Talk:Emergence/Archive 1

message: The water example is interesting, but I don't think it really qualifies as an emergent property.  The sense of emergence is that the property emerges from a large aggregation.  Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom can combine to form water, but the properties of water do not emerge from the combination.  The combination is actually a radically different thing, due to the quantum and wave characteristics of the electrons involved.
The ant example is the perfect example.  If you have two or three ants, there is not much change; they may interact, they may not.  If you add another one or two, still not much change.  Twenty more ants, still not much change.  If you keep adding ants until there is a large colony, then the colony will have a behavior that is at a higher level of description than the behavior of the ants themselves, who will continue to exhibit many of the same behaviors as in the past.  The properties of the colony's behavior will be different from the aggregate behavior of the smaller groups of ants. Hu 19:49, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)
: I agree.  The fact that corrosive oxygen and combustive hydrogen make water is exceedingly cool, but it is not an emergent phenomenon.  I'm removing this.  Jmeppley 22:11, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Disagree about the ant example. Is not the behaviour of the ants in large part defined by the fact that there is a child-bearing queen, which worker, warrior and drone classes exist merely to serve, protect and perpetuate? Isn't a colony not a colony without its queen? Perhaps an entomologist can help us out here.... HarmonicSphere 3:46, 26 Apr 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Water example 

message: The external links are getting out of hand.  First, the links should be useful text, not just a url.  An interview with Steven Johnson, author of Emergence not just http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/02/22/johnson.html.  See Wikipedia:Describe_external_links
Second, my sense of what wikipedia should look like is still forming, but I don't think it should be a clearing house for all related links.  I don't think we need to link to every online book or story about emergence.  I'm removing three links.  http://mind-brain.com/emergence/ doesn't link to anything.  http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html is already mentioned in the references.  http://www.collacomp.com is a software company and offers no information on emergence.  Jmeppley 22:06, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Links 

message: The formation of water is not "against" entropy -- in fact, nothing is. Apparent anti-entropic processes seem to exist merely because the total system which is gaining entropy includes more than the "open" system which appears to be violating it. For example, the Earth would seem to have been going against entropy by the process of more complex animals and plants having evolved from simpler ones over time, if we forget that the total system includes input from the Sun, which is dispersing energy at a far greater rate than the Earth is gaining it; the overall entropy of the system is increasing.
Therefore, the whole notion of gain or loss of entropy as a defining characteristic should be junked, IMHO. Systems that approach limits in a definable way, as naturally-occurring fractals do, are often the result of oscillating processes that are winding down.
HarmonicSphere 3:42, 26 Apr 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment on Water Explanation 

message: I yanked most of the recently added paragraph:
:"Emergent properties arise when a complex system reaches a combined threshold of diversity, organisation, and connectivity. The property itself is totally unpredictable, utterly unprecedented, and represents a new level of the sytems evolution. An example of emergent properties on a universal scale are energy, from which matter emerged, from which life emerged, from which conciousness emerged. This is the stage that the earth has reached through us and other concious beings, such as the whales and dolphins in particular. That we have self-reflective conciousness,ie we are concious that we are concious (ditto dolphins etc), could be interpreted to be a transitional stage between the emergent property of conciousness and the next. Providing that we humans maintain our increasing diversity, organisation, and connectivity, and do not significantly degrade the diversity etc, of the rest of life on earth, then the next emergent property in the energy-matter-life-conciousness evolution will come forth. That is likely to occur on a planetry scale, and gaia will become!"
It starts out rather well (imho), but then gets awfully emotional and includes some questionable facts.  I put the first two sentences in the emergent properties section and removed the rest.  I'm not sure it belongs here, and if it does, it needs to be reworked.  Does anyone think it should come back?  Jmeppley 04:27, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Zenter writes: Jmeppley, I agree that the whole Gaia thing is too much. Emergence is not so, shall we say, driven, to get some next level of understanding. It is, pun intended, more complex. I think this piece relates back to the idea of emergence having some divine purpose, which I don't trust as a systemic descriptor of the universe. Also, I'm troubled with the inclusion of "represents a new level of systems evolution." This doesn't tell me anything because I don't know what "level" or "systems evolution" mean - I am as concerned about it here as I am above, in the water discussion. It conveys a sort of "drivenness" that I would try to avoid. Zenter 17:40, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gaia paragraph removed 

message: OK, I'm sticking my neck out here!  Temperature is not an emergent property.  It is well defined even for a system of 1 particle in a background potential.  If that particle behaves ergodically (i.e. it eventually comes arbitrarily close enough to sampling all of phase space) then it's possible to define a trajectory average of the temperature and any other thermodynamic property.  This is also assuming that the particle is in equilibrium with its surroundings (which can be achieved through equilibrium with the surrounding photon bath).Christianjb 23:02, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I see your point, but on the other hand you are replacing an ensemble in space (many particles at a single instant of time) with an ensemble in time (a single particle, but observed over a long period of time).  There is still no notion of a temperature assigned to each particle at any given instant of time, it only emerges after considering ensembles of such particles (distributed either in space or in time).  As such I would still classify temperature as emergent.  Terry 02:46, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, the average roll on a die is 3, which can be obtained either by rolling 1000 dice at once and averaging or by rolling one die 1000 times and averaging over all throws.  But the average value is not really an emergent property of the dice.. or at the very least I don't think it's a very good example of an emergent property.  Let's see what others have to say- but I'm not convinced.  (Doesn't mean that I'm not wrong of course!)Christianjb 02:55, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The average is 3.5, not 3, but never mind that... OK, I can see why the average value of a die is not an emergent property - it can be computed immediately from the state of a single die at a single instant in time.  Going back to temperature, it would thus seem that temperature is a property of any system with a sufficiently "ergodic" phase space.  So a particle + a potential well would have an inherent temperature, though you wouldn't be able to detect it just by looking at the particle or the potential separately, so it is still emergent in a rather weak sense.  On the other hand, the laws of thermodynamics really don't apply very well to the situation of one or two particles in a potential well... even if quantities such as temperature can be defined in these situations, they don't have good properties.  So perhaps it is only the laws of thermodynamics which are emergent, rather than the thermodynamical concepts themselves.  I guess I should look up how "emergence" is defined in the physics literature (my guess is that the definitions are pretty vague)... Terry 18:06, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text:  Haha I have egg on my face now!  3.5 ok.  Maybe I was using 5 sided dice.  I still disagree however with using temperature as an emergent property.  The laws of thermodynamics apply just as well for 2 particles as for 2 gazillion particles- however care must be used.  It's still true that energy is conserved (1st law), entropy never spontaneously decreases, even for 2 particles (2nd law) and it gets asymptotically difficult to reach the state of zero entropy (3rd law).  Now- some things like infinitely sharp first order phase changes don't exist for finite numbers of particles- but the system still approaches the infinite limit as the number of particles is increased.  It doesn't suddenly become macrosopic. Christianjb 19:28, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: Looks pretty good to me now. Terry 20:32, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Temperature is not an emergent property!

message: Following on from my temperature criticisms...  Sorry to be a downer here- but I really think you need to think through the physics and math examples a bit more thoroughly.  Yes, ok- if you have 2 points then you have a line connecting those 2 points which isn't there if you only had one point by itself- but c'mon people!  Do you really need to call that 'emergent' behavior?  That's not very profound.  Most of the non biological examples you give are so obvious that it seems to be that there's absolutely no need to talk about emergence at all- it's just interactions amongst constituent parts.  I think you really need to be talking about surprising behavior arising from the interactions of millions of parts- not 2 points making a line.  Even a billion points making a massive network of cris-crossing lines isn't really emergent behavior in my book- there's just nothing very unexpected or strange about that which needs further explanation.  To be honest- I think a lot of this is really a problem of the hype associated with emergence, which may be useful in biology, but it really hasn't explained much in physics or mathematics.  I think maybe you need to be a little bit more critical in taking this buzzword too far. Christianjb 05:58, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that some of the examples here are somewhat fluffy.  But emergence means slightly different things in different fields.  For example, while physicists use the term emergence, it doesn't have the same hype attached to it as the term does in the behavioural sciences.  It's simply used to mean a phenomenon or concept which only makes sense, or behaves in an expected way, at macroscopic scales (in space or time) but not at microscopic scales.  Thus questions like "is this electron hot or cold?  blue or green?  soft or hard?  smooth or rough?  solid or liquid?" have little or no useful meaning, because these concepts are emergent and thus do not apply in this setting (or if they do apply, they behave unexpectedly and so one's intuition on the concept may be very misleading here).  That's a helpful thing to keep in mind, it lets one avoid any number of elementary errors when trying to understand particle physics, and thus does have a non-trivial amount of explanatory power.  As for mathematics (which is my own profession), I've almost never seen the term "emergence" used... the closest analogues seem to be the distinction between "local" and "non-local" (or "global") concepts, or between "asymptotic" and "non-asymptotic" behaviour.  It is true, I would classify most of the mathematical examples here as examples of non-local concepts rather than emergent ones.  If I have some time I might try to rework some of the mathematical material (which I was not involved in earlier).  Terry 18:23, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: More problems with article

message: This may be thought of as puzzling, because quantum mechanics is generally thought of as more complicated than classical mechanics
whereas lower level rules are generally less complicated (or at least less complex) than the emergent properties.
Just thought I'd defy my feeling of utter ignorence in the matter and add a short comment:
It is NOT a general property of emergence to have simple agents and a complex system, though it IS for some of the main sub-groups of emergence. Exempli gratia, the study of Cellular Automata. But the opposite counts for other systems with emerging properties, as for example Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), in which complex agents build up a simple system. Or to quote the book Emergence of Complexity by Jochen Fromm, "CA are a complex system with simple agents, MAS are simple systems with complex agents.". Hence, by defining the emergence of classical mechanics from quantum mechanics as a MAS, the "contradiction" and puzzlement is obliterated.
:Put that in the article!  But make it simpler than the above explanation, I don't understand what a MAS is and I still feel puzzled!  Christianjb 20:14, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  MAS and QM 

message: I just hacked up a paragraph citing wikipedia as an example of emergence.  This isn't necessarily true.  It's certainly not a great example.  I think it is a great resource and a great project, I just think its not a clear enough example to make an encyclopedia article.  I left the WWW as an example because it has some interesting properties (power law distribution of links and small-world-ness) that were not planned for and just happened.  
Wikipedia (and most open source software projects) are amazing examples decentralized collaboration producing great results, but in most of these cases, a central group or individual exerts control over overall structure.  And while, in the case of wikipedia, the content is usually not checked by the official editors, there is a set of guidelines and conventions which strive to make wikipedia great.  Even if the details are left to collaboration, if the guidelines are intended to create good content, then you can't really call it emergence.  Even if the guidelines have evolved over time.
Jmeppley 07:31, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  linux wikipedia and emergence 

message: I wonder is the articles Self-organization and emergence should be related more tightly? Also, should the categories :Category:Self-organization and :Category:Emergence (just created it) be directly related somehow? (the difference is not very clear to me) Karol 09:41, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a connection in the sense that both terms or concepts are often used together because the subject system to which they refer incorporates both phenomena. However, in my opinion the concepts each denote a very different meaning. To learn more about my vision you can read a paper which is mentioned on both the Emergence and Self-Organisation page entitled Emergence versus Self-Organisation: Different concepts but promising when combined, by Tom De Wolf and Tom Holvoet  --Tomdw 15:50, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Tom, can you give me an example or two of self-organized systems in which the organization is not an emergent phenomenon? I can't think of any, but that may just be alack of imagination on my part.  Jmeppley 22:58, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In the context of computer science there are systems that can be engineered to be self-organising but not emergent. For example, when your program consists out of multiple autonomous entities that have to form a 2D shape on a 2D plane and they all have the plan or lay-out of that shape available to organise themselves. Then this is self-organising because no external control is needed to get more structure in the system. However, it is not emergent because the macroscopic pattern, i.e. the shape, is not novel with respect to the individual parts. Emergence requires that the parts have no knowledge of the whole. Of course, it may be the case that in other sciences (e.g. physics, biology, ...) there are no systems that organise themselves without being emergent. But I am not an expert on that. The big difference is that in computer science the system can be constructed completely from scratch to make such systems possible. --Tomdw 14:14, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Self-organization & emergence 

message: Can someone explain the following statement to me?
"There is also a view that the beginning and development of evolution itself can be regarded as an emergent property of the laws of physics in our universe, or contrary to this the opposite view that the laws of phyiscs have like their constituents emerged during the course of time (in which case "evolution" and "emergence" would be the most fundamental principles in the universe)."
I think I sort of understand what the first part is saying, but then the second part makes no sense at all to me.  Is this maybe some sort of reference to the anthropic principle?  In any event, I think this paragraph really needs rewording. Grokmoo 04:00, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question regarding emergent structure in nature explanation 

message: Could someone please take a look at the first statement in this article and disambiguate the Rule link to the correct page.  The statement is, "Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules." Thanks! --Hetar 09:17, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Rule

message: Added a link to the Rampancy article, an aspect of the Marathon games (and likely Halo).  Rampancy essentially comes about because of emergent behavior, so it's an interesting take on what may happen in a system (Read, AI) because of emergence. - Raveled
Color is not a physical property, strictly speaking; it's an observational phenomenon. 
See the color section, as linked to in the article. 
71.252.18.252 03:13, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Video Games 

message: Why is there not one mention of dialectical-materalism in this article?
That's what emergence is. 'Prior art' and all that (though this is somewhat of a rhetorical question whose answer I'm sure a number of us are quite aware of...)
Pazouzou 19:24, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where's the Dialectical-Materialism here? 

message: : YES, I think Wikipedia is a marvelous example of an emergent system -- in this case, specifically of an emergent phenomena that is human caused, but not of any human design.  And such a rapidly growing emergent phenomena, in my view, should be documented in a high-quality and thorough encyclopedic article on Emergence.  Having said that, as the 'Emergence in Wikipedia' section evolves, I would think a brief paragraph in the Emergence article, with a link to a longer-length article on 'Wikipedia as an Emergent Phenomena' would likely be in order. N2e 02:48, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia - an emergent system? 

message: I see in the article under "Emergent structures in nature" the following sentence:
'Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. The spatial structure and shape of galaxies is an emergent property, which characterizes the large-scale distribution of energy and matter in the universe'
The first part of this sentence I feel is debatable at best.  Firstly, the exact causes for the observed morphology of galaxies is not that well understood.  Also, the characteristics of galaxies that we do understand by and large follow from basic physical laws and the initial conditions in relatively straightforward ways.
The second half of the sentence is rubbish.  The internal characteristics of individual galaxies are not really related to the large scale properties of the universe, if I am even reading that right.
Anyway, I would be in favor of simply removing this section, but I have a feeling many will find this disagreeable.  Grokmoo 19:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Grokmoo, I'm not clear which of the two sentences in the quoted section you are referring to in your comment "The first part of this sentence..."  Perhaps you could suggest a clarified rewrite of the paragraph here and see if anyone offers input on it.  N2e 17:49, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hi, sorry for the bit of delay.  Apparently the section I was quoting has since been changed.  In any event, I made what I consider to be a fairly minor edit, basically removing galaxies as an example under the 'emergent structures in nature'.  To reiterate my main point, I don't think that the shapes of galaxies are understood well enough to classify them as "emergent structures".  Unless there is some debate, I'll leave it at that.  Grokmoo 18:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Galaxies; an emergent system? 

message: Just a minor detail: I would say that atoms "absorb and reflect light", rather than "absorb and emit".  Emission in this context would be an active act of generating the light which an atom doesn't do.  The light (ie its different wavelengths) reflects off and is absobed by the atom, the result of which is then perceived as a specific color.
:Atoms certainly can and do emit light!  Every time an electron changes orbitals in an atom, it must absorb or emit a photon.  You might change the article to say "absorb, emit, or reflect light", but I think it is fine as is. Grokmoo 20:00, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Color example