Many people on this list seems to have become enthralled by Wimsatt's version of emergence. Although what he says is not very wrong -- perhaps not wrong at all -- it seems to me that it doesn't provide as much insight as his fans seem to think. The essence of his position is (as he says) that "An emergent property is—roughly—a system property which is dependent upon the mode of organization of the system’s parts." It's probably true that emergent properties depend on the mode of organization of the parts of a system that possess them. But that seems to me to say so little. So much depends on the mode of organization of things. And in some cases the mode of organization does not matter. For example if I put various size balls into a box, largest first and then progressively smaller -- and just to eliminate objections shake the box after each ball, it's unlikely that any property will emerge that depends on the order in which the balls were put into the box. (As Nick has been fond of pointing out, the same cannot be said of the ingredients of a cake.)
The point of emergence is that the components *implement* the emergent property. That may not sound much different from "mode of organization" but it is. Implementation implies a mechanism or design of some sort that *brings about* the emergent property. That is not to say that the design must have been created with forethought. Look at all the designs evolution has created. But without linking the "mode of organization" to how the emergent property comes to be, simply pointing to a generic "mode of organization" is incomplete. The mode of organization must accomplish something. It must create a means or mechanism that produces the emergent property as its result. -- Russ A
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