3 ms·

FYI, http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ might explain why people are objecting to your

• mangeletti 11y ago
  I don't mean to suggest that it will magically appear, but certainly abiogenesis is difficult to reduce to it's lowest level. There was just a piece on HN the other day that talked about new research that tries to explain how self replication began in the Precambrian. We can get to the moon, but we still don't understand how many interactions can just accidentally lead to something meaningful and lasting. Emergence doesn't have to be perceived as dogma. In fact, doing so would tend to discount the nature of the evolution of the human brain (leaving creation out of the equation for this context).
• zardo 11y ago
  A precise definition could probably be cobbled together using computational complexity. Something like, a phenomenon which results as a product of deterministic processes that cannot be fully modeled by a polynomial time algorithm. I think that's what people are really getting at, you can know how every piece of something works, and yet seeing how it works together can be much harder (potentially impossible). Maybe that just makes it a synonym for chaos theory...
  • jessriedel 11y ago
    Yea, I think you're talking about chaos, whereas people are gesturing at something different when they talk about emergent complexity. Vaguely, the idea is that the "regular" degrees of freedom (i.e., the ones that are relatively predictable and from which the important objects are constructed) at large scales are not simply related to the microscopic degrees of freedom. There are probably more rigorous things to say, but it definitely requires more than just unpredictability or sensitivity to initial conditions.