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From: fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Emergent Properties
Keywords: chaos, science, prediction
Message-ID: <1990Oct19.201604.7280@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 90 20:16:04 GMT
References: <1990Oct12.214636.7945@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <30@tdatirv.UUCP>
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Reply-To: fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel)
Organization: North Carolina State University
Lines: 81


    Stanly Friesen stomped upon my comments about the term "emergence --
    to my mind missing the points I was trying to make -- and then
    wondered if he "was any help?"  Zounds!  I'm not sure my ego can take
    much more help like that.  Perhaps he (and others) mistook my 
    style for requests for external enlightenment, but I thought they were
    rhetorical questions at best.  Watching the flames grow higher on
    some recent posts perhaps I should be more vociferous.

    In dismissing the deeper implications of chaotic systems in the
    metaphysics of emergence, Friesen said:

        The properties of a chaotic system are inherent in the simplest
        description, they are simply unrecoverable.

    I'm not quite sure what the latter part is supposed to mean, but
    the former is clearly false (so the total statement must be true :-).
    I can think of several ways to describe subsets of a chaotic system
    in such a way that the properties of the system are gone.  For
    example, the first 25% of one of the equations describing the 
    system.  This is a simpler description.  Friesen is probably begging
    questions in his use of "simple" by assuming the operation applied 
    to a complete description to produce a partial description is in
    fact one which preserves the information he thinks is always 
    preserved.  It is a property of well understood sciences, that we
    know how to preserve information at different levels of description.
    I suspect "emergence" is only useful in poorly understood sciences
    and its usefullness is quite suspect since it may discourage the
    search for different formulations of the descriptions that DO
    allow the sort of "simplifying" that Friesen is assuming

    Friesen goes on but the most notable disagreement he and I have is
    his unwillingness to accept that his "brain today is a different
    set of nets than it was last year."  It should be patently obvious
    that his brain today most certainly IS different than last year.
    Identically wired nets with different weights are different.  I
    can only hope his nets will change some more!  (;-)

    There is a lot of question begging going on in this discussion, and
    perhaps that is unavoidable in this media, esp on this topic. For
    example, Leonard Norrgard defined fire as an emergent property of
    material, oxygen and heat.  Fire is supposed to be a property of
    the system that can not be explained by the subcomponents and is
    thus emergent.  Well ... but how is "fire" defined?  It is supposed
    to be a property but it would be quite hard to produce a definition
    of the property "fire" based on visual observations.  There are lots
    of different types of fires that look quite different.  And I want
    a definition of fire that excludes things that are not fire.  The
    only way I know to do this is by the classic reductionist scientific
    attitude that fire is what you see when material is oxidized at a 
    high rate in an oxygen atmosphere with sufficent activation energy
    to maintain or accelerate the process.  I think that fire is a 
    property that can't be defined WITHOUT recourse to the consituents.

    Chris Malcom, in a different post, dismissed Michael Bender's 
    query of "How can we build something we can't define" by claiming
    this was done all the time in research prototypes.  This is also
    sloppy thinking.  (It may well have been intended as a joke, but I  
think the point is serious.) Prototypes are not objects which 
    satisfy any definition; they are instances in search of a definition.
    If one is unable to define a property a system is supposed to have,
    and someone claims to have built a research prototype that has that
    property, there is no way to check that the property is there. 

    The purpose of science is (I thought) to search for descriptions
    of the world, to be offered in terms of defined quantities, and
    then to test those descriptions for adequacy.  Inverting this 
    process, as I suspect many "emergence advocates" may be doing,
    probably interferes with the progress of science -- though of course
    it may have pragmatic benifits. Skinner was able to train Pigeons
    without knowing much of what was going on in pigeons and I worry
    that emergence is an emergent property of a return to behaviorism.
    That sort of "science" has its place, especially in the creation of
    a new field, but if THIS is what emergence is all about why not
    just call it behaviorism?
    Apologies to behaviorists....

----GaryFostel----
                                      Dept of Computer Science
                                      N.C State University