Hang on, Owen, There is an excluded middle, here: OD wrote =====> 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.<===== OD wrote
John Searle? "Flower Child?" Hempel and Oppenheim, "Flower Child?". There is a whole lot of philosophy between "flower child" and reducing thought to a formalism. What => I < = dispise, is the bad habit some have of pushing some intellectual fare off the table on the ground that it is not nutritious, when the plain fact is that they just dont have the taste for it. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([email protected]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > [Original Message] > From: Owen Densmore <[email protected]> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> > Date: 10/10/2009 11:26:11 AM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you > > 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
