epicurus comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: epicurus 02 March 2015 03:10:31PM *  0 points [-]

This is very curious. I never thought of emergent as an explanation but as a property. I roughly understood it to mean that the emergent quality was transferable. That is, intelligence is a product of neurons firing but it need not have been, it could also have been generated from transistors or whatever else.

This is roughly the opposite of your ant example. Something is emergent if it can be explained/predicted with no knowledge of the lower level. A lot of properties of turing machines do not depend on the actual formalism of the turing machine.

Edit: After browsing the other comments, I realize this is something that has been brought up before. My 2 cents for whatever it is worth, I guess...