Thanks for all your input, everybody. If I use the word in talks, I'll be careful about exactly how I'm using it.
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Lesswrong has a few articles about this:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence …
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Perfect!
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Tangentially related, I always thought the word “emergency” was kinda odd in the context of “emergence”. e.g. “There’s a big emergence happening right now. Yeah, things are kind of emergence-y at the moment.”
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"Something big is emerging!"
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Pretty sure it's both. It's explicable in a lot of physical science (causal chains for chemical reactions etc.), and as a philosophical construct, as far as I'm aware. But the woo-woo "emergence" is of course different, and I'm pretty sure people use it that way in debates.
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I was a student at the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School in the early 90s. At least back then, emergent properties could be induced, observed and described, but not explained. Maybe it’s different nowadays, but I don’t think so. Still woo-woo.
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In that case, I may have to check my definitions again. I understood emergent properties to include - for an abstract example - a compound having properties not present in any component element, but which can be explained by the molecular structure of the compound itself.
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As far as I'm aware, such properties can be comfortably explained with current understanding of molecular dynamics, chemistry etc. But I know i sometimes use words recklessly, so I wouldn't be surprised if my internal definition of an "emergent property" doesn't match consensus.
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Maybe the definition and mechanisms of emergent properties are clear for microbiological and chemical systems, but they sure aren’t for sociocultural systems! Nevertheless, we persist.
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They certainly aren't uniformly clear, regardless of domain, but I do think they are sometimes explicable. But yes, as close to a scientific background as I get is psychology or, recently, linguistics, where emergent is usually the functional equivalent of "a wizard did it".
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Property of a group: co-operation. Not analyzable in terms of individual parts.
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No amount of predicates about individuals of group leads to logical entailment of "co-operates"
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Emergent property. Literature on "super plural" logic discusses this.
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in which
@PeterSjostedtH discusses some of the problems of so-called "emergentism" in very much the same vein that you're pointing to here, a cover term for something not well defined or understoodhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2442&v=B7B_RmZQp5Q … -
"Epistemological conceptions of emergence have clear and straightforward applications in current scientific contexts." https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/properties-emergent/ … "Whether there are any instances of ontological emergence is highly controversial."
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In ecology & life science emergence refers to forms and functions that would not occur but for the substrate of other forms and functions that connect together in particular ways to make them possible. Human body is best example: biochemistry: cells: organs: organ systems: body
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I think it's both, depending on who you ask. I tend to go with the idea that emergent properties are always reducible to their constituents.
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I thought most of the language signifiers used to describe causes and conditions were cover terms for complex interactions better explained by mathematics. 'Emergent' is def an edge case tho. Or as McKenna would call it, 'novelty'.
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For me, "then" doesn't feel quite right. More like "emergence = magic just happening now"
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