Comments below... On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky <vbur...@shaw.ca>wrote:
> Wow, wait a second, > > If the object in motion has a group of followers I don't see emergence, > Remoras follow sharks or any other moving object, there is no dynamic > social > system. My Wolfhounds follow rabbits, horses, snowmobiles, bicycles etc at > very high speeds. If they were displayed on a radar screen you might > mistake > five wolfhounds as worshipful devotees of a single leader, running in > absolute terror. If they all came to a stop on the radar screen you might > surmise the group fell into disarray as the result of a leadership dispute. > Perhaps one might think there was a socially repressive regime at work when > the blips resolved as five instead of six, and the pace slowed down. > > Emergence is a tough concept. My understanding is, an emergent property requires correlated feedback in the system. A pack of dogs following a single rabbit, say - with the rabbit's actions influencing the dogs, and the dogs' actions influencing each other - may display emergent properties. For example, in an open, flat field, the rabbit may be more likely to run in a straight line, with individual dogs occasionally keeping the rabbit from diverging to the left or the right. The straight line would be the emergent property. The dogs are both trying to catch the rabbit and avoid crashing into other dogs, producing a "flock" of dogs. > > "Merle Lefkoff wrote: > > * Regardless of whether leaders act because of endogenous traits or a > circumstantial opening, they are indeed emergent throughout the system. > In human systems, however, unlike flocks, over-determined structures > suppress this emergent property of the system. Rather than stepping > aside to allow emerging leaders to bring requisite variety to the > "flock", elite hierarchies/patriarchies suppress distributed leadership > and generally prevail for long periods of time."* > > It looks like the first sign of legitimate "emergence" is the Hierarchy > that > perceives the front man as a leader and attempts later to suppress it, > whether it is a leader or not makes no difference. The act of suppression > emerges complete based on its own belief system. > > The belief system must have been in place prior to the flock being created, > the leader was accidental (Circumstantial) but suppression is truly > emergent, or is it? > I'm not sure I would label 'suppression' as emergent. Depends on exactly what you are referring to. Perhaps a better label is "feedback?" What's interesting about the leadership hierarchies, in human systems, is that the structures themselves are an emergent property. Persistent patterns, changing components. The leadership hierarchy becomes a "basin of attraction," with it's own support structures and correlated feedbacks, even as the people within the hierarchy change over time. -t
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