I am near to the end of plowing through the collection of articles on emergence (Editors' names slip me) and I think any quick embracing or dismissal of the concept is probably premature. I am hoping to get a bunch of people together in Santa Fe to read the collection and come to some common understanding of the disagreement. Most of the authors in the collection agree that emergence is no problem: the problem is that half of them do so because they believe that emergence is obviously occurs and the other half believes that it is just another case of philosophical word magic. I would love to develop a shared way of thinking about this, because I suspect that the impediment to a shared language is merely ideological and could be surmounted. .
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).. Nick -----Original Message----- >From: "glen e. p. ropella" <[email protected]> >Sent: Jul 7, 2009 4:11 PM >To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> >Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Emergence and explanation > >Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 09-07-01 12:02 AM: >> In this post, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that it is futile to use the word >> "emergence". Do you agree? >> http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ > >Yes, I agree. The only caveat is that the term "emergence" seems to >mean something to a large swath of people. Hence, if you have a sense >for that meaning and you're trying to invoke that meaning in the >audience minds, then it's reasonable to use the term. But _merely_ for >invoking that meaning in their minds, not to _explain_ anything but to >manipulate them into thinking the way you want them to be thinking. > >Hence, I regard "emergence" as a purely manipulative term... a bit of >rhetorical trickery intended to hypnotize the audience. Like all >buzzwords, it's useful in some circumstances. So, it's not futile at >all. But it should be used appropriately. > >-- >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 PS --Please if using the address [email protected] to reply, cc your message to [email protected]. Thanks. ============================================================ 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
