Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!venera!vaxa.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Emergence and Static Vs. Dynamic properties Message-ID: <12502@venera.UUCP> Date: 21 Mar 90 02:01:32 GMT Sender: news@venera.UUCP Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 37 Summary: In article kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: > >I would suggest that we defer all discussion of the relation of perception >to description, until we have decided on the logical status of the >concept of emergence. I believe that we will have little success in any >attempt to understand language until we have replaced "emergent" with >"normative". > >Does your concept of "emergence" essentially depend on perception? Or >could you define it in some other terms? > I'm not sure that I (or anyone else) can effectively DEFINE "emergence," which may mean that emergence, itself, is a normative property of dynamic systems. All attempts I have made to deal with emergence thus far have, indeed, depended on perception. By this I mean that an "emergent property" is some property which is observed during the course of the system's behavior without necessarily being directly traced to any of the system's components. This is what Minsky is trying to get at in THE SOCIETY OF MIND. You have this society of agents which, acting together, yield behavior which we would call "intelligent;" but that does not mean that you can isolate which agent is "responsible" for that "intelligence." A glider in LIFE is the same way. We can only talk about a glider as something we can observe; so I think it DOES make sense to say that, whatever emergence may be, it depends on perception. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "Only a schoolteacher innocent of how literature is made could have written such a line."--Gore Vidal