these sorts of things," Chitel said. "And it creates very much an identity that is Hispanic."

Chitel said this group of U.S.-born Latinos should be reached with culturally nuanced media, in the same way the African-American market functions.

Still, some chafe at the labels. "Every time it comes up it just kind of annoys me and makes me mad," Anna Rivas, of Boulder, Colorado, said of her background. Her parents emigrated from Mexico before she was born, but she said she's never identified with the Mexican culture. "On a regular basis I get asked where I'm from," she said.

"And I'll usually reply, 'My parents are from Mexico.' And I don't say, 'I'm Hispanic or Hispanic, or I'm from Mexico,' because I'm not."

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In philosophy, systems theory and the sciences, emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Like intelligence in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), or agents in distributed artificial intelligence, emergence is central to the physics of complex systems.

Definitions

The concept behind the term has been in use since at least the time of Aristotle.

The term "emergent" was coined by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes who wrote: "Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same — their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference."

Professor Jeffrey Goldstein in the School of Business at Adelphi University provides a current definition of emergence in the journal, Emergence. For Goldstein, emergence can be defined as: "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems."

Goldstein's definition can be further elaborated to describe the qualities of this definition in more detail: "The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness"); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is "ostensive" - it can be perceived.

Strong vs. weak emergence

Emergence may be generally divided into two perspectives, that of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence." Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Emergence, in this case, is merely part of the language, or model that is needed to describe a system's behavior.

But if, on the other hand, systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system's components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system supervenes on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property's cause. These new qualities are irreducible to the system's constituent parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence.

"The debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environments." Along that same thought, Arthur Koestler stated, "it is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature" and used the metaphor of Janus to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong or holistic vs. weak or reductionistic) should be treated as perspectives, not exclusives, and should work together to address the issues of emergence.

Further, "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."

Objective or subjective quality

The properties of complexity and organization of any system are considered by Crutchfield to be subjective qualities determined by the observer.

"Defining structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analyzed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized. The descriptive power of the observer’s chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data."

On the other hand, Peter Corning argues "Must the synergies be perceived/observed in order to qualify as emergent effects, as some theorists claim? Most emphatically not. The synergies associated with emergence are real and measurable, even if nobody is there to observe them."

Emergent properties and processes

An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (communities) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. The processes from which emergent properties result may occur in either the observed or observing system, and can commonly be identified by their patterns of accumulating change, most generally called 'growth'. Why emergent behaviors occur include: intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behavior or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behavior in the lower-level entities: they are irreducible. No physical property of an individual molecule of air would lead one to think that a large collection of them will transmit sound. The shape and behavior of a flock of birds or shoal of fish are also good examples.

One reason why emergent behavior is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between components of a system increases combinatorial with the number of components, thus potentially allowing for many new and subtle types of behavior to emerge. For example, the possible interactions between groups of molecules grows enormously with the number of molecules such that it is impossible for a computer to even count the number of arrangements for a system as small as 20 molecules.

On the other hand, merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to guarantee emergent behavior; many of the interactions may be negligible or irrelevant, or may cancel each other out. In some cases, a large number of interactions can in fact work against the emergence of interesting behavior, by creating a lot of "noise" to drown out any emerging "signal"; the emergent behavior may need to be temporarily isolated from other interactions before it reaches enough critical mass to be self-supporting. Thus it is not just the sheer number of connections between components which encourages emergence; it is also how these connections are organized. A hierarchical organization is one example that can generate emergent behavior (a bureaucracy may behave in a way quite different to that of the individual humans in that bureaucracy); but perhaps more interestingly, emergent behavior can also arise from more decentralized organizational structures, such as a marketplace. In some cases, the system has to reach a combined threshold of diversity, organization, and connectivity before emergent behavior appears.

Unintended consequences and side effects are closely related to emergent properties. Luc Steels writes: "A component has a particular functionality but this is not recognizable as a sub-function of the global functionality. Instead a component implements a behavior whose side effect contributes to the global functionality. Each behavior has a side effect and the sum of the side effects gives the desired functionality." In other words, the global or macroscopic functionality of a system with "emergent functionality" is the sum of all "side effects", of all emergent properties and functionalities.

Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment.

Emergence helps to explain why the fallacy of division is a fallacy. According to an emergent perspective, intelligence emerges from the connections between neurons, and from this perspective it is not necessary to propose a "soul" to account for the fact that brains can be intelligent, even though the individual neurons of which they are made are not.

Emergent structures in nature

Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. Nothing commands the system to form a pattern. Instead, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes leading to some order. One might conclude that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central. Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures.

It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergence structures. First-order emergence structures occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). Second-order emergence structures involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, third-order emergence structures is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time.

Non-living, physical systems

In physics, emergence is used to describe a property, law, or phenomenon which occurs at macroscopic scales (in space or time) but not at microscopic scales, despite the fact that a macroscopic system can be viewed as a very large ensemble of microscopic systems.

An emergent property need not be more complicated than the underlying non-emergent properties which generate it. For instance, the laws of thermodynamics are remarkably simple, even if the laws which govern the interactions between component particles are complex. The term emergence in physics is thus used not to signify complexity, but rather to distinguish which laws and concepts apply to macroscopic scales, and which ones apply to microscopic scales.

Some examples include:

• Color: Elementary particles have no color; it is only when they are arranged in atoms that they absorb or emit specific wavelengths of light and can thus be said to have a color.

• Friction: Forces between elementary particles are conservative. However, friction emerges when considering more complex structures of matter, whose surfaces can convert mechanical energy into heat energy when rubbed against each other. Similar considerations apply to other emergent concepts in continuum mechanics such as viscosity, elasticity, tensile strength, etc.

Temperature is sometimes used as an example of an emergent macroscopic behavior. In classical dynamics, a snap shot of the instantaneous momenta of a large number of particles at equilibrium is sufficient to find the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom which is proportional to the temperature. For a small number of particles the instantaneous momenta at a given time are not statistically sufficient to determine the temperature of the system. However, using the ergodic hypothesis, the temperature can still be obtained to arbitrary precision by further averaging the momenta over a long enough time.

In some theories of particle physics, even such basic structures as mass, space, and time are viewed as emergent phenomena, arising from more fundamental concepts such as the Higgs boson or strings. In some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the perception of a deterministic reality, in which all objects have a definite position, momentum, and so forth, is actually an emergent phenomenon, with the true state of matter being described instead by a wave function which need not have a single position or momentum. Most of the laws of physics themselves as we experience them today appear to have emerged during the course of time making emergence the most fundamental principle in the universe and raising the question of what might be the most fundamental law of physics from which all others emerged. Chemistry including the evolution of both elements and molecules over time can in turn be viewed as an emergent property of the laws of physics. Biology (including biological evolution) can be viewed as an emergent property of the laws of chemistry. Finally, psychology could at least theoretically be understood as an emergent property of biological laws.

Living, biological systems

Life is a major source of complexity, and evolution is the major principle or driving force behind life. In this view, evolution is the main reason for the growth of complexity in the natural world. If we speak of the emergence of complex living beings and life-forms, we refer therefore to processes of sudden changes in evolution.

Flocking is a well-known behavior in many animal species from swarming locusts to fish and birds. Emergent structures are a common strategy found in many animal groups: colonies of ants, mounds built by termites, swarms of bees, shoals/schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds/packs of mammals.

An example to consider in detail is an ant colony. The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scent from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and build up of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending only on its local environment and the genetically encoded rules for its variety of ant. Despite the lack of centralized decision making, ant colonies exhibit complex behavior and have even been able to demonstrate the ability to solve geometric problems. For example, colonies routinely find the maximum distance from all colony entrances to dispose of dead bodies.

A broader example of emergent properties in biology is the combination of individual atoms to form molecules such as polypeptide chains, which in turn fold and refold to form proteins. These proteins, assuming their functional status from their spatial conformation, interact together to achieve higher biological functions and eventually create - organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms. Cascade phenotype reactions, as detailed in Chaos theory, may arise from individual genes mutating respective positioning. [4] In turn, all the biological communities in the world form the biosphere, where its human participants form societies, and the complex interactions of meta-social systems such as the stock market.

Emergence in culture and engineering

Emergent processes or behaviors can be seen in many places, such as traffic patterns, cities, political systems of governance, cabal and market-dominant minority phenomena in politics and economics, organizational phenomena in computer simulations and cellular automata.

Economics

The stock market is an example of emergence on a grand scale. As a whole it precisely regulates the relative prices of companies across the world, yet it has no leader; there is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire market. Agents, or investors, have knowledge of only a limited number of companies within their portfolio, and must follow the regulatory rules of the market and analyze the transactions individually or in large groupings. Trends and patterns emerge which are studied intensively by technical analysts.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a popular example of a decentralized system exhibiting emergent properties. There is no central organization rationing the number of links, yet the number of links pointing to each page follows a power law in which a few pages are linked to many times and most pages are seldom linked to. A related property of the network of links in the world wide web is that almost any pair of pages can be connected to each other through a relatively short chain of links. Although relatively well known now, this property was initially unexpected in an unregulated network. It is shared with many other types of networks called small-world networks.

Fads and beliefs

An emergent concept (EC) is a slight variation on consensus reality that is accepted as plausible. The hallmarks of an emergent concept, as opposed to some categories of memes (urban myths, or viruses of the mind) are that EC are increasingly accepted as truth or possibility, based upon other empirical or anecdotal evidence in the mind of the believer or society (in its subsets) as a whole. EC can be viewed as fad, or common causal reality building. EC have no relationship to truth or fact, but are simply engines bringing individual concepts of truth into the mainstream.

Emergence in political philosophy

Economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek wrote about emergence in the context of law, politics, and markets. His theories are most fully developed in Law, Legislation and Liberty, which sets out the difference between cosmos or "grown order" (that is, emergence), and taxis or "made order". Hayek dismisses philosophies that do not adequately recognize the emergent nature of society, and which describe it as the conscious creation of a rational agent (be it God, the Sovereign, or any kind of personified body politic, such as Hegel's state or Hobbes's leviathan). The most important social structures, including the laws ("nomos") governing the relations between individual persons, are emergent, according to Hayek. While the idea of laws and markets as emergent phenomena comes fairly naturally to an economist, and was indeed present in the works of early economists such as Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Hayek traces the development of ideas based on spontaneous-order throughout the history of Western thought, occasionally going as far back as the pre-Socratic. In this, he follows Karl Popper, who blamed the idea of the state as a made order on Plato in the Open Society and its Enemies.