Organizing relations and emergence

• Authors: Stephen Jones
• Venue: ICAL 2003 Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Artificial life
• Year: 2002

Emergence is largely used as an explanation: such and such an object -- ranging from atoms through multicellular organisms to consciousness -- is an emergent property of some ensemble of parts. But this leaves an inadequate level of understanding, making the term a representation of something almost mystical. For emergence to be useful an understanding of the mechanisms of emergence must be brought out. This paper proposes a system of orders of organizing relations that are the means by which complex objects "emerge" from the interactions of their constituent parts.