| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Importance of Emergence |
| Posted by: | John Grinder |
| Date/Time: | 31/01/2004 17:41:51 |
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Hey Ryan Your description of emergence, "To me, emergence and emergent phenomena are ways to find out/describe how pattern and order arise out of the interactions between and among systems" is an acceptable beginning from which, hopefully, an explicit (even formal) representation of emergence will come - this is the task before Carmen and me with respect to emergence and completing RedTail Math. I was surprised by your inclusion of an injunction against appealing to any higher order principle - you commented, "...without resorting to an entity or controling device of some kind...(god, genetic code, mental representations etc.)" While I agree, I had always assumed that such appeals lie outside the boundaries of legitimate scientific enquery but certainly such a "cauz mommy says so" explanation would quickly "solve" any connundrum. Charlie, you wrote, "I found that the authors used the term to refer to behavior or mental products that became surprisingly available to the conscious mind." This is not quite what I intended - what I was proposing is that one characteristic of the phenomena typically proposed is the our inability, given out analysis of the constituent phenomena to foresee the characteristics arising through the interactions of those constituents. To this day, I can play in sequence "individual" parts of a west African polyrhythm well enough but are unable to pre-hear the emergent pattern that occurs once the individual parts are played against one another. Possibly, this is a statement about where in the process of developing my skills as a percussionist I am at present. However checking with other drummers (who I perceive to be more advanced than I, I have found the same inability to pre-hear the emergent rhythm. Something closer to what I intended is the question of whether there is something in emergence besides evidence for our inability to predict, given an adequate representation of constituents, what the emergent properties of the new configuration will be. I think this is what you were pointing at. John |