Related papers: Explaining Emergence
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system's components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often…
"Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to…
Since its application to systems, emergence has been explained in terms of levels of observation. This approach has led to confusion, contradiction, incoherence and at times mysticism. When the idea of level is replaced by a framework of…
Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
The concept of emergence is critically analyzed in particular with respect to the assumed emergence of mental properties from a neuronal basis. We argue that so-called contextual emergence is needed to avoid an eliminatory reductionism.…
The problem of emergence in physical theories makes necessary to build a general theory of the relationships between the observed system and the observing system. It can be shown that there exists a correspondence between classical systems…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
Emergence is a concept in complexity science that describes how many-body systems manifest novel higher-level properties, properties that can be described by replacing high-dimensional mechanisms with lower-dimensional effective variables…
It is well-known that biological phenomena are emergent. Emergent phenomena are quite interesting and amazing. However, they are difficult to be understood. Due to this difficulty, we propose a theory to describe emergence based on a…
Two different conceptions of emergence are reconciled as two instances of the phenomenon of detection. In the process of comparing these two conceptions, we find that the notions of complexity and detection allow us to form a unified…
Unlike computation or the numerical analysis of differential equations, simulation does not have a well established conceptual and mathematical foundation. Simulation is an arguable unique union of modeling and computation. However,…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…
In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…
This is a companion to another paper. Together they rebut two widespread philosophical doctrines about emergence. The first, and main, doctrine is that emergence is incompatible with reduction. The second is that emergence is supervenience;…
Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…