James, I tried this earlier, and I dont know what you thought:
If a property of a whole is sensitive not only to the properties of the its but to their arrangement, or order of presentation, etc., then that property is an emergent one. Some writers have tried to put us off the scent by calling this weak emergence, but it IS the difference we are interested in, isnt it? I have never been able to identify any examples of "strong" emergence that didnt smack of mysticism. There is one aspect of this definition that makes me uneasy: it is an EXPLANATORY definition, like defining adaptation as "whatever natural selection produces". This means that we have to have a [reductive!] explanation for a property in place before we can say whether it is an emergent property or not. In the case of natural selection, reliance on explanatory definition has led to a lot of uncritical circular reasoning. Also, it depends on a clear understanding of what it is to be a "property of a part". I think to be a property of a part means that you cannot mention any other part in the description of that part. So, "being on the left" or "being added to the pile first" are not properly properties of parts. The definition makes emergence VERY common, of course, particularly in the world of computers where the same parts elements get moved around to produce many different kinds of outcomes and similar outcomes can be produced by different arrangements of the parts (multiple realizability). But I would rather have "emergence" banal than mystic. Do you have the EMERGENCE (Bedau and Phillips, MIT press, 2008) collection? Shall we do an online seminar on it???? We could agree to read an essay a week and comment on it. I could set up a WIKI. Shared phone line. Gotta go. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > [Original Message] > From: James Steiner <gregortr...@gmail.com> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> > Date: 7/9/2009 6:27:33 AM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Emergence and explanation > > On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:33 PM, russell standish<r.stand...@unsw.edu.au> wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 10:16:55AM -0700, glen e. p. ropella wrote: > >> The question was: Is there any identifiable property of a system that is > >> NOT an emergent property, regardless of how one defines "system"? If > >> anyone knows of one, please name it! > > > > Absolutely! The positions of the particles in a Newtonian n-body system > > are not emergent. Of course there are other properties of these > > systems that are emergent, but position & momenta of the particles are > > not amongst them, being part of the basic vocabulary of the model. > > OK, so aren't the positions and velocities of the particles a > consequence of the forces affecting the particles? Is saying something > is a consequence the same as saying it is an emergent property? Or is > this concequence too well defined, which brings us back to "emergent" > means "poorly understood"? > > I'm not sure why I'm even playing this game, since I don't think its > helpful to say that everything is an emergent property of something... > because of course it is... because everything in the universe is made > of math. > > ~~James > > ============================================================ > 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
============================================================ 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
