Re: A question for the emergentists among you

Posted by Russ Abbott on Oct 10, 2009; 6:04pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3800666.html

Robert's original question was "What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not?"  I don't think there is a point. That's not the issue. The point of the discussion is that some properties seem to exist at a macro-level (every time I use that word now, I worry that Glen will attack me for it) but not at a micro level.  If that is a frequently occuring phenomenon, it makes sense to ask whether there is something common to all instances of such  phenomena.  I think that's the point of the discussion. It's really a matter of scinece: here are a number of somewhat diverse phenomena that seem to have something in common. Can we come up with a characterization of what it is --  and if so does that offer any insight into how the world works?

-- Russ A

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:

What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge?

In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo.

So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what?

-- Robert

My interest is pretty theoretical.  I'd like to reduce it to some sort of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them.

As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it.  Game of Life is often used as such an environment.  It has several trivial initial conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system and predict the result before running it.  But this is not true in general.  Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful.

A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work well in a multi-tasking environment (unix).  It was really slow.  One of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non-polynomial.  We started over.

I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book.  The difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.

   -- Owen

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org