I think the mark of a truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is
the ability to escape from academia and therefore allow oneself the
space to hold more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to
compare and contrast, virtually impossible in academia. So---as a
recovering academic, I plan to be there--unless I become enthralled with
the Slow Money conference.
Merle Lefkoff
Roger Critchlow wrote:
Point of geography, it's Garcia and Acequia Madre,
-- rec --
On Sep 9, 2009 5:51 PM, "Nicholas Thompson"
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
All,
The emergence seminar, such as it is, will have its first meeting
this thursday (tomorrow) at Downtown Subcription (which is at Garcia
and Agua Fria). I suggest that we devote the seminar, at least in
its early stages, to the collection, EMERGENCE. Why a collection?
Why a seminar? Because, as I keep saying (sorry), I want to
articulate the different views on the subject. One thing I noticed
about academics is their desire to exclude ways of thinking from
discussions. So academics tend to scoff. I think the mark of a
truly educated (smart, knowledgeable) person is the ability to hold
more than one idea in his or her head at once..... to compare and
contrast. Bedau and Humphreys, in their introduction, invite us to
engage in this kind of analysis by bearing in mind a set of seven
questions, as we read each of the authors. These are:
1. How should emergence be defined? (by reference to irreducibility,
unpredictability, ontological novelty, conceptual novelty, and.or
supvenience (whatever that is?)
2. What can be emergent: properties, substances, processes,
phenomena, patterns laws, or something else?
3. What is the scope of actual emergent phenomena? (Is emergence a
rare phenomenon, or broadly distributed in physics and biology as
well as in psychology?)
4. Is emergence an objective feature of the world, or is it merely in
the eye of the beholder.
5. Should emergence be viewed as static and synchronic, or as dynamic
and diachronic, or are both possible?
6. Does emergence imply or require the existence of new levels of
phenomena with their new causes and effects?
7. In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent
bases?
Tomorrow, as a warm up; it would be interesting to see what
preconceptions we hold on these questions.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology an d Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>)
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
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