All,
The emergence seminar met at Downtown Subscription this afternoon and survived
a hailstorm, so I am feeling pretty perky about it. Next week, we will read
The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism by Brian P. McLaughlin. British
Emergentism is charming to read about. It is all so innocent, upbeat ,
hierarchical, and Victorian. The great and stable hierarchy of nature. You
can almost think of the Queen herself as the last and greatest emergent
phenomenon. In McLaughlin's essay, we learn, for instance, that the term,
emergent, arose as a contrast to the term resultant ... as in the addition of
vectors. When the result of the interaction of two forces was different from
the resultant, you had an emergent. See: it's all so simple! I hope that
others will join us from afar in reading this source. I have written the
author, who teaches at Rutgers, to ask him to supply a pdf of the essay for me
to make available for our discussion on the the condition that we would make
that discussion available to him in some way, but he has not written back. If
anybody knows him and would plead our case, I would be in their debt.
A few of you have asked that we might change the time to later. I am going to
hang tough for one more week because of the Ulam lectures, but after that we
might consider a later time. I am a bit reluctant to make it a beer thing,
because I want people sharp, but we shall see.
Thanks all,
Nick
PS. I have a xerox copy of the article if anybody local would like it.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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