emergence
Table of Contents
1. Emergence systems are…
Existent in many forms and at many levels. They are the fundamental building block of everything that exists, I argue, and nothing in this theory of everything will contradict this statement!
1.1. What is Emergence?
Emergence can be broadly defined as a system whose components organize themselves into a larger structure via simpler rules that each component follows.
Entire systems such as mathematics can be explained in terms of a couple axioms, where all the theorems arising from those axioms are emergent from those axioms. At least, that is a relatively simple explanation, and does not capture the full beauty of emergent systems. Therefore, I call upon an example from daily life:
1.1.1. Societies
At every scale, societies exhibit properties of emergence. For example, families and small communities comprise small areas of town, which comprise cities, which then make up provinces, and finally countries. In this particular example, we self organize into self-similar recursive hierarchies. This is for a good reason; in order for societies to scale, there needs to be abstractions. Each level in the hierarchy conveys more but less exact information, until we get to the national level which deals the most with aggregates.
1.1.2. Markets Emergent
In order to define the emergence of markets, we must first define the emergence of property rights. Property rights emerge when a society scales and is able to extract value from more and more natural resources. Property rights come from two different things: a need for certain people to use certain resources more or less often (specialization, division of labor causes this, as well as belongings), and a need for some incentive for people to maintain resources. When property is traded, a market emerges, as well as a currency; a currency is simply the most fungible and liquid asset that has a market. When goods are traded, both parties gain value from the trade. In this way, the distribution of resources becomes more optimal the more consensual trade happens. Capital, or resources used to produce other resources, are sold to people that believe they have the skills to utilize the capital, from people that believe that the capital is suboptimally allocated to them. Companies are simply contractually enforced percentage ownerships of capital.
Prices are adjusted in markets according to supply and demand; they are a signal of the relative scarcity of the good in question. High prices communicate to consumers that they should look for alternatives due to the scarcity of the good, and low prices communicate to consumers that the resource is currently widely available.
This whole study of markets has lead to the study of human behavior known as economics. Although this naive view of markets gives a good intuition about human behavior, it is an incomplete story. Economists have made more particular statements about the state of economic affairs with the tools of mathematics, under neokeynesian theory.
1.1.3. Languages Emergent
2. Key Takeaway
Emergence is the bootstrapping problem that attempts to solve the problem of induction.