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Relevant Less Wrong post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

ClayFerguson 10y ago
The best way to explain emergence, is with an example, imo. The classic example is to look at Conways' Game of Life, and ask yourself what God must have 'designed' the 'lifeforms' that appear in it. Where is their behaviors encoded into reality to make them become real (i.e. happen). The answer is that they are not specifically designed but instead 'emerge'. Not that your snarky 4 word joke of a post deserved a response though. This is for others, not you.
nitrogen 10y ago
Emergence as a concept only serves to eliminate the need for a designer. It doesn't actually explain anything to someone who already accepts the possibility of complexity without design. But that doesn't mean it's a useless concept, just that it is sometimes misused (if the LW post's premise is true).
- ClayFerguson 10y ago
  Right, Emergence is a general term like Entropy, and I chose that on purpose because Emergence is more like the negative of or inverse of Entropy. Emergence is when you get order, complexity, and non-randomness out of pure randomness plus time plus rules.
smaddox 10y ago
While I agree with Eliezer that "emergence did it" is no more of an explanation than "god did it", I'm not sure that this is the meaning people are trying to convey when they say e.g. "intelligence is an emergent phenomenon". What the statement means to me is that intelligence is a computationally dense phenomenon. This doesn't rule out the possibility of understanding it from a lower level, but it does rule out _simplifying_ it to the point where it can be understood without performing large computations. In my mind, the concepts of irreducible complexity and emergence are inherently linked through the concept of abstraction. An emergent phenomenon is a computationally dense phenomenon for which much of the computation can be abstracted away, at the cost of giving up a low-level understanding. In a sense, emergence is the antithesis of irreducible complexity. In another sense, emergence is a sparse chain of islands in a sea of irreducible complexity.

ClayFerguson 10y ago

The best way to explain emergence, is with an example, imo. The classic example is to look at Conways' Game of Life, and ask yourself what God must have 'designed' the 'lifeforms' that appear in it. Where is their behaviors encoded into reality to make them become real (i.e. happen). The answer is that they are not specifically designed but instead 'emerge'. Not that your snarky 4 word joke of a post deserved a response though. This is for others, not you.

nitrogen 10y ago

Emergence as a concept only serves to eliminate the need for a designer. It doesn't actually explain anything to someone who already accepts the possibility of complexity without design. But that doesn't mean it's a useless concept, just that it is sometimes misused (if the LW post's premise is true).

ClayFerguson 10y ago
Right, Emergence is a general term like Entropy, and I chose that on purpose because Emergence is more like the negative of or inverse of Entropy. Emergence is when you get order, complexity, and non-randomness out of pure randomness plus time plus rules.

smaddox 10y ago

While I agree with Eliezer that "emergence did it" is no more of an explanation than "god did it", I'm not sure that this is the meaning people are trying to convey when they say e.g. "intelligence is an emergent phenomenon". What the statement means to me is that intelligence is a computationally dense phenomenon. This doesn't rule out the possibility of understanding it from a lower level, but it does rule out _simplifying_ it to the point where it can be understood without performing large computations. In my mind, the concepts of irreducible complexity and emergence are inherently linked through the concept of abstraction. An emergent phenomenon is a computationally dense phenomenon for which much of the computation can be abstracted away, at the cost of giving up a low-level understanding. In a sense, emergence is the antithesis of irreducible complexity. In another sense, emergence is a sparse chain of islands in a sea of irreducible complexity.