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Pedant comments on Neural Categories - Less Wrong
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"blegg-ness emerges as an attractor in the distributed network." Is this a useful application of the concept of emergence?
Emergence isn't, on its own, bad. It's just generally unhelpful. That doesn't mean it's wrong; my consciousness is in fact emergent from neurons firing. It just doesn't tell me anything extra. If instead, you said something like, "I've got a detailed model of the brain, that simulates the neurons, and through (insert technical explanation here) my model shows consciousness emerging as a property made up of smaller elements", nobody would complain. Emergence is only a bad explanation if it's the only explanation given.
Completely agreed. I think the word emergence is only bad because it's used badly.
"A emerges from B" could reformulated as "There is a causal relationship between B and A" and as such it's also obvious that the description of the causal relationship is missing.
I think the misuse is also about (But notice the difference) people struggling with attempts of understanding a hierarchy of information in the sense that you have two overlapping models... One, say M1, reduced - in the sense of reductionism - to smaller components and the other, say M2, which contains a more general abstract system. So the struggle which I'm referring to is the inability to effectively grasp the relationship between the two models M1 and M2, and then insteading of admitting you either can't explain it or you don't understand it, you just say "M2 is emergent from M1. " Which can be correct, in the sense that "if M1 is true then it follows that M2 is true" - "Though I can't quite explain why"
I think Yudkowsky's pointing out the futility of emergence as a substite for magic is spot on in many cases.
Emergence isn't helpful by itself, but it is helpful in context. For example, if you say that consciousness is emergent from neurons firing, it doesn't describe how it does it, but it does exclude other positions - "Consciousness doesn't exist", "Consciousness is a basic feature of the world and doesn't emerge from anything, it's just there", and "Consciousness emerges from something other than neurons".