Jochen,
Hope to pick this up in a week or two. Strongly recommend (broken record)
Bedau and humphreys emergence. We should all read it and THEN talk about
emergence. All the different points of view represented. Great resource.
Briefly, for me, the devil lies in making a comparison of the aggregation
of parts with the whole. To make such a comparison, obviously, you cannot
only study the parts as assembled into a whole, yet you have to study ALL
the parts. So, the crucial difference seems to be between the parts
arranged (in space and/or in time) in the manner in which the function as
whole and the same parts arranged in some other way. this is how I come to
(tentatively) define emergence as a property of a whole that is sensitive
to the arrangement of its parts. It's an "explanatory" definition, which I
have devoted my career to opposing, but I cannot do better.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (
[hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> [Original Message]
> From: Jochen Fromm <
[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 7/19/2009 3:52:53 AM
> Subject: [FRIAM] The whole minus the parts
>
> Already Aristotle knew emergence:
> he said the whole is sometimes more
> than the sum of its parts (*). Do we
> get the essence of "emergence" if we
> take the whole minus the parts?
>
> (*) He considered the question of unity
> for aggregated things "which have
> several parts and in which the
> totality is not, as it were, a mere
> heap, but the whole is something
> besides the parts" (Aristotle
> Metaphysics Book VIII, Chapter 6)
>
> -J.
>
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