Toward a Formalization of Emergence
- 1 January 2003
- journal article
- Published by MIT Press in Artificial Life
- Vol. 9 (1) , 41-65
- https://doi.org/10.1162/106454603321489518
Abstract
Emergence is a concept widely used in the sciences, the arts, and engineering. Some effort has been made to formalize it, but it is used in various contexts with different meanings, and a unified theory of emergence is still distant. The ultimate goal of a theory of emergence should include using emergence to model, design, or predict the behavior of multiagent systems. The author proposes a formal definition of a basic type of emergence using a language-theoretic and grammar systems approach. It is shown which types of phenomena can be modeled in this sense and what the consequences are for other more complex phenomena.Keywords
This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit:
- Ansatz for Dynamical HierarchiesArtificial Life, 2001
- Defense of the Ansatz for Dynamical HierarchiesArtificial Life, 2001
- Is It the Right Ansatz?Artificial Life, 2001
- Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of EmergenceArtificial Life, 1999
- Eco-Grammar Systems: A Grammatical Framework for Studying Lifelike InteractionsArtificial Life, 1997
- COOPERATING ARRAY GRAMMAR SYSTEMSInternational Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, 1995
- Micro-Determinism and Concepts of EmergencePhilosophy of Science, 1984
- Three models for the description of languageIEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1956
- The Theory of EmergencePhilosophy of Science, 1939
- EmergenceThe Journal of Philosophy, 1926