thomblake comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (125)
This misses the point. 'Quarks' were a stand-in for whatever particle you take to be fundamental; if there's something smaller than quarks, that does not defeat the notion that it is unhelpful to describe the action of the stock market in terms of its non-quarkness.
In what way is this a useful concept? In particular, having not been predicted is a feature of the predictor, not so much of the event, and so attaching the adjective to the event invites thinking wrongly that 'emergence' is fundamental to the event.
It is not an ad hominem argument. I know that because you club baby seals and you claimed it was an ad hominem argument; therefore, it is not an ad hominem argument. The previous sentence is an example of an ad-hominem argument. There are of course other varieties of ad hominem, but it isn't any of those either.
It is really not a non-sequitor. The point is that 'emergent' tells you about as much about the phenomenon as 'mysterious'. It doesn't communicate much more than "I don't understand why this happened" - as you grant above.
Now that I have read more articles, I understand that most of my issues were due to taking the words with my definition and not hers. The result is that the article seems to be against those with different definitions of emergent, even though there is most likely more than one common definition of emergent, and no definition was previously selected as the correct one.
For reference, the above article was written by this guy.