Drafted most of this when the link first came out. Finished now as interest
might be returning:
I completely agree with the criticism of how many people
use the term
"emergence", but I think the term itself is still useful. Yudkowsky's criticism
could have been easily reworded as a guide to using the term properly. Of
course, then it wouldn't have been as good of a read. As for the value of the
term, a favorite quote of mine
regarding emergence is:
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Coral reefs in the last analysis consist of positive
and negative ions, but the biologist, geographer, or sea-captain would miss his
point if he conceived them in any such terms. (Holt, 1915, p. 161)
Whatever it is about coral reefs that would lead a sea captain to not think
about it as a collection of ions... that is an emergent phenomenon. The
biologist, the geographer and the sea captain are each interested in different
properties that are not present in any given ion, but are present in the
configuration of ions that make up a reef. The question of how collections of
ions come to gain those properties needs to be treated as a serious scientific
question. Otherwise it IS just another word for magic. Of course, as Glen
mentions, everything is "emergent" in this sense. However, not everything
emerges in the same way, and the thing to be investigated is how different
things emerge. The properties that the different people are interested in will
be products of different aspects of the configuration.
As an example of the word magic: In my experience, people who say things like
"Intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing" are typically using the
term "emergent" as an excuse for not doing the hard work, rather than as a
marker for where the hard work needs to be done. Their assertion should mean
something like, "Models that explain the origins of intelligence can be
produced using only configurations of interconnected neurons, and we are
interested in how that particular kind of interconnection works." However, in
practice it usually means something more like, "We don't understand
intelligence, it seems bloody mysterious, and we would really rather not talk
about it any more."
Eric
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 03:02 AM, "Jochen Fromm" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
In this post, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that it is
>futile to use the word "emergence". Do you agree?
>http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/
>
>-J.
>
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>
>
>
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