Robert:
House guests, but let me take a quick whack at this. Before the recent
"epigenic" revolution we focussed only on which genes we had, not on the
arrangement of timing of events during development. It's example, I think, of
the heurism of the emergentist viewpoint.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Robert Holmes
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 10/10/2009 8:00:42 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? What
useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge?
In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable consequences. For
example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms and heuristics
embedded in my brain to work out that the three animals wandering through my
house can be categorized as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because
it tells me that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo.
So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached the
"emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what?
-- Robert
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