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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Emergent properties (was: What AI is exactly)
Summary: What emerges from considering emergent properties?
Message-ID: <15132@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 27 Sep 90 00:21:08 GMT
References: <59556@bbn.BBN.COM> <3894@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <26FA3460.1C7D@marob.masa.com> <3918@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
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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:
>>
>>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.
>
>This sounds like "emergent = I don't know".  Your definition I agree with,
>but I don't think it buys us anything.

If we approach it properly (rather than using it as a euphemism for our own
ignorance), it offers the possibility of some intellectual hygiene.  Let me
return, once again, to one of my favorite examples:  the Darwin automata
being investigated by Gerald Edelman's group at the Neurosciences Institute.
The ability of a Darwin automaton to perform perceptual categorization is an
emergent property.  What this means is that one cannot point to some specific
system component and say, "Here is where the knowledge to recognize the letter
A resides."  An outside observer will be able to note that there are parts of
that automaton which exhibit similar behavior when confronted with various
presentations of that letter, but one cannot to a Newell-style knowledge level
analysis of the system.

What does this have to do with intellectual hygiene?  It is a lesson to remind
us that much of artificial intelligence has run aground by virtue of our
insistence on asking ill-formed questions.  It confronts us with the
possibility that, for example, asking for a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions which will enable some kind of decision logic sitting behind a
retina to recognize the letter A may be one of those ill-formed questions.
This is not to say that it is giving us any answers.  However, when we are
having trouble finding answers to our questions, often we would do well to
question those questions.  The study of emergent properties provokes us to
consider how some of those questions might be reformulated into once which
might be more accommodating.

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