Posted by
Douglas Roberts-2 on
Jun 18, 2007; 10:17pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524066.html
I like the response below. I've felt that the phrase "emergent behavior"
has been overused for quite some time now. In the early days of running
TRANSIMS (a large-scale traffic simulator) we often found ourselves saying
"I didn't expect that behavior" upon seeing an unexpected series of traffic
flow patterns 'emerge' in simulations of a city with 8.6 million people
driving around over a 24 hour period. Indeed, often times some of the
results were unexpected, however once analyzed they always made perfect
sense.
--Doug
--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
droberts at rti.org
doug at parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
On 6/18/07, G?nther Greindl <guenther.greindl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Russell,
>
> > "Sum of the parts" is more metaphoric than literal. IMHO, the key to
> > the kingdom is emergence, and nonlinearity is only necessary to
>
> I used to throw around the word "emergence" around until I noticed
> that I used it there where I did not understand what was really going
> on, like in: "consciousness? - simple - an emergent process"
> Since then I have stopped using the word - it is, in fact, vacuous to
> call something emergent - whereas ie. nonlinear has definite meaning.
>
> The problem is that emergence seems to be the opposite of a
> mechanistic or an algorithmic process; or an analytical one.
> So it becomes a stop-gap concept for all processes which elude
> our common problem solution techniques.
>
> But no new explanation is obtained when one calls a process
> emergent - on gets instead a false sense of security, of having
> grasped something which in reality still eludes our understanding.
>
> Best Regards,
> G?nther
>
> --
> G?nther Greindl
> Department of Philosophy of Science
> University of Vienna
> guenther.greindl at univie.ac.at
>
http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/>
> Blog:
http://dao.complexitystudies.org/> Site:
http://www.complexitystudies.org>
> ============================================================
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