Related papers: Explaining Emergence
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Emergence, the phenomena where a system's micro-scale dynamics facilitate the development of non-trivial, informative higher scales, has become a foundational concept in modern sciences, tying together fields as diverse as physics, biology,…
Understanding the functional architecture of complex systems is crucial to illuminate their inner workings and enable effective methods for their prediction and control. Recent advances have introduced tools to characterise emergent…
This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
There are several forms of irreducibility in computing systems, ranging from undecidability to intractability to nonlinearity. This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of investigating speed-up…
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work…
Reasoning about unpredicted change consists in explaining observations by events; we propose here an approach for explaining time-stamped observations by surprises, which are simple events consisting in the change of the truth value of a…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
Emergent effect is crucial to understanding the properties of complex systems that do not appear in their basic units, but there has been a lack of theories to measure and understand its mechanisms. In this paper, we consider emergence as a…
The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…
Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept,…
Predictions of emergent phenomena, appearing on the macroscopic layer of a complex system, can fail if they are made by a microscopic model. This study demonstrates and analyses this claim on a well-known complex system, Conway's Game of…
This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between…
One of quantum theory's salient features is its apparent indeterminism, i.e. measurement outcomes are typically probabilistic. We formally define and address whether this uncertainty is unavoidable or whether post-quantum theories can offer…
In another paper (Butterfield 2011), one of us argued that emergence and reduction are compatible, and presented four examples illustrating both. The main purpose of this paper is to develop this position for the example of phase…
The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. It…
The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic…
Biological neural networks can perform complex computations to predict their environment, far above the limited predictive capabilities of individual neurons. While conventional approaches to understanding these computations often focus on…
Scaling up language models has been shown to predictably improve performance and sample efficiency on a wide range of downstream tasks. This paper instead discusses an unpredictable phenomenon that we refer to as emergent abilities of large…