WhatIsEmergenceWhatIsEmergent

1. Emergent?

1. A Snowflake's form

2. A Tree's form

3. A Sentence's form

4. Infectious-disease epidemics

5. Emergent diseases

6. Traffic jams

7. Economic bubbles

8. Chess

9. Ants "computing" shortest paths to food

10. Geese flying in a V

11. Heat (molecules bouncing around)

12. A marching band (music, and patterns of rows/columns)

13. Everything

14. Conway's Game of Life

15. The macroscopic properties of water

16. Chaos

2. Conjectures

1. Emergence requires randomness/chaos.

2. Emergence requires stigmergy.

3. Emergence requires discrete time and/or discrete space.

4. Emergence is only special because of our limited cognitive capacity.

5. Emergence requires simple interacting pieces (agents).

1. The more intelligent the agent, the less useful it will be in an emergent phenomenon.

2. Emergence requires irrational agents. They must do things for which they do not understand.

6. Emergent systems tend to spinoff further levels of complexity/self-organization.

7. Emergence is in the eye of the beholder. It is a pattern.

8. Emergent patterns cannot be "understood" through abstractions except in broad strokes. The devil is in the details (initial starting conditions).

9. True emergence requires feedback. The feedback can take many forms (stigmergy, evolution).

10. Creates a whole that is really (in some quantifiable way) greater than the sum of parts.

11. The study of emergence will lead to new insights in organization/computation/intelligence.

12. Information theory is the correct method of study for emergent systems.

13. Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Sociology -> Psychology

1. Everything is is just an emergent level from Physics

2. Everything (real) is emergent because it really is all the same thing

3. All emergent (real) phenomena stem from quantum effects

4. It will be impossible to simulate this type of ever-increasing emergence with out simulated quantum effects

14. Emergent phenomena can't be described easily in terms of cause and effect, as the causes are vast, and the effects of any particular effect are subtle and complex

15. Emergent phenomena are not "reversable" (ie, they lose information)

16. Emergent phenomena cannot be written as a closed-form equation, but can only be expressed as a recursive equation.

3. Essential properties?

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