Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id FAA03862 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 18 Feb 2002 05:35:36 GMT Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 21:30:04 -0800 Message-Id: <200202180530.g1I5U4V08821@mail23.bigmailbox.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.116) X-Originating-Ip: [65.80.163.167] From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Memes and Emergent Properties Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)
>Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:09:13 +1100
> Re: Memes and Emergent Properties John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.edu.au> memetics@mmu.ac.ukReply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
>
>On Tuesday, February 12, 2002, at 10:08 PM, John Croft wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks
>>
>> I have been reading up on emergent properties, and
>> wonder whether the conception of Emergence applies to
>> memes. Emergence is being used increasingly in a
>> number of fields. ...
>Emergence was initially defined WRT evolution by Jan Smuts, CL Morgan,
>Samuel Alexander, CD Broad and RW Sellars in the 1920s. Bergson was in
>there as well, but the overall idea goes back to Mill and _A System of
>Logic_ c 1848.
>
>Generally, emergence has been superseded as an ontological concept by
>"supervenience (see Jaegwon Kim's book _Supervenience and mind_) but the
>notion remains popular in philosophy of mind and computation.
>
>I have to ask what the concept implies other than the fact that there
>are things at one level of organisation we may not have expected, either
>because we hadn't been capable of the derivation, or because we did not
>have a full account of lower level phenomena.
>
This is quite enough, in my opinion. The comprehensive operation of the whole cannot be predicted by analyzing even a complete compendium of its constituent parts, absent their interconnections, and including their interconnections mires us in massive complexity. BTW, complexity theory (which sprang from chaos theory) is a cutting-edge discipline where the concept of emergence is well-nigh indispensible. Check out the work of Stuart Kaufmann and John H. Holland or go to the Santa Fe Institute website for more info.
>
>
> This is, of course, the
>holism versus reductionism debate, and very sterile it is too, IMO. I
>prefer GC Williams' characterisation of reductionism and holism in
>biology as a function of the size of the glassware used.
>
>--
>John S Wilkins
>Head, Communication Services
>The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
>Parkville, Victoria, Australia
>
>
>===============================================================
>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
>Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
>For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
>see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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