| Subject: |
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Re: Ghost in the machine |
| Name: |
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James G |
| Date Posted: |
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Mar 14, 06 - 2:46 AM |
| Message: |
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Emergent complexity is the flipside of reduction.
Reduction is 'pulling things apart'
and seeing what all the little pieces do,
whereas emergent complexity is 'putting things together',
and seeing how all the little pieces operate as a whole.
Emergent complexity works very well to explain behaviours
of things that can be reduced into pieces.
I'll use water as an example.
Large bodies of water
do a lot of complex and interesting things:
swirling, splashing, gurgling, etc.
Let's look at crashing waves in particular.
Say we want an explaination for why waves crash
when they reach the shore.
We could use emergent complexity
to look at the little pieces
(in this case water molecules) for an answer.
Although large bodies of water do complex things,
water molecules do simple things.
Water molecules are pulled down by gravity,
pushed along by other molecules bumping into them,
or slowed down when sliding past stationary molecules,
and they stick to other water molecules a bit
(because of free electrons, I think).
We can then answer the question "why do waves crash?"
something like this:
When the waves wash into the shore,
the water molecules on the bottom are slowed down
as they slide over the sand.
The water molecules on the top aren't slowed down though,
so they overtake the molecules on the bottom.
Water molecules stick together a bit,
so as the top molecules begin to fall off,
other molecules pull them back, and they curl over.
Then gravity pulls the whole curled wave crashing down.
I'm not sure if that was a particularly good explaination,
but you get the idea.
A large body of water
is explained in terms of little 'pieces' of water.
Explaining emotions as emergent complexity from the neurons
just doesn't work though.
The little pieces aren't the right kind to make the whole.
Perhaps we can explain complex behaviour of people
in terms of simple behaviour of neurons.
But emotions would have to be explained
in terms emotion particles (or some such).
To go back to the water example,
there is no problem explaining "why do waves crash?"
in terms of the behaviour of water molecules,
but if we tried to explain "where do fish come from?"
in the same way, then something would be amiss. |
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