Re: A question for the emergentists among you

Posted by Russ Abbott on Oct 11, 2009; 8:10pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3804628.html

Roger, Well said. 

But there is a further question.  Can anything be added to your (Mill's) statement that when you combine some things (e.g., combining a bunch of cows into a herd) the result has properties that the components lack. That is, what, if anything, can one say about those phenomena that exhibit this property? Do those phenomena have anything in common?

My claim is that asking (and answering) that question is doing science -- according to Gary's definition of science as an activity. To the extent that that activity yields statements that would qualify as scientific knowledge, one then has advanced the state of our knowledge about nature, which is what science is intended to do.

So that's what I would argue one should be doing when one is asking about emergence: looking for and attempting to abstract and characterize the common elements (if any) in all emergent phenomena.

-- Russ A

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 12:58 PM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

From my perspective, which is probably a minority, your question makes very little sense.

The basic conditions for "emergence" were laid down by Mill in 1843, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27942/27942-h/27942-h.html#toc53, and there's not much to it: when you combine some things, the properties of the whole are an obvious combination of the properties of the parts; when you combine other things, the contrary.  Mill didn't name it as emergence, that came later.  He wasn't the first to identify the conditions, either, but that's where our seminar studies started.

All of the authors we've been reading agree to Mill's definition of emergence.  They all recognize the appropriateness of the label.  They all recognize the same category of phenomena as deserving the label. In short, every schoolboy knows emergence when he sees it.

So, your question places in the hypothetical future something which factually happened at least 166 years ago.

What the authors disagree about is the significance of the category.  Some want it to be simply an aspect of our ignorance, remedied by progress.  Some want it to be the transcendence of material causation, amen.  Some want it to be the nature of reality, russian dolls of causation nested inside other russian dolls.

So, your question doesn't even acknowledge the issues that are under debate.

My discussion of dog packs was supposed to suggest that the recognition of the category is actually prehistoric.  Language is filled with words for collections of X some of which aren't obvious combinations of X's, and the words often have associated verbs and adjectives that cannot be applied to the individuals.  A single cow cannot stampede.  Successfully hunting large grazing mammals with hand tools required understanding of individual animal behavior and of herd behavior, and it required the ability to act upon the appropriate theory, individual or herd, at the appropriate time.

Was there a survival advantage to learning the lesson that one should look for exceptions to the rule that more is simply more?

-- rec --

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> wrote:

Wow, I post a question, go on a 6-hour hike and this is what I come back to...

I still don't feel that I've got a straight answer to my question, other than Doug's (which I suspect is the most accurate) and Russ's (which I really hope isn't true). So let me try again: once I've established that a phenomenon is emergent by using a yet-to-be developed metric (Owen's formalism) or philosophic enquiry (Nick's & other's approach) - then what?

In fact, let's not limit ourselves to the present situation (because I suspect that the current answer is simply "Nothing. Identifying emergence is an end in it's own right"). What would you like to be able to do once you'd attached the "emergent" label to a phenomenon? What's your best case, your grand vision? Imagine the best of all possible worlds and tell me: what would you want to be able to do once that "emergent" label gets attached?

-- Robert

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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

============================================================
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