Doug,
you wrote ====>
"Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I can
apply the following scientific methodologies to solve my problem:"
Well, the experimental method or the comparative method, depending upon the
domain we are dealing with. One has to tease apart the effect of the
configuration of elements from the effects of the simple presense of the
elements.
Here's an example: Once upon a time, many people assumed that a set of
properties possessed by groups of monkeys occured because of the manner in
which groups were organized. Forty years ago, hoping to demonstrate this, I
did a sseries of experiments in which the members of an artificial social group
were convened dyad by dyad ... in other words the group had never met as a
group but all the potential dyads of the group had met and had an opportunity
to behave. Then I summed the dyadic behavior accross all the itneractions and
wrote it up as if I was describing a group in the field. The variables of
interest were indistinguishable. Therefore, I supposed, triadic, tetradic,
n-adic etc., intereactions were not essential to the traditionally observed
patterns in the variables of interest. So far as these animals were concerned
and these variables being in a social group was just like meeting all the other
members of the group one by one.
Now, I dont really believe this to be true, but that was the answer I got, and
had I not tired of running a monkey concentration camp, I would have continued
research on this subject, and it would have been a study of the emergence of
social order in monkeys.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Douglas Roberts
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 10/11/2009 8:43:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
"Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I can
apply the following scientific methodologies to solve my problem:"
a) ...
b) ...
c) ...
--Doug
On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
wrote:
let me take a quick whack at this.
[...]
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