You know how OpenAI trains language models with more and more billions of parameters, expecting that at some point a Skynet will emerge and yield their projected 100x return on capital, and all they get are increasingly fancy lorem ipsum generators? So that's what emergence is not.
What is emergence?
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Re: What is emergence?
#22Emergence is my all time favourite topic. I can highly recommend this video: https://youtu.be/16W7c0mb-rE
When I learned during my computing and philosophy class about emergence it was like I found the missing puzzle pieces so everything (I mean that) makes sense.
I love how all things in existence emerge simply via self organisation. All that is needed is communication. This can be gravity for stardust to form planet systems; using once eyes to form bird flocks; using chemicals for communication to form ant colonies; using human communication to form societies.
Once during my diving lecture, the lecturer pointed out, that we can, in many cases, call self organisation simply an eco system. Which makes it much easier to explain this topic to people.
He said, a lake will self organise when you rob it from an important fish, and so will our body when we start doing sport (grow muscles). Every system will react to change, and will try to re-organse itself.
Re: What is emergence?
#23When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the word "emergence". In pop science, it was spoken in reverent tones. Never mind that they never gave a definition of it that didn't sound trivial -- the word was dripping with meaning and the promise of hidden wisdom. I went to college and studied physics. I learned how the behavior of many atoms leads to thermodynamics and the properties of materials. I learned how elementary…
What did you conclude though...is there no such thing, or do you think there is but no one has figured it out, yet?
Re: What is emergence?
#24Sometimes I think there is other information that gives the physics its meaning. For example, if you took a Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drive filled with VP9 encoded movie files on a NTFS partition, even if you perfectly understood the physics, and figured out all the individual magnetic fields, you would still have a rough time making sense of the of what was on it without this higher level information informat…
That's a good one. I also wonder how many other maps there are, and what _they're_ good at. Consider physics really deep and full of leverage that's currently really helpful to humanity...but still only one general system of map design. The nice thing is that lots of alternatives are considered within physics, but we also like our "best" concept; take Wolfram finding the "best" universal rule system for example. This…
Check out whitehead’s process philosophy. Deleuze has something similar.
Re: What is emergence?
#25Sometimes I think there is other information that gives the physics its meaning. For example, if you took a Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drive filled with VP9 encoded movie files on a NTFS partition, even if you perfectly understood the physics, and figured out all the individual magnetic fields, you would still have a rough time making sense of the of what was on it without this higher level information informat…
Sure, but part of the issue is that we can make accurate predictions of pretty much everything we can readily observe today. If there is higher structure, we can't even see the noise yet.
There's much work to be done, but unless something really amazing happens it'll be a long time before we get anywhere near new fundamental(there's still loads of work to be done elsewhere) physics
Re: What is emergence?
#26If you imagine the physical world as a vast machine. Something like a cellular automata, you can imagine theories about the universe as ‘compressions’. Parts of the universe which show repeating patterns can be explained by theories, which can be used to make predictions about future state. Sometimes the universe permits such theories and some times it does not. Sometimes it’s irreducibly complex and there is no ‘com…
The entire enterprise of human knowledge is an ongoing obligate and procrustean optimization of compression heuristics that force the infinities of space and time into a model that fits into our finite lumps of neuronal tissue.
Re: What is emergence?
#27I really appreciate the intuitive explanation that in Emergentism the whole can have the same ontological importance as the parts. Could it also be more important?
You've just described the concept of the gestalt
Re: What is emergence?
#28What is the simplest system we know that produces unexpected results? Conway's Game of Life comes to mind. Would there be a surprise if we just gently shake 1 billion 2x4 lego blocks?
Re: What is emergence?
#29Emergence is a concept or model, concepts/models are made possible by thought, thoughts are themselves an emergent phenomena
Round and round and round it goes where it stops nobody knows...
Re: What is emergence?
#30Sometimes I think there is other information that gives the physics its meaning. For example, if you took a Shingled Magnetic Recording hard drive filled with VP9 encoded movie files on a NTFS partition, even if you perfectly understood the physics, and figured out all the individual magnetic fields, you would still have a rough time making sense of the of what was on it without this higher level information informat…
Sure, but part of the issue is that we can make accurate predictions of pretty much everything we can readily observe today. If there is higher structure, we can't even see the noise yet. There's much work to be done, but unless something really amazing happens it'll be a long time before we get anywhere near new fundamental(there's still loads of work to be done elsewhere) physics
> Sure, but part of the issue is that we can make accurate predictions of pretty much everything we can readily observe today.
Actually there are a lot of predictions we can’t make today. Stuff that are very important
1) Why do most young people do fine with COVID-19 but some apparently healthy people do not?
2) How exactly do proteins fold
3) Will it rain tomorrow at location x at time x
4) when will my pet tiger decide to maul me?
5) will a drug with this molecular structure for this disease actually treat the disease?
We know a load about the basic building blocks. About quarks and protons and electrons. But once we get to more complicated systems composed of these building blocks, we struggle to make predictions.
See for example the scrubbed SpaceX launch due to weather.
I am sure NASA and spaceX have scientists who are experts in physics, but they could not predict in advance that there would be bad weather on that exact day.
What we do now is make calculations on “spherical cows” and call everything else “chaotic” and “too many variables” and pat ourselves on the back for reducing everything to its basic blocks.