conchis comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (125)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: conchis 27 August 2007 01:35:34AM 12 points [-]

In line with previous comments, I'd always understood the idea of emergence to have real content: "systems whose high-level behaviors arise or 'emerge' from the interaction of many low-level elements" as opposed to being centrally determined or consciously designed (basically "bottom-up" rather than "top-down"). It's not a specific explanation in and of itself, but it does characterise a class of explanations, and, more importantly, excludes certain other types of explanation.

I would think that something like "life/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon" means "you don't need intelligent design to explain life/intelligence".