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- | * A great explanation of emergence for laymen is [[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/10/29/quasiparticles-and-the-miracle-of-emergence/|Quasiparticles and the Miracle of Emergence]] by Brian Skinner | + | |
+ | <blockquote>[T]he concept of [emergence] has suffered in the sciences, and | ||
+ | especially, in physics, where all of the effort has been on describing the individual, | ||
+ | typically by breaking its description down to that of even smaller | ||
+ | individuals. While, without any doubt, this has been a useful endeavour, | ||
+ | it unfortunately has evolved in a rigid doctrine, leaving no space for anything | ||
+ | else. The most extreme manifestation of this dogma is the use of the | ||
+ | term ‘theory of everything’ in particle physics. [...] | ||
+ | |||
+ | **Biology evolved from chopping up individual animals in laboratories, to | ||
+ | considering them in the context of other other animals and varying environments. | ||
+ | the result is the theory of evolution of species. Similarly, our | ||
+ | current (still very poor) understanding of the human brain makes it clear | ||
+ | that the human brain should not be studied as something in isolation, but | ||
+ | as something that fundamentally requires interaction with other brains [30]. | ||
+ | In contemporary audio equipment, music consists of nothing but a strings | ||
+ | of zeros and ones. Instead, the entities that truly make up music are pitch, | ||
+ | sound, rhythm, chord progression, crescendo, and so on. And in particular, | ||
+ | music is not just a bag of these, since their intricate interaction is even | ||
+ | more important than these constituents themselves. The same is true for | ||
+ | film, where it isn’t even that clear what it is made up from, but it does | ||
+ | include such things as (easily replaceable) actors, decors, cameras, which all | ||
+ | are part of a soup stirred by a director. But again, in contemporary video | ||
+ | equipment, it is nothing but a string of zeros and ones.** | ||
+ | |||
+ | **In fact, everything that goes on in pretty much all modern devices is | ||
+ | nothing but zeros and ones.** While it was Turing’s brilliance to realise that | ||
+ | this could in fact be done, and provided a foundation for the theory of | ||
+ | computability [38], this is in fact the only place where the zeros and ones are | ||
+ | truly meaningful, in the form of a Turing machine. Elsewhere, **it is nothing | ||
+ | but a (universal) representation, with no conceptual qualities regarding the subject matter.** | ||
+ | <cite>https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07618</cite> | ||
+ | </blockquote> | ||
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</blockquote> | </blockquote> | ||
- | Great books on the topic are: | + | ---- |
+ | |||
+ | **Recommended Articles:** | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | * A great explanation of emergence for laymen is [[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/10/29/quasiparticles-and-the-miracle-of-emergence/|Quasiparticles and the Miracle of Emergence]] by Brian Skinner | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | **Recommended Books** | ||
* "A different Universe" by Robert Laughlin | * "A different Universe" by Robert Laughlin |