From: Jonathan B. Marder (jonathan.marder@newmail.net)
Date: Sun Oct 27 2002 - 15:54:38 GMT
Hi Roger (Paco), Patrick, Platt and all,
Thanks for reviving an important topic. I think Patrick and Platt
understand "emergent property" in a very non-scientific way, which
rather kills the discussion.
Let me try and explain it to them with the following dice throwing
exercise:
1. Take a single die, throw it several dozen times and record the result
each time.
2. Make a histogram of how many times each number came up.
The histogram should be roughly flat (all columns about the same
height), because the dice throw is "random".
3. Now repeat the exercise with two dice, on each throw recording only
the total.
4. Make the histogram for all possible scores (2 to 12).
If you did enough throws, you will see that the histogram has a very
definite shape to it. You should find that 7 comes up the most, and 2 or
12 the least. There is a very definite pattern that looks NON-random.
(BTW, I saw this exercise done very nicely by a third grader as a
science project).
I would call the pattern that emerged in this example an EMERGENT
pattern.
What is interesting is that this is very mechanistic - it is easy to
understand WHY the pattern emerges, yet each die behaves in a "random",
"purposeless" way.
This is similar to the way the Gas Laws emerge from the random movements
of individual gas molecules (see my End of Causality essay on the MoQ
web site). It is also the mechanistic explanation for biological
evolution, including the behaviour of an ant colony.
Jonathan
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