Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!microsoft!gaben
From: gaben@microsoft.UUCP (Gabe NEWELL)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Thoughts on emergence
Summary: Emergence and past articles
Message-ID: <58134@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 11 Oct 90 01:03:51 GMT
References: <62500@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 29


I have a request and a comment.

The request is that someone mail me the first 12 articles
off of this group.  I don't have access to them and it is
frustrating.

The second is that emergence seems to be a concept based
on a misperception about language or symbolization (I make
no claim to having any expertise in understanding either).

The misperception is that theories or thoughts about things
are not the actual things themselves.  Theories are in general
very lossy data compression schemes.  Emergence is the result
of divergence from my model (I think the hierarchical issue
is irrelevant - you can get emergence from theorizing about things
at the same level of abstraction not just from moving from a lower-level
description to a higher level; more specifically emergence is
an example of a class of problems  which result from failure
to recognize that knowledge is inherently lossy as is the whole
concern about which is "true" or "right", psychoanalysis or neuro-
science, etc...).

For example, I have a cat.  The cat is furry, and purrs a lot,
and makes me happy.  I have a very simple description of a cat.
Now I have a second cat, and I have a cat fight.  Nothing in my
model of a cat would have predicted a cat fight.  Emergent behavior
is NOT an interesting characteristic of the universe, it is an
interesting result of how I think about things.