Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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.

Comment author: Zaq 21 November 2010 10:07:44PM 1 point [-]

The even/odd attribute of a collection of marbles is not an emergent phenomenon. This is because as I gradually (one by one) remove marbles from the collection, the collection has a meaningful even/odd attribute all the way down, no matter how few marbles remain. If an attribute remains meaningful at all scales, then that attribute is not emergent.

If the accuracy of fluid mechanics was nearly 100% for 500+ water molecules and then suddenly dropped to something like 10% at 499 water molecules, then I would not count fluid mechanics as an emergent phenomenon. I guess I would word this as "no jump discontinuities in the accuracy vs scale graph."

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 09 May 2012 03:58:01PM 0 points [-]

I don't understand this comment.

Two posters had offered only positive examples. Five had offered at least one negative example in contrast to a positive example.

Comment author: blacktrance 07 January 2014 08:42:53PM *  4 points [-]

To respond to a really old comment -

Emergence does exclude some possibilities. For example, if consciousness is emergent, it means that it's not ontologically basic, it's not caused by something outside the system, and that it exists.