Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnewsj!avr
From: avr@cbnewsj.att.com (adam.v.reed)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Emergent properties in VERY simple systems
Summary: There's nothing mysterious about emergence
Message-ID: <1990Oct5.210737.4836@cbnewsj.att.com>
Date: 5 Oct 90 21:07:37 GMT
References: <3531@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <7738@icot32.icot.or.jp>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 34


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 (engineers say "memory", but some
biologists and psychologists find such usage unbearably
anthropomorphic) 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". Now I find
the denizens of this newsgroup are talking of "emergence" as
something applicable only to very complex systems, or to
properties not predicted, or not understood, or not capable of
extrinsic definition. What's going on?

My own notion of an emergent property of a system would include
any property which is "qualitatively different" from any property
of its component parts. I think that the notion "qualitatively
different" here means "defined by criterial operations which
cannot be derived from the criterial operations defining the
properties of the component parts by simply changing the value(s)
of one or more parameters". Thus, when two one-gram masses are
combined into a two-gram mass, the latter's property of weighing
two grams is NOT an emergent property, since it differs from each
component's property of weighing one gram only in the value of a
parameter. Memory, on the other hand, does NOT <correspond except
for parameter values> to any property of separate NOR gates.
Hence, it fits my idea of an "emergent property".

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. Why do
some people have a need to make it into something esoteric and
mysterious?
					Adam_V_Reed@ATT.com