[FRIAM] words RE: words

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

In that same volume is my favorite definition of emergence:  When the properties of the whole are dependent upon the order or arrangement of the ingredients.  So a cake is an emergent, a bowl of oatmeal is not.  I think that's Wimsatt. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2019 3:53 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] words RE: words

Ugh! I looked it up.  It's not Dennett's.  It's Crutchfield's. [†] And it's not his definition of intrinsic emergence. [‡] It's his "operational definition of emergence" and, quoting now:

"A process undergoes emergence if at some time the architecture of information processing has changed in such a way that a distinct and more powerful level of intrinsic computation has appeared that was not present in earlier conditions." From Crutchfield's "Is Anything Ever New?" in "Emergence" Bedau and Humphreys eds.

[†] Oh the irony of complaining about misattribution and then to go misattributing. 8^)

[‡] But, Crutchfield's defn of intrinsic emergence *does* get at a point I think is critical.  Again quoting: "In the emergence of coordinated behavior, though, there is a closure in which the patterns that emerge are important _within_ the system." (emphasis in the original)

On 5/7/19 1:44 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> No, it's OK. I just don't understand.
> 
> To be clear, I kinda like Dan Dennett's concept of "intrinsic emergence". I may not remember it well. But it goes something like this: emergence exists when the higher level language is more computationally expressive than the lower level language.
> 
> I only kinda like it because I would prefer something like: emergence exists when the post-map language has a different expressibility than the pre-map language. By removing "level", referring to the gen-phen map directly, and not requiring the containership of more or less expressibility, it seems more palatable to me. But I don't know if my re-phrasing even makes sense.


--
☣ uǝlƃ

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