studiot

I am not convinced. It must depend upon your use of the word emerge or emergent or emergence. For instance I would say that the general English expression The Moon emerged from behind the clouds is too wide and open (and just plain wrong) for the Scientific use. But lots of (scientific) folks use it in different ways. As far as matrix multiplication goes we know the commutator is sometimes zero sometimes not zero thus there are circumstances when there is an emergent consequence and sometimes not, depending upon circumstances To me it is the reliable emergence of whatever phenomenon under the some repeated circumstances but equally relaible failure to emerge under different repeated circumstances. I look forward to your definition to match future use against.

Rewarding job, though I don't know where you are it can be interesting to swop regulatory stories. Did you know that in the UK it is illegal for the consumer to connect the neutral to earth, whereas in the US it is illegal not to ?

I thought I had added in the example using space and time. In quantum mechanics by themselves, neither space nor time are emergent as they are a necessary part of the fundamental principles and equations. However the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is emergent from this Mathematics as the matrices involved ar non commutative. ie A.B is not equal to B.A where A and B are the relevant matrices, involving space / time. So (B.A. - A.B) is non zero and gives us the Uncertainty Principle

Thank you for your input including this, where you seem to be the only one that fully understands English. +1 Great or greater means enlarged (in some way) as in Great Britain, Greater London, Greater Manchester and so on. I suppose on the questionable principle that 'bigger is better' it has also come to mean better or wonderful (in the sense of very good). The scope and reach of Science has far outstripped that of Philosophy in modern times.

This would not be a short circuit however. It is an example of an overload condition, nor is the intentional use of the heating effect of cuurent in electric heaters, light bulbs etc. Peter has asked specificially about the relationship of short circuits, which are unintentional connections, to heating. There are other undesirable effects of short circuits (without necessarily causing large currents) but which can cause danger to life. This happens when an exposed conductor becomes unintentionally connected to a live supply and then a danger if touched. Metal cases, knobs suffer from this.

So now we are on the same page. There is a great deal of modelling in its widest sense going on in Science. There is also a great deal of data collection and collation. Not all of this is mathematical, or has any significant mathematical content. For instance. A scientific investigation migh look into what materials (chemicals) were used by a certain painter in his studios in the late 1500s. More could be developed from this data, including some (slightly) mathematical comparisons to test an offered painting as being by this artist, or to suggest cause of death or to develop a model of available materials at that time. Edit Two further examples. It is common parlance to say "The Moon emerged from (behind) the clouds". Scientific use is more restriced than this common English use and would not say this was an emergent phenomenon. However some quantum phenomena (eg Heisenberg's Uncertainty Princilple) are emergent from the Mathematics of matrix algebra where A.B is sometimes not equal to B.A Where A and B are matrices representing certain quantities.

Arguing , discussing whatever. You are putting your points in the proper way. 🙂 It is not, however, my understanding of the meaning of the term, 'emergent'. We do not consider heat, resulting from friction to be 'emergent', although it is the result of that friction. There has to be something special about the circumstances that allows or brings about 'emergence', so that it would not happen in different circumstances. Consider a pile of bricks for instance. If you stack them in any old random way, the pile will soon fall over. But if you configure them in one particular way you will achieve a very strong and stable self supporting structure called an arch. This property sensitive to configuration which is the controlling circumstance in this case. Configuration is not more, or less 'fundamental' than the bricks themselves or their other properties.

You asked for some I gave you some. I did not say there were not plenty more. Engineering Science is largely about the synthesis of that which does not (yet) exist.

Yes today we use these terms differently from what was done in the past. Which is what I said.

You got there before me. At Cambridge, Natural Philosophy was changed to Natural Sciences in 1851.

can be trained = external intervention.

Of course. Our Earth has an mean temperature of around 15oC (NASA), though the actual value does not matter. There does not exist an Earth with an average temperature of say 18oC. Yet Climate Science is studying such a hypothetical Earth. IOW is is studying that which is not. Sometimes the model we have from analysis such as a simple formula for kinetic energy or momentum can be used to model that which is not for instance the kinetic energy of a 750kg car travelling at 1,000mph. As an aside most questions at the end of chapters in Science textbooks model that which is not.

I understand that you and perhaps iNow limit your definition of Science to analysis and only to analysis of what is. I happen to hold a wider definition. One of the biggest efforts in Science ATM is the study of what is not.

Rome split from Ancient Greece and became a greater nation. America split from England and became a greater nation. What we now call Physics and Chemistry used to be called Natural Philosophy. So Where, When, How and Why did Science split from Philosophy and do we think they are now the greater discipline ?

'But' suggests you disagree with some part of my thoughts. The rest suggests you think there is little else but models involved in Science and perception but 'models'. I think there is far more to both (as I said) so I am starting another thread to discuss this.

A good question. Yes I think the substrate has most to do with it. But also the nature of that substrate. Don't get hung up on pentiums. They were just a quick example off the top of my head. However the analogy can be pursued further. Unlike cells, transistors have never been known to club together to form more complex circuits. They were placed together by human design, first as dual transistors, then as simple 'integrated circuits', then as LSI (large scale integration) and then as VLSI (very large scale integration). But in no case did the simple placement and connection give rise to anything other than the deterministic output of the designers and then only only their control with the supply of external equipments. There was a process of gradual deliberate but controlled growth in size and complexity. There was no sudden awakening Skynet style. The internet as we know it includes all the satellites, microwaves, fibre optic and copper connections laid over two centuries as well as the support switching stations and so on. Yet the complexity and number of connections is still many orders of magnitude less than that of the human brain and as I already pointed out, possesses no evolutionary capability.

There is a lot more to both Science and perception that this. It really is. +1 for this and for demonstrating proper respectful discussion. But I think it deserves its own thread away from heated discussion and potential heckling.

Can you tell me what you understand 'emergent' to mean ? Perhaps with some example(s) of actual 'emergence'.

Will 'the internet' (as we know it) still exist in the furture or will it have been replaced ? I am assuming the question refers to the internet as we know it. So I am suggesting that the system as we know it is not capable of such a feat.

Well done, I agree. +1 One way to think of this is to look at the units of each quantity. Entropy has units of energy transfer divided by temperature. Disorder and randomness are pure numbers ie they do not have units. Uncertainty has no particular units of its own and always needs a complement ie ( 'something has to be uncertain' ) and takes on the units of the complement. The victim was murdered between 10 pm and midnight give an uncertainty of 2 hours for instance. So you are left with energy decay which has units of energy transfer divided by time, which would be the nearest.

The maximum current between any two points in any circuit flows along the path of least resistance. When an unintentional low resistance path occurs between two conductors (perhaps one being earth) a very large unintentional current can flow. This develops a large amount of heat as the heating effect is proprotional to the square of current. So (metal) conductors can get very hot and if theya re touching something flammable they can start a fire. Does this help, ask for more if you did not follow any part of it ?

Wet biology has shown the ability to evolve from single cell organisms that are definitely not 'self aware' to creatures like ourselves that (we liike to think) are. I know of no such ability of a bunch of circuit boards, or any other electro- mechanical construct. Changes have all come from human intervantion. Pentium 3s did not evolve into pentium 4s by themselves.

Thank you for telling me some stuff I didn't know. +1 This thread has some use after all. Very interesting example illustration in the cells of the body. I would suggest a correction to the use of the word 'finite' . The body has a finite though large number of cells. Even with the ability to add new ones it will never generate an infinite number. Though finite the number of cells is not specific and continually changing as cells rub off etc and new one are, as you say, generated. So I would suggest not specific or specified instead of not finite.

Out of interest I just had a quick flick through my old textbook Computability and Logic Boolos and Jeffrey Cambridge University Press. I immediately note that most of the undecidable (the correct term is not indeterminate) problems refer to synthesis, not analysis. For example in Ramsey's Theorem there is a perfectly good analytical proof of the existence of certain numbers. But when asked the synthetical question of finding a specific one for specific cases we struggle as there are only a few known sets for very small numbers. Then we have the dyadic undecidability theorem There is no effective method for deciding the validity of an arbitrary pure dyadic sentence. The book abounds with counterexamples to your claim, most of which I had forgotten because this is not really my chosen area of mathematics.

I suspect that you know full well what I am talking about. It is the same part of rational thinking that I use to reply to Physicists who try to insist that Physics must be mathematical. You are only addressing the area of analysis. There is a whole area of synthesis you are ignoring.