[FRIAM] emergence as stop gap

[Russell Standish]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 09:03:55AM -0700, Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:
> 
> But, so what?  Taken this way _everything_ is emergent.  I even heard a
> guy named Terry Bristol claim that the universe is a kind of emergent
> cycle where the emergent things at the bottom emerge from the emergent
> things at the top in a kind of ourboros.  And that makes the word
> "emergent" completely useless.
> 

Only if taken to extremes. Emergence is always relative to a pair of
models. Since there is no evidence that there is a bedrock of physical
reductionism, it would seem that all physical phenomena can therefore be
modelled in such a way that the phenomena in question are emergent. 

Yet it is not alway useful to have a pair of models. I have already given the
simple archetype of a gravitationally bound pair modelled as point
masses undergoing Newtonian gavitational attraction. Such a model system
does not exhibit emergence.

It does mean that emergence is a broader concept than usually
conceptualised, but I disagree that it is so broad as to be
useless. Also, there are a number of attempts at refining emergence
into stronger concepts - eg Bedau's "weak emergence", or Wolfram's
"computational irreducibility" that go to the heart of your
criticism. I'm not sure how successful they are, but such is the way
of philosophical debate.

-- 

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