Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Emergent properties (was: What AI is exactly)
Message-ID: <161@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 27 Sep 90 23:51:18 GMT
References: <59556@bbn.BBN.COM> <3894@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <26FA3460.1C7D@marob.masa.com> <3918@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 35

In article <3918@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus) writes:
>In article <26FA3460.1C7D@marob.masa.com> cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan) writes:
>>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.
>
>This sounds like "emergent = I don't know".  Your definition I agree with,
>but I don't think it buys us anything.

I do not think this is what John Cowan meant by his definition, nor is it
what I mean by 'emergent'.  Another way to put it is that an emergent property
is one that makes the whole into more than the sum of its parts.  We could
quite well know how the parts combine to cause the added property.  In fact,
I would maintain that the term is only legitimately used where there is at
least an educated guess about the mechanism of emergence.

Thus if I say (and I do) that self-awareness is an emergent property of a
system with a certain level of 'intelligence', I mean that I can see a
mechanism by which the various compinents of intelligence combine to cause
the phenomenon that we call self-awareness, but that it is not inherent in
the descriptions of the individual components of intelligence.

>  People usually throw this term
>around as if it means something when it really means "we don't know how
>this happens, only that it does".  I've seen "emergence" used to try to 
>"explain" things, but how can you explain something using a term that
>means "unknown"?

And I would say this is a mis-use of the term, and is the reason why it
is so controversial.



--------------------
uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)