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From: jhess@orion.oac.uci.edu (James Hess)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: emergence
Message-ID: <271172B0.12370@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 90 06:48:16 GMT
References: <87759@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Reply-To: jhess@orion.oac.uci.edu (James Hess)
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Lines: 23

Help!  We now have at least three definitions of emergence running around, and 
considerable verbiage generated by the confusion.

1) My prefered definition:  Those properties which are not possessed by the 
   components of a system but emerge as properties of the system as a whole.

2) Those unanticipated or unpredictable properties which emerge only in the
   system as a whole, which are not properties of its components or 
   subsystems.

   This is a special case of the definition above; the qualifiers speak to our
   state of knowledge rather than some aspect of emergence or the system.

3) Those functions which are not dependent on the implementation of the 
   system (for computers, in a specific set of hardware or software).

   In this case, the two systems (complete systems, not hardware or software
   alone) might be thought of as formal analogues or models of each other.  
   This redefintion needs some qualification, in that they may only be models 
   in the sense of black boxes which given the same input produce the same
   output, rather than processual models or structural models.  (For a good
   discussion of this subject, see discussion of models and simulations in
   James G. Miller's "Living Systems".