Posted by
Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/emergence-tp3586728p3600913.html
Hi, Owen,
Very interesting. Where does your version of this distinction come from?
Who has formalized it? I need to know.
I think this version is different from the same distinction in Bedau,
which is in the collection we will begin discussing in the "Seminar" on
Thursday afternoon (4pm, DS), but frankly I found the Bedau article so
tortured I cannot be sure. Bedau distinguishes three different "degrees"
of emergence, if you will; nominal, weak, and strong. Something is
nominally emergent if it displays properties that cannot be displayed by
its parts. At the other extreme is strong emergence which "adds the
requirement that emergent properties are supervenient properties with
irreducible causal powers". Both supervenient and irreducible are
difficult terms. Supervenient implies to me a causal ratchet in which
knowing how the parts are arranged tells you how the whole will behave but
knowing how the whole is behaving tells you only that the parts are
arranged on one of a potentially infinite set of ways. Irreducible
probably means that the whole can do stuff the parts cant. Neither term
seem to suggest irreversibility, which is the criterion your guy suggests.
Weak emergence is said to occur when the only way you can work out what the
properties of the whole will be is by assembling the parts and seeing what
happens, as in a simulation. What these two have to do with one another is
a mystery to me, so if you have an author with a more lucid version of the
distinction, I am all ears.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) the Bedau article is available on the web at
http://people.reed.edu/~mab/publications/papers/principia.pdf, so you can
suffer without buying the book.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (
[hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> [Original Message]
> From: Owen Densmore <
[hidden email]>
> To: <
[hidden email]>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 9/7/2009 8:28:41 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] emergence
>
> On Sep 7, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>
> > Owen,
> >
> > You wrote:
> >
> > I think it's simply the appearance within a time varying aggregate
> >> system of a feature not apparently derived from its components'
> >> interactions.
> >
> > A perfect example of a non-"out there" definition. "Apparently"
> > implies
> > that further understanding, information, knowledge will dispel the
> > emergence. Many smart people hold that position,, but I am not one
> > of them
> > (;-})
>
> Well, I was fudging a bit with "apparently". Formal emergence is
> divided into two domains, weak and strong. If I understand it
> correctly, irreversible phenomena are the strong emergence types,
> while reversible are the weak.
>
> In plan language, if the emergence is derived from ignorance, it is
> weak. If it is fundamental (chaos, for example), it is strong.
>
> -- Owen
>
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