Hi, Owen, Very interesting. Where does your version of this distinction come from? Who has formalized it? I need to know.
I think this version is different from the same distinction in Bedau, which is in the collection we will begin discussing in the "Seminar" on Thursday afternoon (4pm, DS), but frankly I found the Bedau article so tortured I cannot be sure. Bedau distinguishes three different "degrees" of emergence, if you will; nominal, weak, and strong. Something is nominally emergent if it displays properties that cannot be displayed by its parts. At the other extreme is strong emergence which "adds the requirement that emergent properties are supervenient properties with irreducible causal powers". Both supervenient and irreducible are difficult terms. Supervenient implies to me a causal ratchet in which knowing how the parts are arranged tells you how the whole will behave but knowing how the whole is behaving tells you only that the parts are arranged on one of a potentially infinite set of ways. Irreducible probably means that the whole can do stuff the parts cant. Neither term seem to suggest irreversibility, which is the criterion your guy suggests. Weak emergence is said to occur when the only way you can work out what the properties of the whole will be is by assembling the parts and seeing what happens, as in a simulation. What these two have to do with one another is a mystery to me, so if you have an author with a more lucid version of the distinction, I am all ears. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the Bedau article is available on the web at http://people.reed.edu/~mab/publications/papers/principia.pdf, so you can suffer without buying the book. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([email protected]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > [Original Message] > From: Owen Densmore <[email protected]> > To: <[email protected]>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > Date: 9/7/2009 8:28:41 PM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] emergence > > On Sep 7, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > > > Owen, > > > > You wrote: > > > > I think it's simply the appearance within a time varying aggregate > >> system of a feature not apparently derived from its components' > >> interactions. > > > > A perfect example of a non-"out there" definition. "Apparently" > > implies > > that further understanding, information, knowledge will dispel the > > emergence. Many smart people hold that position,, but I am not one > > of them > > (;-}) > > Well, I was fudging a bit with "apparently". Formal emergence is > divided into two domains, weak and strong. If I understand it > correctly, irreversible phenomena are the strong emergence types, > while reversible are the weak. > > In plan language, if the emergence is derived from ignorance, it is > weak. If it is fundamental (chaos, for example), it is strong. > > -- Owen > ============================================================ 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
