The last of the topics I’ve devoted time to these last months is the subject of emergence; sometimes referred to as emergent behavior/phenomena/systems. It’s an area of inquiry that crosses boundaries from philosophy and theology all the way to physics, chemistry, and biology.
This additional area of interest is the natural continuation of my interests in systems of distributed intelligence and cellular automata as computational systems. That is, both of these areas of inquiry take you right to the heart of emergent behaviors. To jumpstart my research in this area, I’ve started reading the book “Re-emergence of Emergence, The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion”, edited by Philip Clayton and Paul Davies.
So far this book seems to be a very good introduction to the depth, breadth and history of the cross discipline discussions on what constitutes emergence.
To go along with this added dimension to my interests, I’ve now added the keywords emergent-systems underneath the blog header.
