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I just read the abstract and some of the discussion. He is saying something interesting, however the language is pretty opaque if you aren't doing philosophy of
by jdougan 3y ago
I just read the abstract and some of the discussion. He is saying something interesting, however the language is pretty opaque if you aren't doing philosophy of science.
As I understand the abstract (ruthlessly oversimplified):
1. Emergent behvior is interesting.
2. We don't really understand how to theoretically model emergent systems. Emergent properties are high level, the stuff we can measure is low level. Connecting them in a principled fashion is hard.
3. We don't know if the limits are in the catgorization or aquisition of knowledge.
4. We are proposing a pragmatic bottom up approach which, like granger causality, bypasses some of the hard parts.
5. We test the approach on an artificially hard problem and got good results.
6. We think this has use elsewhere
It helps if you understand he's working in theoretical biology where they see emergent systems at all levels and the inability to model these systems jn a principled fashion is a real drag.
- ed_westin 3y agoAdding some links to his publications and field ranking: [] https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Alberto-Pascual-Garcia-39285250 https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Albert... [] https://www.adscientificindex.com/scientist/alberto-pascual-garcia/1082857 https://www.adscientificindex.com/scientist/alberto-pascual-...
- dekhn 3y agoI stopped reading the article after a few sentences, so thank you for the summary. What's funny is that we've shown time and again that we have ways to model emergent complexity and even have generalized predictive ability. Turing's reaction diffusion is a perfect example of that. In my experience modelling using "agents" that interact, and then having absolutely enormous scale, often demonstrates emergent properties that greatly resemble those of biological systems- which isn't totally surprising, given how biological systems work.
- mistrial9 3y ago> often demonstrates emergent properties that greatly resemble those of biological systems as a newb I looked for this, later, not so much
- User23 3y agoMy notion of pragmatic is this: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. By that standard this work appears, shall we say, limited. “Emergence” is a conceptual dead end that’s pragmatically comparable to a just-so story.
- AllegedAlec 3y ago> 2. We don't really understand how to theoretically model emergent systems. Emergent properties are high level, the stuff we can measure is low level. Connecting them in a principled fashion is hard. I feel like this is just outright wrong because we have a history of being able to model it. Saying we don't understand it is to deny years of good theoretical modelling with real results.