You use quarks as your one example of something that is not emergent. However, how can you prove that quarks are not a system of smaller interacting particles? String theory seems to propose that quarks can be broken into smaller pieces which are strings. Maybe its the interaction of the strings that cause the overall action of the quark? As for emergence, the way I understand Emergence based on this post and the comments is that emergence is a result of the parts of a system interacting with one another, possibly limited to those event that were not predicted. Of course, just because someone uses this inappropriately, does not mean that its wrong. In fact, insisting that a word is terrible just because it was used wrong by some people is obviously an ad hominem argument. Just because some people use it wrongly does not mean it can’t be used correctly, and replacing it with magical is simply non sequitor. I could replace every “explanation” in your article with “Magic”, and it would make about as much sense. Resorting to such fallacious arguments is not the way to prove your point.
You use quarks as your one example of something that is not emergent. However, how can you prove that quarks are not a system of smaller interacting particles?
This misses the point. ‘Quarks’ were a stand-in for whatever particle you take to be fundamental; if there’s something smaller than quarks, that does not defeat the notion that it is unhelpful to describe the action of the stock market in terms of its non-quarkness.
As for emergence, the way I understand Emergence based on this post and the comments is that emergence is a result of the parts of a system interacting with one another, possibly limited to those event that were not predicted.
In what way is this a useful concept? In particular, having not been predicted is a feature of the predictor, not so much of the event, and so attaching the adjective to the event invites thinking wrongly that ‘emergence’ is fundamental to the event.
insisting that a word is terrible just because it was used wrong by some people is obviously an ad hominem argument.
It is not an ad hominem argument. I know that because you club baby seals and you claimed it was an ad hominem argument; therefore, it is not an ad hominem argument. The previous sentence is an example of an ad-hominem argument. There are of course other varieties of ad hominem, but it isn’t any of those either.
Just because some people use it wrongly does not mean it can’t be used correctly, and replacing it with magical is simply non sequitor.
It is really not a non-sequitor. The point is that ‘emergent’ tells you about as much about the phenomenon as ‘mysterious’. It doesn’t communicate much more than “I don’t understand why this happened”—as you grant above.
Now that I have read more articles, I understand that most of my issues were due to taking the words with my definition and not hers. The result is that the article seems to be against those with different definitions of emergent, even though there is most likely more than one common definition of emergent, and no definition was previously selected as the correct one.
You use quarks as your one example of something that is not emergent. However, how can you prove that quarks are not a system of smaller interacting particles? String theory seems to propose that quarks can be broken into smaller pieces which are strings. Maybe its the interaction of the strings that cause the overall action of the quark?
As for emergence, the way I understand Emergence based on this post and the comments is that emergence is a result of the parts of a system interacting with one another, possibly limited to those event that were not predicted. Of course, just because someone uses this inappropriately, does not mean that its wrong. In fact, insisting that a word is terrible just because it was used wrong by some people is obviously an ad hominem argument. Just because some people use it wrongly does not mean it can’t be used correctly, and replacing it with magical is simply non sequitor. I could replace every “explanation” in your article with “Magic”, and it would make about as much sense. Resorting to such fallacious arguments is not the way to prove your point.
This misses the point. ‘Quarks’ were a stand-in for whatever particle you take to be fundamental; if there’s something smaller than quarks, that does not defeat the notion that it is unhelpful to describe the action of the stock market in terms of its non-quarkness.
In what way is this a useful concept? In particular, having not been predicted is a feature of the predictor, not so much of the event, and so attaching the adjective to the event invites thinking wrongly that ‘emergence’ is fundamental to the event.
It is not an ad hominem argument. I know that because you club baby seals and you claimed it was an ad hominem argument; therefore, it is not an ad hominem argument. The previous sentence is an example of an ad-hominem argument. There are of course other varieties of ad hominem, but it isn’t any of those either.
It is really not a non-sequitor. The point is that ‘emergent’ tells you about as much about the phenomenon as ‘mysterious’. It doesn’t communicate much more than “I don’t understand why this happened”—as you grant above.
Now that I have read more articles, I understand that most of my issues were due to taking the words with my definition and not hers. The result is that the article seems to be against those with different definitions of emergent, even though there is most likely more than one common definition of emergent, and no definition was previously selected as the correct one.
For reference, the above article was written by this guy.