Fucken Emergence... How does it work?

[pErvinalia]

Emergence as in emergent behaviour/properties. Is it a "real" thing? If so, what exactly? Or is it just a figment of our imaginations because we are predisposed to being pattern recognition systems?

I guess I just feel uncomfortable with the idea that things can't be reduced to simple physical interactions.

Does Chaos theory have anything to do with the concept of emergence?

[cronus]

Some folks use the idea of emergence to excuse not noticing the list of the ship. Or is that submergence?

[pErvinalia]

Shut up.

[cronus]

Shut up.

That's why you don't understand it when new stuff happens.

[pErvinalia]

This is in the "Serious Discussion" section. I iz serious.

[cronus]

This is in the "Serious Discussion" section. I iz serious.

All systems are unique. There are points when they don't change much then things happen, emergence. The emergence is a by product of large scale changes usually because the previously stable system haz run out of something needed at different scales to keep life like it was before.

[pErvinalia]

So what is "emergence" then? I put it to you it's just a figment of our pattern recognition system minds.

[pErvinalia]

Also, your response hinges on the concept of "equilibrium", something I thought had been debunked as pop-science.

[PsychoSerenity]

Ultimately everything can be reduced to fundamental physical interactions and doing so would give the most accurate description of the world. However, the difficulty in performing the observations and calculations that would be needed to describe the world in these terms makes it impractical to the point of uselessness, particularly for large and complex or chaotic systems.

Where emergence comes in is that sometimes at higher levels or larger scales certain complex systems combine to give relatively simple patterns (although they may lose some accuracy and certainty). So we can talk about things in terms of these patterns instead of the fundamental ones. One of the most clear cut examples is the difference between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. Strictly speaking classical mechanics is not an entirely accurate description of what's going on, but when you have billions of quantum particles acting together there's a very high probability of them following the simple rules.

The progression from simple patterns to complex systems and back to higher emergent simple patterns can happen many times. Ultimately it's down to how we describe the world and where we draw boundaries based on what we recognise as simple patterns and complex patterns.

[cronus]

The universe began well ordered. Everything since appears to be bits falling off and it coming apart faster and faster. That much is true. Emergence is how we order the chaos of the big bang as it becomes worse?

[pErvinalia]

@PS

So in this case, emergence is just simple pattern recognition. It's not telling us anything we couldn't understand if we had enough computing power and knew every physical law.

That's soft emergence, I think. Hard emergence says that some things can't be reduced to less complex states of understanding.

[pErvinalia]

The universe began well ordered. Everything since appears to be bits falling off and it coming apart faster and faster. That much is true. Emergence is how we order the chaos of the big bang as it becomes worse?

That doesn't make any sense.

[PsychoSerenity]

Rev, as far as I'm aware there's nothing in this universe that couldn't be reduced to fundamental interactions because everything in this universe is a product of fundamental interactions. - That's a tautology really, but basically I've never heard of anything demonstrating "hard" emergence.

It's not necessarily just pattern recognition in that there are mathematical reasons like countability for seeming some patterns as simple and others as complex. Of course it could be argued that our mathematics is the way it is because it's based on our natural pattern recognition.

Anyway here's one of my favourite examples - Langton's ant. It starts with some really simple fundamental rules, and to begin with you could easily calculate and predict the first few steps. But as the pattern turns in on itself it be comes almost impossible to predict without actually running the experiment to see what happens. Eventually though, the chaotic pattern stumbles across a sequence that repeats itself one step diagonally and, because it repeats, itself it caries on going. It's still obeying the fundamental rules and the repeating pattern involves over a hundred steps, but at a higher level you could simply describe it as "Langton's ant moves diagonally".

[FBM]

H20 molecules aren't wet, but put a bunch of them together and they become water, which has the property of wetness that its constituent parts don't have. Is that an example of emergence?

Or maybe intelligent behavior? No single cell has it, but sentient organisms do, to varying extents.

Not sure if these are good examples. I may be thinking of something else. I would google it, but I'm not going to.

[cronus]

The universe began well ordered. Everything since appears to be bits falling off and it coming apart faster and faster. That much is true. Emergence is how we order the chaos of the big bang as it becomes worse?

That doesn't make any sense.

Regardless of sense that is how it really appears to be happening out there.