Re: emergence (or is that re-emergence)
Thank you, Eric for your considerate reply, however more comprehensive (branching into math) than I can absorbe all of it. Please see my remarks interjected as lines between John M - Original Message - From: Eric Hawthorne [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 2:42 AM Subject: Re: emergence (or is that re-emergence) Let me first apologize for not yet reading the mentioned references on the subject, John Mikes wrote: As long as we cannot qualify the steps in a 'process' leading to the emerged new, we call it emergence, later we call it process. Just look back into the cultural past, how many emergence-mystiques (miracles included) changed into regular quotidien processes, simply by developing more information about them. I did not say: the information. Some. I don't think this is correct. A fundamental concept when talking about emergence ought to be the pattern, or more precisely, the interesting, coherent, or perhaps useful pattern; useful perhaps in the sense of being a good building block for some other pattern. Process is a subset of pattern, in the sense in which I'm using pattern. Also, system is a subset of pattern. ** I also think in second thought that my statement is NOT correct. I mixed the (misused name) complexity, indeed a set of all descriptions with the model we form within a topic (a defined subset). Once you mention a 'pattern', it is a model. A cut-off view within the topical interest of the observer. In the 'emergence' as I formulated it, the effect of the total is invoked, influences from broader sets than the model itself. I find mathematical examples off (my) base, since math is 'describing' the model and so it is the map of the territory - where the territory itself is also only a model of our viewed (selected) part in question. ** Q: How do you know when you have completely described a pattern? Two examples, or analogies, for what I mean by this question: e.g. 1 I used to wonder whether I had completely proved something in math, and would go into circles trying to figure out how to know when something was sufficiently proved or needed more reductionism ... ** You said it in the last three words. I try to generalize (which is, of course, beyond my capabilites, but so be it: I don't cut my inqueries to the conventional old reductionistic knowledge in searching for new views). Your completely described pattern is still an incomplete model. [let me skip your example #1, the A to it, shows the model indeed] ** e.g. 2 Is the essence of human life in the domain of DNA chemistry, or in the domain of sociobiology, psychology, cultural anthropology? Are we likely to have a future DNA based theory of psychology or culture? Definitely not. Cellular processes and psychology and culture are related, but not in any essential manner. ** I don't know what is life, especially human life? There is a 'pattern' in processes of changes in parts of the complexity which - at a certain level - may be called 'life', not essentially different from other types of change. How good old reductionist science boxed in the models formulated under this name are good for the developmental sequence in the inquiry, but do not contribute much to my search of fundamental generalization. The organizations are interconnected and interinfluenced, which makes the difference between a machine and a natural system (words borrowed from Robert Rosen's vocabulary). Cellular processes IMO are definitly model based cut-offs. *** A: Let's define a complete description of a pattern as a description which describes the essential properties of the pattern. The essential properties of the pattern are those which, taken together, are sufficient to yield the defining interestingness, coherence, or usefulness of the pattern. **QED** Note that any other properties (of the medium in which the pattern lives) are accidental properties of the incarnation of the pattern. Note also that the more detailed mechanisms or sub-patterns which may have generated each particular essential property of the main pattern are irrelevant to the creation of a minimal complete description of the main pattern being described. As long as the property of the main pattern has whatever nature it has to have as far as the pattern is concerned, it simply doesn't matter how the property got that way, or what other humps on its back the property also has in the particular incarnation. And that level-independence or spurious-detail independence or simply abstractness of useful patterns is one of the reasons why it makes sense to talk about emergence. e.g.of level-independence of a pattern. 1. Game of Pong 2a. Visual Basic 2b. Pascal program 2c. Ping-pong table, program on PCon a Mac ball, bats, players 3a. x86 ML
Re: emergence (or is that re-emergence)
Let me first apologize for not yet reading the mentioned references on the subject, John Mikes wrote: As long as we cannot qualify the steps in a 'process' leading to the emerged new, we call it emergence, later we call it process. Just look back into the cultural past, how many emergence-mystiques (miracles included) changed into regular quotidien processes, simply by developing more information about them. I did not say: the information. Some. I don't think this is correct. A fundamental concept when talking about emergence ought to be the pattern, or more precisely, the interesting, coherent, or perhaps useful pattern; useful perhaps in the sense of being a good building block for some other pattern. Process is a subset of pattern, in the sense in which I'm using pattern. Also, system is a subset of pattern. Q: How do you know when you have completely described a pattern? Two examples, or analogies, for what I mean by this question: e.g. 1 I used to wonder whether I had completely proved something in math, and would go into circles trying to figure out how to know when something was sufficiently proved or needed more reductionism i.e. The old Wait a minute: How do we know that 1 + 1 = 2? problem. The gifted mathematicians teaching me seemed to have no trouble knowing when they were finished proving something. It was intuitively obvious -- load of cods wallop of course. And I still wonder to this day if they were simply way smarter than me or prisoners of an incredibly limited, rote-learned math worldview. The point is, every theory; every description of states-of-affairs and processes or systems (patterns) using concepts and relationships, has a limited domain-of-discourse, and mixing descriptions of patterns in different domains is unnecessary and obfuscates the essentials of the pattern under analysis. e.g. 2 Is the essence of human life in the domain of DNA chemistry, or in the domain of sociobiology, psychology, cultural anthropology? Are we likely to have a future DNA based theory of psychology or culture? Definitely not. Cellular processes and psychology and culture are related, but not in any essential manner. A: Let's define a complete description of a pattern as a description which describes the essential properties of the pattern. The essential properties of the pattern are those which, taken together, are sufficient to yield the defining interestingness, coherence, or usefulness of the pattern. Note that any other properties (of the medium in which the pattern lives) are accidental properties of the incarnation of the pattern. Note also that the more detailed mechanisms or sub-patterns which may have generated each particular essential property of the main pattern are irrelevant to the creation of a minimal complete description of the main pattern being described. As long as the property of the main pattern has whatever nature it has to have as far as the pattern is concerned, it simply doesn't matter how the property got that way, or what other humps on its back the property also has in the particular incarnation. And that level-independence or spurious-detail independence or simply abstractness of useful patterns is one of the reasons why it makes sense to talk about emergence. e.g.of level-independence of a pattern. 1. Game of Pong 2a. Visual Basic 2b. Pascal program 2c. Ping-pong table, program on PCon a Mac ball, bats, players 3a. x86 ML program 3b. PowerPC ML program3c. Newtonian physics of everyday objects 4a. voltage patterns in 4b. voltage patterns in silicon NAND gates Gallium Arsenide NOR gates (you get the idea) Key: - 1. The main pattern being described 2, 3, 4. Lower-level i.e. implementation-level or building-block-level patterns whose own internal details are irrelevant to the emergence of the main pattern, which emerges essentially identical from all three of very different lower level building-block patterns. So in summary, an emergent pattern is described as emergent because it emerges, somehow, anyhow, doesn't matter how, as an abstract, useful, independently describable pattern (process, system, state-of-affairs). A theory of the pattern's essential form or behaviour need make no mention of the properties of the substrate in which the pattern formed, except to confirm that, in some way, some collection of the substrate properties could have generated or accidentally manifested each pattern-essential property. A theory of form and function of the pattern can be perfectly adequate, complete, and predictive (in the pattern-level-appropriate domain of discourse), without making any reference to the substrate properties. This is not to say that any substrate can generate any pattern. There are constraints, but they are of many-to-many
