Nice. That sort of turns Bedau on his head without rearranging his features much. Where he is saying that an emergent process cannot be compressed into a smaller computation than a full simulation, you're saying for given computational resource the full simulation of an emergent process gives you the most "complexity" for your buck. -- rec --
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:57 AM, glen e. p. ropella < g...@agent-based-modeling.com> wrote: > Thus spake ERIC P. CHARLES circa 10/11/2009 09:13 PM: > > "Once I've > > attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I CANNOT > apply > > scientific methodologies to the problem that treat the phenomenon as > > if: > > Excellent modification. I do have a (speculative) positive answer, > though. I've just been waiting to see if anyone else put it forward. > > My answer to Robert's question is: Once I trust that a phenomenon is > emergent, I can be more confident in the assumption that the phenomenon > can be used as a mechanism in a layer of abstraction that generates > coarser phenomena. > > If a phenomenon is NOT emergent, then, in order to build an adequate > description of the whole system, I must include the details of the > mechanism that generated the phenomenon. I.e. any abstraction of those > details will be inadequate or impoverished... the abstraction will be > too easily punctured. If, however, a phenomenon is emergent, then I'm > under less pressure to delineate each detail of its mechanism and can > get away with encapsulating the phenomenon in a coarser abstraction. > > The _use_ to which such a categorization would be put is the method of > replacement in, for example, modeling and simulation. If we need a more > "sciency" method, then we can talk about compressibility. I might be > able to claim that systems exhibiting emergent phenomena are _more_ > compressible than those without them. > > > Note that the above is about emergent phenomena, not emergent > properties. I still think the concept of an emergent property is either > useless, self-contradictory, or just confused. > > -- > 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 >
============================================================ 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
