I read this entire thread to my psittascenes. None of them had much to say, except, of course, one of the African Greys.
After a moment of deliberation (Opus, the Grey *never* speaks without deliberation) he fixed me with one of his beady little eyes and said, "Ow, Butthead." I emerged from the bird room to ponder this. --Doug On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Roger Critchlow <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes <[email protected]>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? >> >> > Well, if you recognized that the animals wandering through your house were > a pack of dogs, and not just a collection of individual dogs, then you might > save yourself and your neighbors a passel of trouble by finding a full time > specialist to manage them. Or you could just turn them out doors to amuse > themselves at the expense of the young children and other small animals in > your neighborhood. > > Meanwhile, Doug can rest easy that his birds will only turn on him with > collective malice if he happens to wake up inside Alfred Hitchcock's > imagination some morning, because whatever the collective noun for parrots > is, it isn't anything like a pack of canids. > > -- rec -- > > ============================================================ > 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 > -- Doug Roberts [email protected] [email protected] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell
============================================================ 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
