http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3800791.html
forward without formalization. I don't argue about conceptualizing
emergence, even within the philosophic realm. But I do object to not
of gravity in your ontology?" .. i.e. are they "real", do they "exist"?
traction. Dennett would agree, he is yet another philosopher
> Hang on, Owen, There is an excluded middle, here:
>
> OD wrote =====> 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.<===== OD wrote
>
> John Searle? "Flower Child?" Hempel and Oppenheim, "Flower Child?".
>
> There is a whole lot of philosophy between "flower child" and
> reducing
> thought to a formalism.
>
> What => I < = dispise, is the bad habit some have of pushing some
> intellectual fare off the table on the ground that it is not
> nutritious,
> when the plain fact is that they just dont have the taste for it.
>
> 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: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]
>> >
>> Date: 10/10/2009 11:26:11 AM
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
>>
>> 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.orgMeets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College