Emergence Seminar
Locked
 
|
All,
The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting this thursday (tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia and Agua Fria). I suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in its early stages, to the collection, EMERGENCE. Why a collection? Why a seminar? Because, as I keep saying (sorry), I want to articulate the different views on the subject. One thing I noticed about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking from discussions. So academics tend to scoff. I think the mark of a truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and contrast. Bedau and Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to engage in this kind of analysis by bearing in mind a set of seven questions, as we read each of the authors. These are:
1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility, unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or supvenience (whatever that is?)
2. What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes, phenomena, patterns laws, or something else?
3. What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena? (Is emergence a rare phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as well as in psychology?)
4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in the eye of the beholder.
5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic and diachronic, or are both possible?
6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of phenomena with their new causes and effects?
7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent bases?
Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what preconceptions we hold on these questions.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
============================================================ 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 |
|
|
Since I won't be there, let me suggest a pre-requisite activity.
Discuss why do you (or anyone else) want to define emergence? In saying that I'm not suggesting that emergence should not be defined -- although I now think that it is unfortunate that the word has become so widely used. What I want to do is to prompt you to talk about what it is that leads you to want to define emergence in the first place. It seems to me that it's impossible even to begin to answer the questions listed below until one has developed for oneself an intuitive idea about what it is that one wants the word emergence to capture. That's where I would suggest you start: what is your possibly vague sense of the sorts of things you want the word emergence to refer to. Once you have clarified that for yourself I think the questions below will be easier to deal with -- as will the papers in the book. -- Russ On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ 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 |
Re: [WedTech] Emergence Seminar
|
|
In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Point of geography, it's Garcia and Acequia Madre, -- rec -- On Sep 9, 2009 5:51 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote: ============================================================ 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 |
Re: [WedTech] Emergence Seminar
|
|
I think the mark of a truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is
the ability to escape from academia and therefore allow oneself the space to hold more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and contrast, virtually impossible in academia. So---as a recovering academic, I plan to be there--unless I become enthralled with the Slow Money conference. Merle Lefkoff Roger Critchlow wrote: > > Point of geography, it's Garcia and Acequia Madre, > > -- rec -- > >> On Sep 9, 2009 5:51 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" >> <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote: >> >> All, >> >> The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting >> this thursday (tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia >> and Agua Fria). I suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in >> its early stages, to the collection, EMERGENCE. Why a collection? >> Why a seminar? Because, as I keep saying (sorry), I want to >> articulate the different views on the subject. One thing I noticed >> about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking from >> discussions. So academics tend to scoff. I think the mark of a >> truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold >> more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and >> contrast. Bedau and Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to >> engage in this kind of analysis by bearing in mind a set of seven >> questions, as we read each of the authors. These are: >> >> 1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility, >> unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or >> supvenience (whatever that is?) >> 2. What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes, >> phenomena, patterns laws, or something else? >> 3. What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena? (Is emergence a >> rare phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as >> well as in psychology?) >> 4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in >> the eye of the beholder. >> 5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic >> and diachronic, or are both possible? >> 6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of >> phenomena with their new causes and effects? >> 7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent >> bases? >> >> Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what >> preconceptions we hold on these questions. >> >> >> Nick >> >> >> >> >> Nicholas S. Thompson >> Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology, >> Clark University ([hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>) >> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ >> <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wedtech mailing list >> [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]> >> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.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 |
|
|
In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Hi, Russ,
It's my least favorite of the seven questions. To me, the question my be recast as, "What light's your wick in the world to which the label emergence has been attached.?" I know you wouldn't know if from my posts on Friam but I spent most of my career working as a research scientist on forms of communication ... bird song, babies cries, whining, for instance. As a dyed in the wool materialist, I have always been fascinated by the question of how things come into being and why they have come to take the form that they do. Rather than using the question to build a wall around emergence, I would hope that we will use it to develop a list of all the things labeled emergent that have challenged the imagination of group members.
Have you read Sean Carroll's book on EVO DEVO? For years I sat in a psychology department listening to sterile arguments concerning nature and nurture. And now, by god, we know how it works, and neither nature nor nurture -- in the sense that their protagonists understood them -- had anything to do with it. I am so glad that I lived to learn how nature makes an organism.
nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
============================================================ 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 |
«
Return to Friam
|
1 view|%1 views
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |