Talk:Symposium on Complex Systems Engineering/Abbott notes

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Hi Russ, A couple of belated comments on your paper. 1. You might find Mark Bedau's paper `Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence' relevant to your interests. It was published in a pretty obscure jouranl but you can download a copy from his website www.reed.edu/~mab/ under Publications. 2. The point you make about a property being describable independently of its implementation is related to the idea of universality in dynamical systems. There are many physics papers on this, of course. One philosophical treatment is in Robert Batterman's book The Devil in the Details. 3. More specifically, regarding your claim on pp.7-8, why do you want to formulate the criterion for novelty in terms of a change in mass when the issue seems to be more directly about energy (and relativistic interconversions seem not to be particularly relevant for many of the examples)? Paul Humphreys