There are fields that demand precise language, philosophy possibly most of all. These fields tend to adopt words and assign technical sorts of meanings. Therefore, I've put together a small glossary of philosophical words used in these pages.
Emergent behavior is behavior that something does that is not a scaling up or adaptation of anything its parts do. Salt is often used as an example. Sodium is a soft metal that bursts into flame on exposure to water or air, while chlorine is an asphyxiating and dangerous greenish gas. Put them together chemically, and you get table salt.
Emergence will crop up, sometime or other, in any discussion of the human mind. If you assume that people have the ability to think, and that people are made up of things that can't think, then thinking must be emergent behavior. Most philosophers nowadays do think that people are physical objects that think, and are made up of molecules and atoms that do not think.
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All contents of these pages Copyright 1997 by David H. Thornley.