Flickering Emergences: The Question of Locality in Information-Theoretic Approaches to Emergence.

ABSTRACT: "Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted effort to formally define emergence using the mathematical framework of information theory, which proposes that emergence can be understood in terms of how the states of wholes and parts collectively disclose information about the system's collective future. In this paper, we show how a common, foundational component of information-theoretic approaches to emergence implies an inherent instability to emergent properties, which we call flickering emergence. A system may, on average, display a meaningful emergent property (be it an informative coarse

SUBMITTER: Varley TF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9858457 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature