This document is an attempt to define and describe the concept of "emergence" and why we are interested in studying it in the Emergent Phenomena Research Group at Bryn Mawr College. This paper, like emergence itself, is the product of the interactions of a number of agents. Please feel free to be an agent by helping to write this document. Nothing is sacred; anything can be changed, including this sentence.

1. Emergence

TGW: I'd suggest reframing this section on reductionism as a discussion of modes of explanation. Reductionist science explains by showing how a phenomenon follows logically (that is, in a simple enough way that our intuition accepts it) from the behavior of components. Reductionist science therefore requires scale-independent mechanisms, so that processes that make sense on the scale of our perception are also the processes that act on the micro scale. Emergent phenomena -- while still resultant from the behavior of components -- never boil down in the same satisfying way. They imply processes that are scale-dependent, so that macro assemblages obey rules not predictable from those that drive micro entities.

1.1. Reductionism

One method to figuring out how something works is to take it apart. Dismantling things, such as a radio or a poem, allows one to focus on the particular pieces. Each piece can be then studied in isolation.

This methodology has been the main tool in science for at least the last couple millennia. Sometimes called reductionism,

1.2. Reductionism in Science

All of us are trying to make sense of the world, by habitual ways of thinking that shape how we organize new observations and new questions (both those we ask and those we don't). Periodically, because new ways of making observations arise, new frameworks for thinking also evolve. Like telescopes and microscopes, computers have opened up a whole new world of possible observations.

1.3. The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts

The concept of emergence has proved useful for biologists, physicists, chemists, computer scientists; for psychologists, historians and economists...as well as for sculptors, visual artists, multimedia performance artists, film makers and computer game makers. It is very also useful as a way of thinking about how to set up and run a classroom so that new discoveries can be made. Teachers who are interested in the emergence of "emergent systems" as a way of thinking are invited to join this discussion.

1.4. History of Emergence

1.5. Computers and modeling

Because they can calculate so rapidly, computers have made it possible to explore the consequences of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple things in ways that were never possible before. From this new capability are emerging significant insights into phenomena long believed too complex for serious analysis--as well as a new general framework for thinking about how novel properties or substances arise out of simpler entities.

1.6. What to do with emergence?

1.6.1. Emergence as a paradigm

1.6.2. Emergence as a pedagogy

AFD: For me, this has been the clearest and most exciting application of the ideas we've been discussing. "Emergence" has become my newest shorthand for most of the progressive pedagogical strategies I employ: local hands-on interactions that produce unanticipated outcomes by validating multiple ways of knowing and thinking, and the relationships and interdependencies among the people doing the thinking.

What happens in our Emergence Group is clear evidence of this process. Recently, for instance, Paul came in w/ a series of (elaborately backed-up) propositions about the need for information loss and death, in order for new levels of complexity to emerge. By the end of a long hour's interaction among us all, w/ several of us providing the punch lines along the way, we arrived together @ several very different claims: that information, like energy, is not actually lost, but instead transformed, as it "moves up to another level," forming a category, an abstraction. We began w/ death; we ended w/ resurrection. THAT's emergence working as a pedagogy.

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