On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 09:03:55AM -0700, Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: > > But, so what? Taken this way _everything_ is emergent. I even heard a > guy named Terry Bristol claim that the universe is a kind of emergent > cycle where the emergent things at the bottom emerge from the emergent > things at the top in a kind of ourboros. And that makes the word > "emergent" completely useless. >
Only if taken to extremes. Emergence is always relative to a pair of models. Since there is no evidence that there is a bedrock of physical reductionism, it would seem that all physical phenomena can therefore be modelled in such a way that the phenomena in question are emergent. Yet it is not alway useful to have a pair of models. I have already given the simple archetype of a gravitationally bound pair modelled as point masses undergoing Newtonian gavitational attraction. Such a model system does not exhibit emergence. It does mean that emergence is a broader concept than usually conceptualised, but I disagree that it is so broad as to be useless. Also, there are a number of attempts at refining emergence into stronger concepts - eg Bedau's "weak emergence", or Wolfram's "computational irreducibility" that go to the heart of your criticism. I'm not sure how successful they are, but such is the way of philosophical debate. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ 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
