Posted by
Phil Henshaw-2 on
Jun 19, 2007; 2:12am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524070.html
Doug,
Well, I think the better choice is to try to understand why English
needs the word 'emerge' to letting us talk about the world. Emerging
is appearing from nowhere, or coming out of the shadows or passing
through an opening or becoming fully formed. The last one there points
to what we really want to mean by the term, right? I think the others
apply to our perception or awareness of the things that change from
being unformed to fully formed, the subjective part of it.
The way I've been using to point to what and where emergence is, in the
'becoming fully formed' sense, is by identifying the growth of the
network of relations that is actually doing it, i.e. the network that is
becoming formed. It takes a while to sort the categories of the all
the kinds of growth processes (trends with all derivatives positive) and
all the kinds of emergence (new networks of relationships), but once you
make a little headway with that you find that growth and emergence are
very oddly related 1 to 1, that every kind of growth accompanies a kind
of emergence and every kind of emergence accompanies a kind of growth.
Must be somehow connected! :,)
Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040
tel: 212-795-4844
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com <
http://www.synapse9.com/>
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 6:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Seminal Papers in Complexity
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<
http://www.complexitystudies.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-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20070618/989f5847/attachment.html