Jed_Harris comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong
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I do think there is a good deal of commonality among the reasonable comments about what emergence is and also feel the force of Eliezer's request for negative examples.
I'll try to summarize (and of course over-simplify).
When we have a large collection of interacting elements, and we can measure a property of the collection as a whole, in some cases we'd like to call that property emergent, and in some cases we wouldn't.
I can think of three important cases:
I'm not claiming these three cases cover all the legitimate positive and negative examples of emergence -- I don't think the concept has crystallized that completely yet. But I do think they answer Eliezer's challenge.
Another, less crisply defined question is whether we should be using "emergence" so defined, and relatedly, whether people are mostly trying to use it in this sense, or whether they are, as Eliezer fears, just using it as a synonym for "magic".
My own feeling is that many users of the term are groping for a clear definition of this general sort, and that they are doing so precisely to avoid having to explain a large class of phenomena by "magic".