Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-10-05 01:00 PM: > In our attempts to understand what is going on in this tangled literature, > we have come up with only one way to characterize the different views of > emergence that seems to endure more than a week: that is the > epistemological vs ontological distinction.
I think that's an insight that can't be ignored. > Like Hemple and Oppenheim, Dennett would concede > that seeing emergence requires one to take a point of view.... a STANCE, if > you will. But taking that stance is like looking through binoculars ... it > may limit your field of vision, but it also tells you something that is > true of the world. In fact, every stance tells you something that is true > of the world. Thanks! Risking an abuse of the rather strict thread control for this seminar, I'll say that I'm very much in agreement with this position on "emergence". However, I'd stretch it just a tiny bit to include _any_ measure operator, not just a stance (a.k.a. point of view, perspective, subject-sensitive perception, etc.). The "looking through binoculars" is a great example of a measurement operator. But it's a subjective measurement (an objective form of it would be the image projected onto a piece of paper behind the binoculars). There are, I posit, objective measurements. And _any_ inaccurate measurement will introduce just such a stance, albeit objective. Hence, as long as the measurements are used in some sort of positive or negative feedback loop as part of the mechanism of the system being measured, then it realizes ontological complexity. If, however, the measurements (the range of the operator) are NOT part of the system's mechanism, then we merely have epistemological complexity (if even that). And for the sake of this discussion, I'll posit that only complex systems exhibit emergence, which means I basically agree with some of what Bedau says early on. And to take it back to what I've actually read from the book, I can say that Bedeau's constructions are _totally_ unsatisfying because he doesn't explicitly treat the operators at all. For example, he talks about "gliders" as if we all grew a "glider-sensor" out of our forehead ... like an ear or an eyeball or something. True, I know what he _means_; but he glosses over the extreme difficulty of unambiguously defining a measure operator to determine if some set of cells over time is exhibiting a "glider" or not. His text is chock full of such glossed abstractions, which make it totally unusable to me. And, by the way, why do we have to use the term "supervenience"? Why can't we just say the map between property sets A and B is surjective? It's so much clearer than saying "B supervenes upon A".... Sheesh. ;-) -- 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
