Re: A question for the emergentists among you
Posted by
Roger Critchlow-2 on
Oct 12, 2009; 5:01pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3809292.html
Nice. That sort of turns Bedau on his head without rearranging his features much. Where he is saying that an emergent process cannot be compressed into a smaller computation than a full simulation, you're saying for given computational resource the full simulation of an emergent process gives you the most "complexity" for your buck.
-- rec --
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:57 AM, glen e. p. ropella
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Thus spake ERIC P. CHARLES circa 10/11/2009 09:13 PM:
> "Once I've
> attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I CANNOT apply
> scientific methodologies to the problem that treat the phenomenon as
> if:
Excellent modification. I do have a (speculative) positive answer,
though. I've just been waiting to see if anyone else put it forward.
My answer to Robert's question is: Once I trust that a phenomenon is
emergent, I can be more confident in the assumption that the phenomenon
can be used as a mechanism in a layer of abstraction that generates
coarser phenomena.
If a phenomenon is NOT emergent, then, in order to build an adequate
description of the whole system, I must include the details of the
mechanism that generated the phenomenon. I.e. any abstraction of those
details will be inadequate or impoverished... the abstraction will be
too easily punctured. If, however, a phenomenon is emergent, then I'm
under less pressure to delineate each detail of its mechanism and can
get away with encapsulating the phenomenon in a coarser abstraction.
The _use_ to which such a categorization would be put is the method of
replacement in, for example, modeling and simulation. If we need a more
"sciency" method, then we can talk about compressibility. I might be
able to claim that systems exhibiting emergent phenomena are _more_
compressible than those without them.
Note that the above is about emergent phenomena, not emergent
properties. I still think the concept of an emergent property is either
useless, self-contradictory, or just confused.
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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