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Blueberry comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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The fallacy here is thinking there's a difference between the way the ideal gas laws emerge from particle physics, and the way intelligence emerges from neurons and neurotransmitters. I've only heard "emergent" used in the following way:
A system X has emergent behavior if we have heuristics for both a low-level description and a high-level description, and the high-level description is not easily predictable from the low-level description
For instance, gliders moving across the screen diagonally is emergent in Conway's Life.
The "easily predictable" part is what makes emergence in the map, not the territory.
Er, did you read the grandparent comment?
Yes. My point was that emergence isn't about what we know how to derive from lower-level descriptions, it's about what we can easily see and predict from lower-level descriptions. Like Roko, I want my definition of emergence to include the ideal gas laws (and I haven't heard the word used to exclude them).
Also see this comment.