Posted by
glen e. p. ropella-2 on
Oct 05, 2009; 11:34pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/EMERGENCE-SEMINAR-V-Dennett-et-al-WAS-emergence-seminar-what-s-next-tp3771294p3772286.html
Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-10-05 01:00 PM:
> In our attempts to understand what is going on in this tangled literature,
> we have come up with only one way to characterize the different views of
> emergence that seems to endure more than a week: that is the
> epistemological vs ontological distinction.
I think that's an insight that can't be ignored.
> Like Hemple and Oppenheim, Dennett would concede
> that seeing emergence requires one to take a point of view.... a STANCE, if
> you will. But taking that stance is like looking through binoculars ... it
> may limit your field of vision, but it also tells you something that is
> true of the world. In fact, every stance tells you something that is true
> of the world.
Thanks!
Risking an abuse of the rather strict thread control for this seminar,
I'll say that I'm very much in agreement with this position on
"emergence". However, I'd stretch it just a tiny bit to include _any_
measure operator, not just a stance (a.k.a. point of view, perspective,
subject-sensitive perception, etc.). The "looking through binoculars"
is a great example of a measurement operator. But it's a subjective
measurement (an objective form of it would be the image projected onto a
piece of paper behind the binoculars). There are, I posit, objective
measurements. And _any_ inaccurate measurement will introduce just such
a stance, albeit objective. Hence, as long as the measurements are used
in some sort of positive or negative feedback loop as part of the
mechanism of the system being measured, then it realizes ontological
complexity. If, however, the measurements (the range of the operator)
are NOT part of the system's mechanism, then we merely have
epistemological complexity (if even that). And for the sake of this
discussion, I'll posit that only complex systems exhibit emergence,
which means I basically agree with some of what Bedau says early on.
And to take it back to what I've actually read from the book, I can say
that Bedeau's constructions are _totally_ unsatisfying because he
doesn't explicitly treat the operators at all. For example, he talks
about "gliders" as if we all grew a "glider-sensor" out of our forehead
... like an ear or an eyeball or something. True, I know what he
_means_; but he glosses over the extreme difficulty of unambiguously
defining a measure operator to determine if some set of cells over time
is exhibiting a "glider" or not. His text is chock full of such glossed
abstractions, which make it totally unusable to me.
And, by the way, why do we have to use the term "supervenience"? Why
can't we just say the map between property sets A and B is surjective?
It's so much clearer than saying "B supervenes upon A".... Sheesh. ;-)
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
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