After learning that a property is emergent, you have learned nothing that you did not know before.
Agree connotationally but object denotationally. Learning that a property is emergent implies that extrapolating the phenotype from the underlying rules requires nontrivial processing time.
That’s a fair point, actually. More generally, to say that a property emerges from the interaction of N nodes in a system, rather than being directly instantiated in one node of that system, is to say something nontrivial. And it’s not inane to use “emergent” as shorthand for that.
I hadn’t thought of that, and phrased that way, it even suggests a context in which one might care whether a property is emergent: an emergent feature of a program is more difficult to maintain than a directly-coded one.
This is not always true. There are (desired) emergent phenomena that are robust to a lot of minor tweaks to the underlying elements. For instance, neural nets are effective, even independent of the details of the individual neurons.
I would have said that you care whether a phenomenon is emergent because studying individual elements carefully is usually a bad way to understand emergent processes. We understand macroscopic hydrodynamics much better than we understand the precise forces between water molecules.
A denial-of-service attack is an “emergent phenomenon” that doesn’t involve any kind of complicated coordination whatsoever. No one request causes the server to be overloaded and time-out a large number of other requests. But tens of thousands of requests all at once can do so.
Agree connotationally but object denotationally. Learning that a property is emergent implies that extrapolating the phenotype from the underlying rules requires nontrivial processing time.
That’s a fair point, actually. More generally, to say that a property emerges from the interaction of N nodes in a system, rather than being directly instantiated in one node of that system, is to say something nontrivial. And it’s not inane to use “emergent” as shorthand for that.
I hadn’t thought of that, and phrased that way, it even suggests a context in which one might care whether a property is emergent: an emergent feature of a program is more difficult to maintain than a directly-coded one.
This is not always true. There are (desired) emergent phenomena that are robust to a lot of minor tweaks to the underlying elements. For instance, neural nets are effective, even independent of the details of the individual neurons.
I would have said that you care whether a phenomenon is emergent because studying individual elements carefully is usually a bad way to understand emergent processes. We understand macroscopic hydrodynamics much better than we understand the precise forces between water molecules.
Just ask a sysadmin.
A denial-of-service attack is an “emergent phenomenon” that doesn’t involve any kind of complicated coordination whatsoever. No one request causes the server to be overloaded and time-out a large number of other requests. But tens of thousands of requests all at once can do so.
Good point. I’ll edit it.
Or might even be incomputable?
Maybe, but probably not. Suppose our universe turns out to be Turing-equivalent; does this imply that there are no emergent phenomena?
Maybe not, but it makes emergence a bit less useful concept.