Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Oct 10, 2009; 6:28pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3800735.html
All,
Following wimsatt, the puffiness of pancakes is emergent because it depends on the order of mixing the ingredients. You mix the dry ingredients together, you mix the set incredients together and THEN you mix the wet with the dry. Similarly, with a bread maker you dont want to mix the yeast with the salt, or with the water, in the first instance.
If you are making pancakes from a recipe, because text is linear, the steps always appear in an order. For instance, most start with the flour and then add the baking powder and the salt, then the sugar, etc.. For pancakes, the order of these steps does NOT make a difference. Similarly, there are spacial instructions that dont make a difference: "In a separate bowl...". it instructs you to mix the wet ingredients, but you can put the sugar and the salt in witht the eggs and the milk and the oil, if you like. Try to add the baking powder to the wet ingredients or to add it AFTER you have mixed the wet and the dry, and you have trouble.
It is these sorts of facts that make the puffiness of pancakes an emergent property, and knowing on which sorts of temporal and spatial arrangements the emergent properties of a meal depends is what makes a flexible and skillful cook.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 10/10/2009 12:06:14 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
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