Related papers: Explaining Emergence
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence,…
The emergent nature of quantum mechanics is shown to follow from a precise correspondence with the classical theory of irreversible thermodynamics.
We propose that catastrophic events are "outliers" with statistically different properties than the rest of the population and result from mechanisms involving amplifying critical cascades. Applications and the potential for prediction are…
If quantum mechanics is taken for granted the randomness derived from it may be vacuous or even delusional, yet sufficient for many practical purposes. "Random" quantum events are intimately related to the emergence of both space-time as…
Contemporary complexity theory has been instrumental in providing novel rigorous definitions for some classic philosophical concepts, including emergence. In an attempt to provide an account of emergence that is consistent with complexity…
We suggest a quantitative and objective notion of emergence. Our proposal uses algorithmic information theory as a basis for an objective framework in which a bit string encodes observational data. A plurality of drops in the Kolmogorov…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
Abductive reasoning, reasoning for inferring explanations for observations, is often mentioned in scientific, design-related and artistic contexts, but its understanding varies across these domains. This paper reviews how abductive…
Can free agency be compatible with determinism? Compatibilists argue that the answer is yes, and it has been suggested that the computer science principle of "computational irreducibility" sheds light on this compatibility. It implies that…
Unexpectedness is a central concept in Simplicity Theory, a theory of cognition relating various inferential processes to the computation of Kolmogorov complexities, rather than probabilities. Its predictive power has been confirmed by…
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system's causal workings. An…
The concept of emergence is a powerful concept to explain very complex behaviour by simple underling rules. Existing approaches of producing emergent collective behaviour have many limitations making them unable to account for the…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…
Prediction is a fundamental objective of science. It is more difficult for chaotic and complex systems like turbulence. Here we use information theory to quantify spatial prediction using experimental data from a turbulent soap film. At…
Recent work claims that large language models display emergent abilities, abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in larger-scale models. What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold: their sharpness,…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
We show that if one starts with a Universe with some matter and a cosmological constant, then quantum mechanics naturally induces an attractive gravitational potential and an effective Newton's coupling. Thus gravity is an emergent…
Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and purposes -- traits…
At the intersection of what I call uncomputable art and computational epistemology, a form of experimental philosophy, we find an exciting and promising area of science related to causation with an alternative, possibly best possible,…