Re: A question for the emergentists among you
Posted by
Russ Abbott on
Oct 12, 2009; 1:11am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3805620.html
Roger, I've lost track of what your point is.
I said that the attempt to find the appropriate abstractions to characterize emergence is valid science. Are you agreeing? Disagreeing? Neither? Both?
And what does Winsatt have to do with it? Are you saying that his aggregativity has captured the essence of emergence -- and that there is no more science left to do? That it hasn't captured the essence of emergence? (But then why did you mention it in the first place?)
So where are we with respect to whether or not it is worthwhile attempting to understand/chacterize emergence--your original question.
-- Russ A
On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Roger Critchlow
<[hidden email]> wrote:
An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack.
I read this better the second time through.
The gas laws are pretty well explained by the kinetic theory - that the gas is composed of atoms which have mass and velocity and the atom kinetic energies follow Boltzmann's distribution.
I suppose that one might call the Boltzmann distribution an emergent, but once one has any collection of individuals which have individual properties, one gets a distribution that describes the property in the collection, so it's a pretty low surprise emergent.
Now, there was an interesting paper in
arxiv.org about systematic coarse graining of molecular dynamics simulations to compute non-equilibrium thermodynamic properties,
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1467, which had some bearing on this,
-- rec --
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