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Unnamed comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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It seems to me that "emergence" has a useful meaning once we recognize the Mind Projection Fallacy:
We say that a system X has emergent behavior if we have heuristics for both a low-level description and a high-level description, but we don't know how to connect one to the other. (Like "confusing", it exists in the map but not the territory.)
This matches the usage: the ideal gas laws aren't "emergent" since we know how to derive them (at a physics level of rigor) from lower-level models; however, intelligence is still "emergent" for us since we're too dumb to find the lower-level patterns in the brain which give rise to patterns like thoughts and awareness, which we have high-level heuristics for.
Thoughts? (If someone's said this before, I apologize for not remembering it.)
It's worth checking on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy when this kind of issue comes up. It looks like this view - emergent=hard to predict from low-level model - is pretty mainstream.
The first paragraph of the article on emergence says that it's a controversial term with various related uses, generally meaning that some phenomenon arises from lower-level processes but is somehow not reducible to them. At the start of section 2 ("Epistemological Emergence"), the article says that the most popular approach is to "characterize the concept of emergence strictly in terms of limits on human knowledge of complex systems." It then gives a few different variations on this type of view, like that the higher-level behavior could not be predicted "practically speaking; or for any finite knower; or for even an ideal knower."
There's more there, some of which seems sensible and some of which I don't understand.
Many thanks!