RafeFurst comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2007 10:10PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 August 2007 03:58:08AM 5 points [-]

Creeping into his soul, he felt the first faint tinges of despair.

After all these posts on how the strength of an idea is what it excludes, forbids, prohibits, people are still citing positive examples as proof of the power of emergence? Tell me what it isn't!

Comment author: RafeFurst 07 March 2010 04:01:45PM 0 points [-]

Emergence is NOT the sum of the parts.

I'm curious, Eliezer, what you think of Alex Ryan's and Cosma Shalizi's definitions/formalisms of emergence?

http://www.per.marine.csiro.au/staff/Fabio.Boschetti/papers/ITprimer.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/nlin/0609011 http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/thesis/single-spaced-thesis.pdf

The both seem to be claiming that emergence is more than you are, but that could be an illusion...

Comment author: Davorak 19 May 2011 11:08:19PM *  0 points [-]

You ITprimer seems to disagree with your statement:

Emergence is NOT the sum of the parts.

ITprimer:

(3) the non-trivial interactions result in internal constraints, leading to symmetry breaking in the behaviour of the individual components, from which coordinated global behaviour arises;

(4) the system is now more organised than it was before; since no central director nor any explicit instruction template was followed, we say that the system has ‘self-organised’ ;

(5) this coordination can express itself as patterns detectable by an external observer or as structures that convey new properties to the systems itself. New behaviours ‘emerge’ from the system;

Non-trivial interactions of individual components -> Self organization -> New behaviors labeled to have 'emerged'

Where did they emerge from? The non-trivial interactions. This description runs counter to your discription "Emergence is NOT the sum of the parts." It is the sum of the non-trivial parts by the above description and a loose definition of sum.