From: robd@cherry09.cray.com (Robert Derrick)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Emergence again...
Date: 17 Nov 92 23:40:27 GMT
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

Mickey Rowe (rowe@pender.ee.upenn.edu) wrote:

[re: the use of the term "emergent property"]

: Wherever the potential for this confusion remains, I'm against using
: the word.  Anybody else?  

How do you feel about substituting the term epiphenomenon?  This is more
concise in that it means that the property in question is caused by the
primary phenomenon, although it is not necessary that the cause/effect
relationship be one that is intuitive, predictable, or reducible.

This idea of K's that all destinations must somehow be reducible to
a roadmap that details how you got there is jejune.

In the simplest of examples:

A cake that exists now is not reducible to a recipe of how to make the
cake.  That information is not inherent in the cake itself.  What can
be done is to deduce a way to reproduce the cake, creating a new
recipe.  But there is no way of ever deducing the original recipe with
absolute certainty.  That information is gone.

However, if every time you have angel food cake, it brings back 
certain memories of your grandmother, those memories are an epiphenomenon
of the conjunction of angel food cake and you.

Of course, K will notice that despite the fact that the recipe is unknown,
we will infer that the cake had a creator.  This is the classic "looks
designed" arguement, and is what the shishya is prattling on about in his
"who is the programmer" arguements.

So a slightly more exotic example:

In Africa something profound and amazing was discovered: an ancient
nuclear reactor!  This was a sustained and periodic nuclear fission reaction.
The exact recipe of how that reactor came to be there and how it was put
together we will never know.  All we have is the finished product.  However,
there is one thing that we do know:  that although this is a highly complex
and full of information effect (I think even K will admit that the 
information content of the necessary components and requirements of
a sustained fusion reaction are orders of magnitude higher than the
components and requirements for a cake), there was no intelligence or
creator that designed and implemented it, because it has been in the 
ground for many thousands of years before any intelligent life walked 
the earth!  Only the random forces of nature managed to accomplish what
took mankind many years of concerted effort.

Where did the information come from?  The property of the nuclear reactor
was an epiphenomenon of the natural forces that brought the constituents
together in that place and time.

The K believes that epiphenomenon cannot exist.  That all information 
flows downhill.  It can degrade, but never increase.  And that since
our original laws are simple, that complexity cannot arise.  He doesn't
realize that the epiphenomena are not deducible from the simple laws.
But they are all there, hidden from view until we delibrately, or nature
blindly, brings out the wealth of information implicit within.

We have seen it happen time and again.  Abiogenesis is simply an
inference from many similar observances throughout all of nature.

--

rob derrick				robd@cherry.cray.com
Newsgroups: talk.origins