Emergence
Collective intelligence Collective action Self-organized criticality Herd mentality Phase transition Agent-based modelling Synchronization Ant colony optimization Particle swarm optimization Swarm behaviour Social network analysis Small-world networks Centrality Motifs Graph theory Scaling Robustness Systems biology Dynamic networks Evolutionary computation Genetic algorithms Genetic programming Artificial life Machine learning Evolutionary developmental biology Artificial intelligence Evolutionary robotics Reaction–diffusion systems Partial differential equations Dissipative structures Percolation Cellular automata Spatial ecology Self-replication Conversation theory Entropy Feedback Goal-oriented Homeostasis Information theory Operationalization Second-order cybernetics Self-reference System dynamics Systems science Systems thinking Sensemaking Variety Ordinary differential equations Phase space Attractors Population dynamics Chaos Multistability Bifurcation Rational choice theory Bounded rationality In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole.
[3] Many scientists and philosophers[4] have written on the concept, including John Stuart Mill (Composition of Causes, 1843)[5] and Julian Huxley[6] (1887–1975).
[9] Some common points between the two notions are that emergence concerns new properties produced as the system grows, which is to say ones which are not shared with its components or prior states.
[10] Physics lacks well-established examples of strong emergence, unless it is interpreted as the impossibility in practice to explain the whole in terms of the parts.
Practical impossibility may be a more useful distinction than one in principle, since it is easier to determine and quantify, and does not imply the use of mysterious forces, but simply reflects the limits of our capability.
How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities?
Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analysed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in non-linear processes.
An observer's notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference.
The descriptive power of the observer's chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data.
[17][18] An emergent behavior of a physical system is a qualitative property that can only occur in the limit that the number of microscopic constituents tends to infinity.
Novelist Arthur Koestler used the metaphor of Janus (a symbol of the unity underlying complements like open/shut, peace/war) to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong vs. weak or holistic vs. reductionistic) should be treated as non-exclusive, and should work together to address the issues of emergence.
Renormalization methods in theoretical physics enable physicists to study critical phenomena that are not tractable as the combination of their parts.
The view that this is the goal of science rests in part on the rationale that such a theory would allow us to derive the behavior of all macroscopic concepts, at least in principle.
The development of macroscopic laws from first principles may involve more than just systematic logic, and could require conjectures suggested by experiments, simulations or insight.
[25] An early argument (1904–05) for the emergence of social formations can be found in Max Weber's most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
The principle of emergence is also brought forth when thinking about alternatives to the current economic system based on growth facing social and ecological limits.
As Peter Senge and co-authors put forward in the book Presence: Exploring profound change in People, Organizations and Society, "as long as our thinking is governed by habit - notably industrial, "machine age" concepts such as control, predictability, standardization, and "faster is better" - we will continue to recreate institutions as they have been, despite their disharmony with the larger world, and the need for all living systems to evolve.
Warm Data Labs are the fruit of their praxis, they are spaces for transcontextual mutual learning in which aphanipoetic phenomena unfold.
Having hosted hundreds of Warm Data processes with 1000s of participants, they have found that these spaces of shared poly-learning across contexts lead to a realm of potential change, a necessarily obscured zone of wild interaction of unseen, unsaid, unknown flexibility.
[39] In linguistics, the concept of emergence has been applied in the domain of stylometry to explain the interrelation between the syntactical structures of the text and the author style (Slautina, Marusenko, 2014).
[42] In a wider sense, the norms of a language, i.e. the linguistic conventions of its speech society, can be seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances.
Such arrangements can be used as simple physical prototypes for deriving mathematical formulae for the emergent responses of complex systems.
In the congestion control mechanism, TCP flows can become globally synchronized at bottlenecks, simultaneously increasing and then decreasing throughput in coordination.
Congestion, widely regarded as a nuisance, is possibly an emergent property of the spreading of bottlenecks across a network in high traffic flows which can be considered as a phase transition.
Examples are detailed in The Sacred Emergence of Nature by Ursula Goodenough & Terrence Deacon and Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman, both from 2006, as well as Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist from 2014 and Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World by Brendan Graham Dempsey (2022).
[citation needed] Michael J. Pearce has used emergence to describe the experience of works of art in relation to contemporary neuroscience.
[48] Practicing artist Leonel Moura, in turn, attributes to his "artbots" a real, if nonetheless rudimentary, creativity based on emergent principles.
