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From: burke@russell.Stanford.EDU (Tom Burke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: emergence
Message-ID: <15744@russell.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 10 Oct 90 04:45:32 GMT
References: <87759@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <271172B0.12370@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 35

In <271172B0.12370@orion.oac.uci.edu> jhess@orion.oac.uci.edu (James Hess) writes:

>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).

...etc.

Notice that definitions (1) and (2) are circular or else rely on an
ambiguity in the term `emergence' -- i.e., they use the very term they
are meant to define.  How about the following revision:

(1') The emergent properties of a system are those which are not
     possessed by the components of the system but are products of the
     functioning of the system as a whole.

...or something like that.  I think this is probably what was meant in
the first place.

But then, this sounds more like a definition of "epiphenomenon" than
of "emergent property".  It is at least partially right, but it can't
be the whole story if you want the term `emergent' to be something
more than merely synonymous with `epiphenomenal'.  It seems like you
want a conception of emergence that requires emergent properties to
have some kind of causal efficacy in their own right.

This may have something to do with (3), but I'm not sure what.