[Kieth] In any event, I'd love to see how the concept of emergence informs the MOQ because, as I've said, I find the 4 MOQ levels so broad that I have difficulty applying them to concrete questions. If we had generic criteria for judging evolutionary advances across and within these domains and could talk meaningfully about both intra- and inter-level moral conflicts, I think we'd have a much more powerful intellectual framework.
It seems to me that the concepts of game theory, general systems theory (and its subdisciplines, especially hierarchy theory, cybernetics, and complexity studies), and allied disciplines, are beginning to generate the concepts necessary to identify cross-level criteria for emergence that may shed light on this process of universal unfolding. [Ron] Awhile back I tried to explain the connection I see with Topos theory on just that subject. MOQ coupled with emergence and topos would give, as you say, a more powerful intellectual framework. I feel they are all pointing in the same direction and support each other's arguments. Thanks for your post and the links. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ron Kulp Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 11:10 To: [email protected] Subject: [MD] emergence and MOQ I thought this snip from "Emergent properties & processes" sounded a lot like Pirsigs description of the four levels. [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." [Ron] Has anyone else connected/compared Emergence with MOQ? I do know there are those who object to the idea, I find it interesting though that Pirsigs levels can be accepted although the idea of emergence, particularly as it applies to consciousness is in hot debate. "Regarding strong emergence, Mark A. Bedau observes: "Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing."(Bedau 1997) However, "the debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)." (Corning 2002) Along that same thought, Arthur Koestler stated, "it is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature" and used the metaphor of Janus to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong or holistic vs. weak or reductionistic) should be treated as perspectives, not exclusives, and should work together to address the issues of emergence.(Koestler 1969) Further, "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 [Ron] All opinions welcome, I'm very interested in the contrasts/simularities with MOQ and "Emergence" moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
