On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]> wrote:
> Roger, I've lost track of what your point is. > My point was that Mill spent a few pages defining what became know as emergence, and that everyone since has known exactly what he was talking about. Your question was: what can you say beyond what Mill said? My answer is that you can say what Wimsatt says: here are four heuristics that should allow you to identify emergents by their failure to be simple aggregates. I said that the attempt to find the appropriate abstractions to characterize > emergence is valid science. Are you agreeing? Disagreeing? Neither? Both? > Sure, characterization of emergence is science, whether emergence is epistemological, ontological, or some unholy amalgam of the two. And what does Winsatt have to do with it? Are you saying that his > aggregativity has captured the essence of emergence -- and that there is no > more science left to do? That it hasn't captured the essence of emergence? > (But then why did you mention it in the first place?) I'm saying that I accept his distinction between aggregate and emergent properties and the heuristics he proposes to implement the distinction. The essence of emergence is that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts. Beyond that I believe that science is a brute force enumeration of the ways that the whole can be the sum of the parts, and of the ways that the whole can be more than the sum of the parts. The second part of the enumeration is going to be much longer than the first. > So where are we with respect to whether or not it is worthwhile attempting > to understand/chacterize emergence--your original question. My original question? Where was that? -- rec --
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