Thus spake Nick Thompson circa 09-07-07 01:28 PM: > My present candidate is Wimsatt's view which is to say that an entity > has emergent properties if it has properties that depend upon the > organization of its parts, rather than solely on the nature of the > parts themselves. So a triangular frame has emergent properties not > shared, for instance, with a parallelogram frame (other than having > three members)..
But, as Yudkowsky said in that post that Jochen forwarded, isn't this true of _everything_? Can you name any system where _every_ property of the system is based solely on the nature of its components and not on its organization? More generally, is any property _not_ an emergent property? Sure, there may be _types_ of organization, as in the case of a triangle vs. a parallelogram; but if that's the case, why not just talk about types of organization instead of using the magical term "emergence"? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ 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
