Doug, Well, I think the better choice is to try to understand why English needs the word 'emerge' to letting us talk about the world. Emerging is appearing from nowhere, or coming out of the shadows or passing through an opening or becoming fully formed. The last one there points to what we really want to mean by the term, right? I think the others apply to our perception or awareness of the things that change from being unformed to fully formed, the subjective part of it. The way I've been using to point to what and where emergence is, in the 'becoming fully formed' sense, is by identifying the growth of the network of relations that is actually doing it, i.e. the network that is becoming formed. It takes a while to sort the categories of the all the kinds of growth processes (trends with all derivatives positive) and all the kinds of emergence (new networks of relationships), but once you make a little headway with that you find that growth and emergence are very oddly related 1 to 1, that every kind of growth accompanies a kind of emergence and every kind of emergence accompanies a kind of growth. Must be somehow connected! :,)
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/> -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 6:18 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Seminal Papers in Complexity I like the response below. I've felt that the phrase "emergent behavior" has been overused for quite some time now. In the early days of running TRANSIMS (a large-scale traffic simulator) we often found ourselves saying "I didn't expect that behavior" upon seeing an unexpected series of traffic flow patterns 'emerge' in simulations of a city with 8.6 million people driving around over a 24 hour period. Indeed, often times some of the results were unexpected, however once analyzed they always made perfect sense. --Doug -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On 6/18/07, Günther Greindl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hello Russell, > "Sum of the parts" is more metaphoric than literal. IMHO, the key to > the kingdom is emergence, and nonlinearity is only necessary to I used to throw around the word "emergence" around until I noticed that I used it there where I did not understand what was really going on, like in: "consciousness? - simple - an emergent process" Since then I have stopped using the word - it is, in fact, vacuous to call something emergent - whereas ie. nonlinear has definite meaning. The problem is that emergence seems to be the opposite of a mechanistic or an algorithmic process; or an analytical one. So it becomes a stop-gap concept for all processes which elude our common problem solution techniques. But no new explanation is obtained when one calls a process emergent - on gets instead a false sense of security, of having grasped something which in reality still eludes our understanding. Best Regards, Günther -- Günther Greindl Department of Philosophy of Science University of Vienna [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/ Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/ Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org <http://www.complexitystudies.org> ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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