I just came from a debate with a friend of mine about emergence, so here’s a simple example of what emergence is and isn’t that I just told to him. (That he rejected anyway.)
Let’s take, as an example, a car. Motion is an emergent property in cars. (I’m talking about motion on the level we live on that allows whole objects to move great distances.)
The pieces of the car, gathered into a pile, could not move. So motion was not a property in the parts making up the car. Motion emerges when the parts are built into the complex relationship that makes up the car.
That’s an example of what emergence is. Here’s just as simple of an example of what it isn’t.
Let’s say I strapped a bunch of cars together to make a long train of cars traveling down the freeway. One car might be towing the whole train. Half of the cars might be contributing to the motion of the car train. All of the cars might be running and contributing to the motion of the train. But the motion is not an emergent property of this car-train.
Motion emerged at the level of the individual cars. Motion is also a property of the train, but that’s not where the motion emerged. Motion is therefore an emergent property in cars, but not an emergent property in car-trains.
Emergent properties being “Properties possessed by the whole that the sum of its parts did not possess” basically means “This property emerged here, and not a level higher. And it was not present a level lower.”
This creates a huge number of falses for a huge number of car-train configurations when testing for motion as an emergent property.
I just came from a debate with a friend of mine about emergence, so here’s a simple example of what emergence is and isn’t that I just told to him. (That he rejected anyway.)
Let’s take, as an example, a car. Motion is an emergent property in cars. (I’m talking about motion on the level we live on that allows whole objects to move great distances.)
The pieces of the car, gathered into a pile, could not move. So motion was not a property in the parts making up the car. Motion emerges when the parts are built into the complex relationship that makes up the car.
That’s an example of what emergence is. Here’s just as simple of an example of what it isn’t.
Let’s say I strapped a bunch of cars together to make a long train of cars traveling down the freeway. One car might be towing the whole train. Half of the cars might be contributing to the motion of the car train. All of the cars might be running and contributing to the motion of the train. But the motion is not an emergent property of this car-train.
Motion emerged at the level of the individual cars. Motion is also a property of the train, but that’s not where the motion emerged. Motion is therefore an emergent property in cars, but not an emergent property in car-trains.
Emergent properties being “Properties possessed by the whole that the sum of its parts did not possess” basically means “This property emerged here, and not a level higher. And it was not present a level lower.”
This creates a huge number of falses for a huge number of car-train configurations when testing for motion as an emergent property.