Why conversational equations and emergence (General)

by romansh , Sunday, March 30, 2014, 22:18 (3688 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Tony
Someone posted an article a while back on the self ... where the article referred to the self as an emergent phenomenom. I commented that for me emergence was a non word or concept. It does not really mean or explain anything.-Various people have explained what emergence meant for them, some giving more than one "definition". They can be divided into three broad classes:-1) complex systems of simple elements can behave in complex ways. I have no problem with this, but it does give me a Duh! moment.-2) the whole is greater than the sum of parts. I do have a big problem with this. It is a direct contravention of the first law of thermodynamics. So unless we are using it in some arbitrary hand waving way, we better have some good evidence at the table to refute the first law. I have not seen it yet!-3) the other one is an unexpected behaviour. This is the one that makes least sense to me. Unexpected to whom? What are the parameters that make it unexpected. Do models like this one change what we might expect?-You asked:
>... but do you think that we could ever match 100% the state of the ocean, or even of a bathtub full of water being sloshed around?-No I don't think we can model anything 100%. If we can isolate it from the universe we might get close. The universe appears chaotic from a modelling sense. But take David's dismissal of the double pendulum as being an emergent phenomena ... that double pendulum is difficult to model and I don't think we can model it perfectly. Does it make it an emergent phenomena. By some definitions apparently.