Related papers: Synergy as the failure of distributivity

"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…

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…

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,…

In this paper, we summarize the development of the concept of emergence in physical science and propose key concepts of emergence in the form of conjectures. Our conjectures are threefold: I. A system having a broken-symmetry in membership…

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 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,…

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…

The engineering and design of self-organizing systems with emergent properties is a long-standing problem in the field of complex and distributed systems, for example in the engineering of self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems. The problem 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…

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…

Is reduction always a good scientific strategy? Does it always lead to a gain in information? The very existence of the special sciences above and beyond physics seems to hint no. Previous research has shown that dimension reduction…

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…

Concepts used in the scientific study of complex systems have become so widespread that their use and abuse has led to ambiguity and confusion in their meaning. In this paper we use information theory to provide abstract and concise…

Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…

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…

When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…

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…

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…