Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Emergent properties in VERY simple systems
Message-ID: <10@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 8 Oct 90 22:38:36 GMT
References: <3531@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <7738@icot32.icot.or.jp> <1990Oct5.210737.4836@cbnewsj.att.com>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 37

In article <1990Oct5.210737.4836@cbnewsj.att.com> avr@cbnewsj.att.com (adam.v.reed) writes:
>
>I'm rather surprised to find that everybody else's (at least on
>this newsgroup) notions of "emergence" are so different from my
>own. For years, I've been using the "emergence" of the ability
>to store information over time
> when two NOR gates are combined into a flip-flop
>(separately, NOR gates do not have memory, a flip-flop does)
>to help my students grasp the concept of "emergence".

This seems like a perfectly valid, and extremely simple, example of emergence
to me.  It may even be the best example yet for explaining what the word means.

> What's going on?

I think some people are confused by the fact that we often *assume* emergence
when we do not have an explanation for some system property.  Thus it might
appear that emergence applies to *inexplicable* properties only.  But, as I
see it, the assumption of emergence in this case is philosophical [i.e. there
is an explanation for everything, so we assume an explanation and take the most
obvious one as the first guess] [At least that is how I approach it, this is
probably a better assumption to make than to assume acausality or supernatural
causality].

>Emergence, in this sense, is a very useful notion for separating
>interesting and uninteresting properties that systems get by
>virtue of the organization and interaction of their parts.

Exactly.  The emergent properties of a system are the ones that must be studied
in the context of the system, bercause they do not exist at the lower levels.
Thus the appropriate domain of biology is the emergent properties of living
things, since the other properties are the domain of chemistry and physics.
The appropriate domain of AI research and cognitive science are the emergent
properties of cognitive processors, such as brains and AI software.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)