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This essay feels like "philosophy lite[0]." One one hand, it's great to introduce new eyes and ears to these deep concepts, but on the other, there's a deep his
by dvt 6y ago
This essay feels like "philosophy lite[0]." One one hand, it's great to introduce new eyes and ears to these deep concepts, but on the other, there's a deep historico-philosophical morass that one needs to wade through to get to the modern state of the art. There's an incredibly rich corpus discussing emergent properties[1] (most notably of which is, arguably, consciousness) but even the SEP article (which is orders of magnitude more informative than the blog post) is quite terse.
[0] For example, putting emergentism and reductionism on two ends of a spectrum is not strictly correct. There are reductionist emergent theories out there (in both phil. of science, as well as phil. of mind).
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/
- joe_the_user 6y agoI think the description feels klunky and kludgy because it leaves out a key aspect of what physics sees in emergent properties[1]; these are properties arising out of the interaction of an ensemble of elements. And looking at your link, it seems most "emergentists" also were specifically considering ensembles. But article just says: "Emergence occurs when there is a conceptual discontinuity between two descriptions targeting the same phenomenon.", which seems too broad and so unilluminating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence