Dear all,
I am clearly being shunned. I keep trying to answer robert and nobody pays the
slight attention to my attempts at answering. Next I will find my porch light
shot out. After that my barn will be burned.
Answer #1
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.
Answer #2
Following wimsatt, the puffiness of pancakes is emergent because it depends
on the order of mixing the ingredients. You mix the dry ingredients together,
you mix the wet incredients together and THEN you mix the wet with the dry.
Similarly, with a bread maker you dont want to mix the yeast with the salt, or
with the water, in the first instance.
If you are making pancakes from a recipe, because text is linear, the steps
always appear in an order. For instance, most start with the flour and then
add the baking powder and the salt, then the sugar, etc.. For pancakes, the
order of these steps does NOT make a difference. Similarly, there are spacial
instructions that dont make a difference: "In a separate bowl...". it
instructs you to mix the wet ingredients, but you can put the sugar and the
salt in witht the eggs and the milk and the oil, if you like. Try to add the
baking powder to the wet ingredients or to add it AFTER you have mixed the wet
and the dry, and you have trouble.
It is these sorts of facts that make the puffiness of pancakes an emergent
property, and knowing on which sorts of temporal and spatial arrangements the
emergent properties of a meal depends is what makes a flexible and skillful
cook.
Answer #3
Like any definition, a definition of emergence will serve us if it calls
attention to crucial aspects of the systems we are curious about. So, for
instance, let us say that we are curious about the whole properties of a system
and we adopt Wimsatt's definition that a syetem is emergent if its properties
are dependent upon the arrangement of its parts, either in time or in space.
We are led to consider the robustness of the system properties against
variations in the arrangements of its parts. Some system properties are
senstiive to the arrangements of some part entities, not sensitive to others.
Against some small changes in part arrangements, the system is strongly
buffered; against others, it is highly senstiive.
Further, we are led to inquire how the parts come to be arranged in a manner
that facilitates emergence. Notice that arrangements of anythng are already at
least nominally emergent properties. Organismic development is just a cascade
of emergents, each emergent becoming part of an arrangement for the purposes
of facilitating the next emergent in the cascade.
I dont think you get to any of these questions by thinking reductionistically,
and unless the questions are asked, you don't get the answers.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Thompson
To: [email protected]
Sent: 10/10/2009 12:28:36 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
All,
Following wimsatt, the puffiness of pancakes is emergent because it depends
on the order of mixing the ingredients. You mix the dry ingredients together,
you mix the set incredients together and THEN you mix the wet with the dry.
Similarly, with a bread maker you dont want to mix the yeast with the salt, or
with the water, in the first instance.
If you are making pancakes from a recipe, because text is linear, the steps
always appear in an order. For instance, most start with the flour and then
add the baking powder and the salt, then the sugar, etc.. For pancakes, the
order of these steps does NOT make a difference. Similarly, there are spacial
instructions that dont make a difference: "In a separate bowl...". it
instructs you to mix the wet ingredients, but you can put the sugar and the
salt in witht the eggs and the milk and the oil, if you like. Try to add the
baking powder to the wet ingredients or to add it AFTER you have mixed the wet
and the dry, and you have trouble.
It is these sorts of facts that make the puffiness of pancakes an emergent
property, and knowing on which sorts of temporal and spatial arrangements the
emergent properties of a meal depends is what makes a flexible and skillful
cook.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 10/10/2009 12:06:14 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Robert's original question was "What's the point of determining whether a
phenomenon is emergent or not?" I don't think there is a point. That's not the
issue. The point of the discussion is that some properties seem to exist at a
macro-level (every time I use that word now, I worry that Glen will attack me
for it) but not at a micro level. If that is a frequently occuring phenomenon,
it makes sense to ask whether there is something common to all instances of
such phenomena. I think that's the point of the discussion. It's really a
matter of scinece: here are a number of somewhat diverse phenomena that seem to
have something in common. Can we come up with a characterization of what it is
-- and if so does that offer any insight into how the world works?
-- Russ A
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote:
On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
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
My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some sort of
formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes of computing
devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could discover simple
properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them.
As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. one that
has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life is often used as
such an environment. It has several trivial initial conditions that are
pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system and predict the result before
running it. But this is not true in general. Finding the conditions
separating the two would be useful.
A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an event
distribution scheme for an early window system that would work well in a
multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One of our team spent
time resolved that its computational class was non-polynomial. We started over.
I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child philosophic, I've
gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The difficulty is the signal to
noise ratio is pretty poor.
-- Owen
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
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
