[Platt]
It's the view of current science I find lacking in explanatory power,
like attributing what can't be explained to "emergence" and "chance."
[Ron]
I do not see emergence as "chance" so to speak. What I read of it, it
describes evolution in
terms of Pirsigs levels. This is why I'm drawn to the idea.
"In this plain of understanding static, patterns of value are divided
into four systems: inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social
patterns and intellectual patterns. They are exhaustive. That's all
there are. If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics - Inorganic,
Biological, Social and Intellectual - nothing is left out. No 'thing,'
that is. Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any
encyclopedia, is absent.
But although the four systems are exhaustive they are not exclusive.
They all operate at the same time and in ways that are almost
independent of each other.
This classification of patterns is not very original, but the
Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual.
It says they are not continuous. They are discreet. They have very
little to do with one another. Although each higher level is built on a
lower one it is not an extension of that lower level. Quite the
contrary. The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the
lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own
purposes.
This observation is impossible in a substance-dominated metaphysics
where everything has to be an
extension of matter. But now atoms and molecules are just one of four
levels of static patterns of quality and there is no intellectual
requirement that any level dominate the other three."-Pirsig (lila
chpter 12)
[edit] Emergent properties & processes
"An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of
simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex
behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size
scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different
scales. In other words there is often a form of top-down feedback in
systems with emergent properties. The processes from which emergent
properties result may occur in either the observed or observing system,
and can commonly be identified by their patterns of accumulating change,
most generally called 'growth'. Why emergent behaviours occur include:
intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known
as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very
predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new
level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are
not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be
predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities: they
are irreducible. No physical property of an individual molecule of air
would lead one to think that a large collection of them will transmit
sound. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds[1] or shoal of fish
are also good examples."
"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not
imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the
universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted
with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of
complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied
biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole
becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its
parts."(Anderson 1972)-wiki
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