All,
The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting this thursday
(tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia and Agua Fria). I
suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in its early stages, to the
collection, EMERGENCE. Why a collection? Why a seminar? Because, as I keep
saying (sorry), I want to articulate the different views on the subject. One
thing I noticed about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking
from discussions. So academics tend to scoff. I think the mark of a truly
educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold more than one
idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and contrast. Bedau and
Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to engage in this kind of analysis
by bearing in mind a set of seven questions, as we read each of the authors.
These are:
1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility,
unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or supvenience
(whatever that is?)
2. What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes, phenomena,
patterns laws, or something else?
3. What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena? (Is emergence a rare
phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as well as in
psychology?)
4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in the eye
of the beholder.
5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic and
diachronic, or are both possible?
6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of phenomena
with their new causes and effects?
7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent bases?
Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what preconceptions we
hold on these questions.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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