Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

than three, she might follow a rule that has her return to the nest’ (76- 77). Knowledge of some of the ant rules gives the impression that the behaviour of the colony is entirely determined bottom-up. That is, one can imagine that each ant has built-in laws governing its behaviour, and one 14 Deborah Gordon, Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized (New York: Free Press, 1999). 15 Reported in Steven Johnson, Emergence (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 74. 16 Quoted in Johnson, p. 81. 17 Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, The Ants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). How to Keep the ‘Non’ in Nonreductive Physicalism 13 can imagine a molecular-neural level account: ‘smell of fourth forager within one minute causes return to the nest’. So the typical causal agent is not ‘the system as a whole’ or ‘the environment’ but a few molecules of a pheromone embedded in the ant’s receptor system. If one had all of the information about the rules, the initial placement of the ants, and the pheromone trails, one could predict or explain the behaviour of the whole colony. Now consider an alternative, systems-theory description of the phenomena. The colony as a whole is certainly describable as a system. It is bounded but not closed; it is a self-sustaining pattern. The shift in perspective required by a systems approach is to see the colony’s components as a set of interrelated functional systems - not a queen plus other ants, but rather an organisation of processes such as reproduction, foraging, nest-building. It is a system that runs on information. The colony is a self-organised system: it produces and maintains its own functional systems in that the relations among the ants constrain them to fulfil the roles of queen, forager, etc. (notice the language Juarrero uses). All have the same DNA; differentiation occurs only in the context of the colony. In addition it has a high degree of autonomy vis-a-vis the environment. The colony displays a number of emergent, holistic properties. In addition to its relative stability there is the ‘intelligence’ displayed in the placement of the trash pile and cemetery, the ability to prioritise food sources. Accidents of the environment such as location of food sources affect the foraging system as a whole, which in turn constrains the behaviour of individual ants. The crucial shift in perspective is from thinking in terms of causes (that is, nothing will happen unless something makes it happen) to thinking in terms of both bottom-up causes and constraints (that is, a variety of behaviours are possible and the important question is what constricts the possibilities to give the observed result). It is a switch from viewing matter as inherently passive to viewing it (at least the complex systems in question) as inherently active. In contrast to the assumption that each lower-level entity will do only one thing, the assumption here is that each l