Solid and nicely written-up post! As commenters recognized when responding to Eliezer’s post back in the day, calling a phenomenon “emergent” has a real and valuable semantic meaning:
In line with previous comments, I’d always understood the idea of emergence to have real content: “systems whose high-level behaviors arise or ‘emerge’ from the interaction of many low-level elements” as opposed to being centrally determined or consciously designed (basically “bottom-up” rather than “top-down”). It’s not a specific explanation in and of itself, but it does characterise a class of explanations, and, more importantly, excludes certain other types of explanation.
I would think that something like “life/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon” means “you don’t need intelligent design to explain life/intelligence”.
At the time, Eliezer was both on an anti-”semantic stopsign” crusade and was facing many comments from respected users who were somewhat childing him for being too hindsight-pilled and dismissive of the epistemological conundrums previous generations had faced. So he wanted to select an example relevant to our modern day which fulfilled the former purpose and responded to the latter criticisms. However, he simply overreached in his choice. See also the following exchange:
HI: Aren’t superconductivity and ferromagnetism perfect examples of emergent phenomena?
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Yes. So are non-superconductivity and non-ferromagnetism. That’s the problem.
Perplexed: Uh. No. Non-superconductivity is not usually considered as an example of emergence. Because the non-superconductive system is composed of smaller subsystems which are themselves non-superconductive. Same goes for non-ferromagnetism. Not “emergent” because nothing new is emerging from the collective that was not already present in the components.
Implying that all uses of a term are equally and horribly wrong is a bit of a stop sign itself.
Yudkowsky’s take on emergence: he argues that merely saying something is emergent isn’t explaining it...but the same would be true if you merely said something is reductionistic. Nonetheless, he believes that there are problems with emergentism that reductionism doesn’t have
Thanks, and yes, I did scan over the comments when I first read the article, and noted many good points, but when I decided to write I wanted to focus on this particular angle and not get lost in an encyclopaedia defences. I’m very much in the same camp as the first comment you quote.
I appreciate your take on Yudkowsky’s overreach, and the historical context. That helps me understand his position better.
The semantic stop-sign is interesting, I do appreciate Yudkowsky coming up with these handy handles for ideas that often crop up in discussion. Your two examples make me think of the fallacy of composition, in that emergence seems to be a key feature of reality that, at least in part, makes the fallacy of composition a fallacy.
Solid and nicely written-up post! As commenters recognized when responding to Eliezer’s post back in the day, calling a phenomenon “emergent” has a real and valuable semantic meaning:
At the time, Eliezer was both on an anti-”semantic stopsign” crusade and was facing many comments from respected users who were somewhat childing him for being too hindsight-pilled and dismissive of the epistemological conundrums previous generations had faced. So he wanted to select an example relevant to our modern day which fulfilled the former purpose and responded to the latter criticisms. However, he simply overreached in his choice. See also the following exchange:
Implying that all uses of a term are equally and horribly wrong is a bit of a stop sign itself.
Yudkowsky’s take on emergence: he argues that merely saying something is emergent isn’t explaining it...but the same would be true if you merely said something is reductionistic. Nonetheless, he believes that there are problems with emergentism that reductionism doesn’t have
Thanks, and yes, I did scan over the comments when I first read the article, and noted many good points, but when I decided to write I wanted to focus on this particular angle and not get lost in an encyclopaedia defences. I’m very much in the same camp as the first comment you quote.
I appreciate your take on Yudkowsky’s overreach, and the historical context. That helps me understand his position better.
The semantic stop-sign is interesting, I do appreciate Yudkowsky coming up with these handy handles for ideas that often crop up in discussion. Your two examples make me think of the fallacy of composition, in that emergence seems to be a key feature of reality that, at least in part, makes the fallacy of composition a fallacy.