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From: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Emergent properties (was: What AI is exactly)
Summary: Emergent properties depend on explanatory levels
Message-ID: <26FA3460.1C7D@marob.masa.com>
Date: 21 Sep 90 15:40:15 GMT
References: <147@tdatirv.UUCP> <59556@bbn.BBN.COM> <3894@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Organization: ESCC, New York City
Lines: 32

In article <3894@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>,
    jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus) writes:
>In article <59556@bbn.BBN.COM> BKort@bbn.com (Barry Kort) writes:
>>As I see it, emotions are an emergent property of any learning system.  

>Not to flame, but I wish people would stop using the term "emergence".
>I know they won't, but could you state what you mean?  My assessment
>of the idea of emergence is that it's not possible within our curernt
>paradigm of science and rationality.  The impression I get is that
>people throw the term around when they need a hand-waving explaination
>of some mental phenomenon.

People certainly do abuse the term "emergent", but it does have a definite
meaning.  An emergent property is a property of a system that cannot be
accounted for by the properties of the system components, relative to some
level of explanation.

For example:  Nitric acid does not dissolve gold.  Sulfuric acid does not
dissolve gold.  A mixture of the two, called aqua regia, does dissolve gold.
This property is emergent at the level of commonplace understanding,
namely that the properties of a mixture are a mixture of the properties of
the components.  At the level of acid-base chemistry, of course, the behavior
of aqua regia is well understood.

So emergent-ness does not make sense as a concept without reference to a
level of understanding, either implied or stated.  In the original article,
the claim that "emotions are an emergent property of intelligent systems"
means that emotions arise from the interactions of a set of components,
none of which themselves possess emotion.
-- 
cowan@marob.masa.com			(aka ...!hombre!marob!cowan)
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban