Friam - Seminal Papers in Complexity

Friam

Seminal Papers in Complexity

Posted by Russell Standish on Jun 19, 2007; 2:43am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524072.html

I disagree. Some counterexamples.

Game of Life is not a growth process. Yet it exhibits clear emergence
in the form of gliders. So you supposed connection is one-sided at best.

Whilst most growth processes involving interacting particles will
produce emergence, if the particles do not interact, there will be
nothing other than trivial, or resultant emergence. Not sure I can
think of a physical example - after all, inert objects will still
interact via elastic collisions, which gives rise to some emergent
properties. But one can easily imagin coding an agent-based model in
which none of the agents interact with themselves or the
environment. You would need to ensure that the container allows
multiple agents to occupy the same position (otherwise they're
interacting elastically). If you did that, and set the system up to
add agents one at a time, what would you have? At each time step, you
would just have n(t) agents, with only resultant properties such as
average, standard deviation etc.

Cheers

On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 10:12:38PM -0400, Phil Henshaw wrote:

> 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: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] 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>
>
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>
>
>
>

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