> [Original Message]
> From: russell standish <
[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 9/15/2009 5:39:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Emergence Seminar--British Emergence
>
> >From the text below, it is apparent that British emergence is not the
> same beast as what we call emergence today. Those very
> "configurational forces" you mention are precisely what I mean by
> emergent phenomena, which is entirely consistent with how the term is
> used in the complex systems literature that I have been reading my whole
> professional life.
>
> It would seem that "British emergence" is something akin to the widely
> rejected notion of vitalism, and as Russ Abbott states - why, as
> complexity researchers, would we be interested in that?
>
> Cheers
>
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 08:48:55PM -0600, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > As I read it, the issue isn't whether structures and/or configurations
> > are/aren't important, the question is whether they operate according
> > to emergent or resultant rule sets.
> >
> > The Emergentists were betting heavily on the emergent rule set. They
> > believed that the variety of chemistry couldn't possibly be the result
> > of protons and electrons operating according to physics as they knew
> > it. They were right, it wasn't physics as they knew it, but the
> > answer turned out to be the result of configurational physics rather
> > than emergent principles of chemistry. They also bet that the variety
> > of biology couldn't be the result of chemical molecules operating
> > according to the chemistry they knew. And they were right again, it
> > wasn't chemistry as they knew it, but the answer turned out to be the
> > result of configurational chemistry rather than emergent priniciples
> > of biology.
> >
> > Chemistry and biology turn out to be ever more complicated
> > configurations of protons and electrons, with some neutron ballast,
> > operating according to the principles of quantum mechanics and
> > statistical mechanics. It's all physics, same particles, same forces,
> > same laws, no emergent forces. There are configuration forces, but
> > they're not emergent forces, they're subtle results of electrons
> > packing themselves into quantized energy levels in increasingly
> > complicated configurations of nuclei.
> >
> > The structure of DNA and the elaboration of molecular biology was the
> > last straw because it provided a purely physical mechanism for
> > inheritance.
> >
> > But you're right to see it as a bit of a conundrum. The Emergentists,
> > as McLaughlin summarizes them, were substantially correct:
> > configurations of atoms in molecules are the key to understanding
> > chemistry, there are all sorts of chemically distinctive things that
> > happen because of those configurations, none of those chemically
> > distinctive things are obvious when you play around with protons and
> > electrons in the physics lab. But it all turned out to be part of the
> > resultant of quantum mechanics, not emergent in the sense the
> > Emergentists had painted themselves into, so they were wrong in the
> > one sense they really cared about.
> >
> > -- rec --
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Nicholas Thompson
> > <
[hidden email]> wrote:
> > > All,
> > >
> > > I would like to appeal for some help from The List with the chapter