To Nick: How about replying to the core observation on a theoretical
approach? Forgive the sentence saying the book is OK.
Simply stated, we may come to a better understanding of the notion of
emergence by discussion, but we will not take an important step
forward without formalization. I don't argue about conceptualizing
emergence, even within the philosophic realm. But I do object to not
having a final formal/theoretical goal.
To FRIAM: how would you answer this question by Dennett: "Are centers
of gravity in your ontology?" .. i.e. are they "real", do they "exist"?
My answer is that this question primarily exposes one idea: that you
must enter into an abstract model of emergence rather quickly for
traction. Dennett would agree, he is yet another philosopher
fascinated by Conway's Game of Life.
The answer is then "yes".
-- Owen
On Oct 10, 2009, at 12:12 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
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
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
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
