Davorak comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

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

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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.