Re: A question for the emergentists among you

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on Oct 10, 2009; 8:34pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3801083.html

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> 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?

 

Well, if you recognized that the animals wandering through your house were a pack of dogs, and not just a collection of individual dogs, then you might save yourself and your neighbors a passel of trouble by finding a full time specialist to manage them.  Or you could just turn them out doors to amuse themselves at the expense of the young children and other small animals in your neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Doug can rest easy that his birds will only turn on him with collective malice if he happens to wake up inside Alfred Hitchcock's imagination some morning, because whatever the collective noun for parrots is, it isn't anything like a pack of canids.

-- rec --

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