The whole is larger than the sum of its parts

As opposed to reductionism, emergentism argues that there exist emergent properties in the world not reducible to some set of more basic properties. Crucially, this is very much linked to systems science. Anyone here work in systems science (systems biology, systems neuroscience, etc.) care to comment on their views about reductionism?

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arxiv.org/abs/1011.4125
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/
youtube.com/watch?v=QItTWZc7hKs
youtube.com/watch?v=o_ZuWbX-CyE
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Shut up faggot

What's gotten your jimmies rustled?

...

No.

I'd really lIke to get drunk with this guy

He'd probably get really annoying at some point.

He doesn't drink :(

This is interesting. Bamp.

This article is very related:
arxiv.org/abs/1011.4125

It's called "Life is Physics" and argues that the current "modern synthesis" explanation of evolution is a bit dated, and that natural selection is just one instantiation of a more general phenomenon that gave rise to life. It's a good read and is well-sourced with some cool anecdotes from physics/biology. Definitely give it a read if you have a chance.

>arxiv.org/abs/1011.4125
Thanks! This seems really interesting. I'll definitely give it a read soon.

Very cool, thanks!

Yeah, fuck threads about new research avenues in science. I much prefer threads about which race has the highest IQ or whether global warming is a hoax.

I'm excited at the prospect of emergentism becoming a little more mainstream, and ultimately I think it is a good step in the right direction.

If its principles were to be formalized, the implications for our understanding of social systems would be enormous

I definitely think the implications of emergentism on social science can be massive. It's my hope that by pursuing this line of reasoning, we might one day arrive at a much better grasp of the organization of societies.

I think we're getting there, thanks to the development of software tools built specifically to model complex systems - I'm taking a class on agent based modeling now. Its a pain in the ass but really cool

Wow, neat! What are you majoring in to be studying things like this?

BS Economics / BA International Studies

I'm glad to see that new computational models of emergence are finding their way in fields like economics. It really seems like a no brainer, but new scientific paradigms can take a long time before being adopted in any given field.

It's just cause a lot of economists have had their heads up their asses ever since the 70s, but 2008 kinda shook the field up.

As newer generations of economists come into the fold o except to see tools like this come into the mainstream. The current chief economist of the Bank of England wrote this whole article about how the field needs reform, and he suspects ABM to be one of the analytical tools to fill in the gap

>there exist emergent properties in the world not reducible to some set of more basic properties.

Isn't that basically what biology is?? Didn't know that was a theory.

I'll buy into emergentism when it produces the samr number of useful applications as reductionism

Much of biological research has actually adopted a reductionist research paradigm, seeking to explain biological phenomena by referencing the chemistry inside living organisms. Only recently does it seem like more holistic views of biological systems are becoming more common.

I expect* not o except

Emergentism is retarded and emergentists are retarded

Wow, very though-provoking rebuttal there. Really activates the almonds.

Tard

>The whole is larger than the sum of its parts.
This is a stupid statement. The sum of somethings parts = the whole. so therefore something=something+1??? doesnt work friend

Except the parts interact and the emerging behavious is something *new*.
Just like a cell has a behaviour that would be extremely complex to model in terms of what atoms it is made of. You can go to the next level and watch proteines, but there is still a giant mess.

Are you saying they behave in ways that are in contradiction with the underlying physics?
If yes, then proofs. If no, then emergentism is retarded, and it's just a name for the need of approximate models once the system under study becomes too complex

>arxiv.org/abs/1011.4125
Thanks a Bunch!

Why do you describe emergentism, then ask what we think about reductionism? Let me explain a grape to you, then ask your feeling about an orange. You're not only initiating for bias, you're begging for it by reducing half of the subject matter to only it's label

To say 'the whole is larger than the sum of its part' is simply a nice way to describe emergence. What is meant by this is that certain systems cannot be described in terms of the set of their constitutive parts. To properly understand the system, you must not only consider its parts, but the interactions between them. These interactions are what is thought to lead to the 'emergence' of new properties in systems not found in their parts. For example, mind in cognitive science is often described as emerging from the interaction of neurons. In some sense, a mind is not just a collection of neurons. It is a set of neurons paired with their interactions. So saying that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts is to say that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts in addition to their interactions.

Emergence is first and foremost a subjective illusion that arises from our brains function of compressing the world around us using the same shared internal models (because the world is not random noise, such sharing is more common than pure coincidence).

Emergent properties are reoccurring partial approximations - several perceived systems when simplified into a composition of several of our internal models, overlap (they appear similar from some perspectives), which allows us to describe those overlapping regions/models as their own concepts (and thus emergent properties of the perceived systems).

Emergence does not describe the world, it describes our culture, human psychology.

Are you saying that when I see what I think of as a lamp ("lampness" being an "emergent property" of a bunch of matter), it's because I'm comparing that bunch of matter to the pre-existing concept of a lamp?

How could the first concept ever have existed without something to compare it to and no one to inherit it from? Was it random?

I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say here. Are you trying to say that all is reducible to its constituent parts and that our appeal to emergence is simply an approximation?

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Are you somehow very stupid or very new at the practice of thinking rationally?

Show 1 case where they are not. Every complex system we encounter is described solely by properties of its constituents

I don't think you have it correct, user. No one thinks that it's just chemical interactions that dictate biological processes. If anything, the effects of the environment on the biological processes shape the chemistry that makes them tick under the hood. Life is most definitely not shaped by chemistry, though it is made from chemistry.

>Every complex system we encounter is described solely by properties of its constituents
I think the whole reason why we have systems science is because people disagree with your position. There are interesting examples of this in AI. What seems to be the case is that you can have agents in models display systematic behaviors without the need to program in these behaviors. They tend to emerge from a much more basic level of programming. An example of this is Vogel et al. 2013a, a paper in computational linguistics which argues that cooperative use of language can emerge from Dec-POMDPs by simply programming agents to maximize their reward. I won't go into all the details of the paper, but I suggest you find it and read it, it's very interesting.

You'd be surprised.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/

> Are you saying they behave in ways that are in contradiction with the underlying physics?
Of course not

> it's just a name for the need of approximate models once the system under study becomes too complex

It's not "approximate models", it's totally different models that would be extremely difficult or impossible to design starting from the low level.

But why does it make you angry ? Did an emergetist stole your imaginary girlfriend ?

Statistical mechanics here.

Going from Newton's laws (Hamiltionian) to a kinetic gas theory already requires the use of the ergodic hypothesis. If you want to model a fluid from this kinetic gas on first principles, you need to use these approximations:

>molecules are only hard spheres with infinite repulsion
>take only the pair potentials of these spheres (first order Taylor approximation)
>deconvolute all pair potentials and order into direct and indirect (involves graph analysis)
>then use an approximate closure
>solve all path integrals, then connect to thermodynamics by two different routes which are not equal because of your approximations
>look at Monte-Carlo simulations and realize you need too average two thirds of one solution with one third of the other

Congratulations, you now have Carnahan-Starling EOS for spherical hard particles with no interactions. There were only 3 assumptions and 3 approximations in 50 years (time since Ornstein-Zernike, not Gibbs) needed to arrive at the wrong answer , which could be extrapolated to the empirical correct answer.

Good luck explaining why it is advantagous for frogs to be amphibian from first principle.

Read the paper: "More is different"

I will, thanks for your input!

>more
Perhaps you meant that the whole is other than the sum. I don't see why you would implicitly assign a value to these concept by comparing them. Even if you mean to say that investigating the whole is better than investigating the sum of parts, the phrase you use does not say that.

More importantly, what is the difference between emergentism and making multiscale models? (such as the different models for subatomic, 'human' and galactic scales in physics)

Nevertheless, this seems to be an interesting framework for knowledge gathering, but it seems to lack 'formal' aspects for verification/validation (i.e. seems nice for a hypothesis, but how do we test it?)

Not OP, but I know there are some formalized properties of emergence, I'm just not sure what they are (I have a book coming in the mail)

The only ones I can recall off the top of my head are that complex systems are self organizing, and that rare events occur more often than conventional probability suggests (fat-tailed distributions). How exactly they are formalized, I'm not sure. Look up the work of John Holland

Four wheels are four wheels. Four wheels and an engine are a car. The basic properties of wheels exist in interaction with the overall system that is the vehicle, and this system is not its constituent parts as much as how these constituent parts inform each other in relation. Simple axioms (fundamental laws) produce complex phenomena (emergent properties). What are you having so much trouble with

Brainlet here. I thought this would be better known.

Stuart Kaufman comes to mind.

I think it's creeping more and more into the mainstream.

youtube.com/watch?v=QItTWZc7hKs

good thread

I recommend watching this lecture. It's quite long, but Sapolsky explains emergentism well.

youtube.com/watch?v=o_ZuWbX-CyE