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From: danforth@riacs.edu (Douglas G. Danforth)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: emergent properties
Message-ID: <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu>
Date: 3 Oct 90 18:35:22 GMT
References: <1990Sep29.213139.2876@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
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In <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) writes:

>The amazing thing is how rarely anything resembling an "inexplicable
>emergent" has ever reigned for very long in the history of Science --
>except for transient periods before better theories remove the need
>for the assumption of extra, special laws.  The moral is that,
>whenever you're pretty sure you are dealing with a "genuine emergent",
>you're proably making a mistake that reflects the primitive scientific
>culture of your time.  

> ....                                               That would appear,
>to a classical physicist, to be an "inexplicable emergent" -- until it
>was added as a new law of nature.


(Point 1)
     It seems that man can not tolerate "inexplicable emergents".  Either
it is explained by existing laws or soon thereafter by new theories.  If
not then it is simply added as a new law of nature.
     Every once in a while we reremember that the blue of the sky is
truely amazing and not just a consequence of Rayleigh scattering, or that
the tug of gravity is just as mysterious whether or not affine connections
play a role.
     My sense-of-self will still be a sense of my-self even when we have
the full "explanation" of it (if I live that long).

(Point 2)
     I sometimes wonder how much our theories are not just recastings of
our experience (without great insight). It has happened several times that
physicists have found in the mathematics literature exactly the math they
need to solve their physics problems. Whence came the mathematics? Was it not
from abstractions of earlier physics problems (an historian of science should
be able to prove or disprove this conjecture)?
--
Douglas G. Danforth   		    (danforth@riacs.edu)
Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS)
M/S 230-5, NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035