Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Establishing the emergence framework with a checklist to identify its occurence in individual cases

      Emergence is pervasive in world phenomena and we should have a checklist to recognise and identify the relevant features. This bulleted list is an attempt to recognise such phenomena drawn out of the understanding built from a variety of disciplines.


  • It gives rise to totaly new entities

  • New entities transcend their origins

  • Entities possess their own set of features. They are emergent features.

  • Emergent features bear no relevance to the entity's features it originates

  • The new entities act as a whole which is more than the sum of its parts

  • It builts hierarchy

  • It organises reality into hierarchical levels

  • Entities act as adaptive agents in the environment

  • Each adaptive agent creates its own set of rules of contact

  • Adaptive agents and their immediate environment comprise the system

  • Adaptive agents act in their hierarchy level, to produce emergent behaviour

  • Emergent behaviour gives rise to the next level in the hierarchy

  • Adaptive agents are oblivious to the rules of the level it sprung out of

  • Action from some rules can leak out to higher levels in the hierarchy

  • Leak-out action can impair organisation in the hierarchical level it leaks in

  • Adaptive agents and environment built hierarchical structures

  • Hierarchical structures co-exist and can overlap each other

  • Overlapping hierarchical structures can be oblivious of each other

  • Overlapping hierarchical structures interaction can only be if their respective adaptive agents interact

  • No comments:

    Post a Comment