Hi Nick and others on this thread,
I have been reading this conversation for a while and debating whether to
post anything. If you will accept the caveat that I am not intending to
address all meanings of the word emergence in all contexts, please feel
free to read the attached if you have time to kill.
I think there is still some clarity to be gained by understanding
carefully the classes of emergent phenomena recognized in statistical
mechanics, not because they are representative of everything, but because
they contain enough variation to help us clarify certain aspects of the
topic.
The main assertion of the attached, which it may be too poorly written to
make obvious, is that the science of emergence should be understood as an
outgrowth of the science of compression, and this is what makes its
essence distinct from the particular sciences of many processes to which
the concept can be applied, and also distinct from the enterprise of
reductionism (not opposite, but orthogonal).
I'm sure lots of people will object to lots of things, but that's okay. I
don't have any authority, so everyone can use anything or nothing as he
chooses.
Eric
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