Lions, Mosquitoes , and Emergent Behavior

There was a recent curious sugya that I want to point out, so that I could look it up for myself later. Sanhedrin 77a:

וְאָמַר רָבָא: כְּפָתוֹ לִפְנֵי אֲרִי – פָּטוּר, לִפְנֵי יַתּוּשִׁין – חַיָּיב. רַב אָשֵׁי אָמַר: אֲפִילּוּ לִפְנֵי יַתּוּשִׁין נָמֵי פָּטוּר, הָנֵי אָזְלִי וְהָנֵי אָתוּ.

And Rava says: If one bound another before a lion, he is exempt from execution. Since perhaps the lion will choose not to prey on the victim it was not his action that caused the damage. If he bound another before mosquitoes he is liable to be executed, as inevitably, the mosquitoes will bite him until he dies. Rav Ashi says: Even if he bound an individual before mosquitoes he is exempt from execution, as the mosquitoes who were there when he bound the individual are not the ones who killed him. Rather, those mosquitoes went and these other mosquitoes came. Therefore, this case is comparable to the case where one bound another in a place where the sun or the cold would ultimately arrive.

Thus, according to fourth-generation Rava, one would be liable for binding before the lion, assuming the lion would surely bite. It is just that it is not a certainty.

Also, according to Rava, a swarm of mosquitoes are like a lion, so since they will certainly bite, the binder is liable.

Meanwhile, two scholastic generations later, his grandstudent Rav Ashi disagrees, because each mosquito does a single bite and moves on. That later mosquitoes, part of the swarm, are each a different entity, that perhaps wasn’t directly present at the time of the binding.

While presumably halacha follows the later Amora, Rav Ashi, I think there is a more basic dispute between Rava and Rav Ashi here, that relates to Emergent Behavior.

The idea of emergence is that there are some entities that exhibit more complex behavior than their individual parts. Here, each mosquito has a tiny brain, and a small set of rules or behaviors it follows. But, together, a swarm of mosquitoes might display much more complex behavior, like the swirls or tentacles in the AI-generated image of a swarm of mosquitoes above.

For instance, here is a slime mold that pulsates and moves. It is made up of many independent slime molds, but overall, it behaves like an organism:

Similarly, in Conway’s Game of Life, there is a grid representing the world, with some cells empty and some cells populated. Four simple rules determine whether a cell will be alive or dead in the next generation.

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.

2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.

3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.

4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Just applying these four rules to each individual cell in turn, we observe complex emergent behavior, for instance the glider:

which slowly moves / glides across the game world.

We might imagine that Rava deems a swarm to be its own emergent organism, so since part of the greater organism is there, it is all there. Meanwhile, Rav Ashi does nor recognize the phenomenon of emergent behavior.