Robert's original question was "What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not?" I don't think there is a point. That's not the issue. The point of the discussion is that some properties seem to exist at a macro-level (every time I use that word now, I worry that Glen will attack me for it) but not at a micro level. If that is a frequently occuring phenomenon, it makes sense to ask whether there is something common to all instances of such phenomena. I think that's the point of the discussion. It's really a matter of scinece: here are a number of somewhat diverse phenomena that seem to have something in common. Can we come up with a characterization of what it is -- and if so does that offer any insight into how the world works?
-- Russ A On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote: > >> What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? >> What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? >> >> In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable >> consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-matching >> algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out that the three >> animals wandering through my house can be categorized as "cats" and not >> "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me that I should buy cat food >> and not dog food when I go to PetCo. >> >> So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached the >> "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? >> >> -- Robert >> > > > My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some sort of > formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes of > computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could discover > simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them. > > As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. one > that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life is often > used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial conditions that > are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system and predict the result > before running it. But this is not true in general. Finding the conditions > separating the two would be useful. > > A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an event > distribution scheme for an early window system that would work well in a > multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One of our team > spent time resolved that its computational class was non-polynomial. We > started over. > > I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child philosophic, > I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The difficulty is the > signal to noise ratio is pretty poor. > > -- Owen > > > > > ============================================================ > 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 >
============================================================ 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
