Much like life, consciousness often eludes definition or even description. We have a tendency to create ambiguous definitions for consciousness that deify the category of whoever is doing the defining (ourselves) while at the same time locking down certain aspects of consciousness that lead us away from knowing anything useful about it. Learning from our […]
Tag: emergence
Entropism: Defining Life
Life is a concept with which we are all intuitively familiar but is difficult to pin down with a concrete definition. Let’s start with a definition up front and go from there. An Entropist definition of life is simple: A locally anti-entropic process that maintains or increases local order at the cost of an increase […]
Entropism: Defining Emergence
Defining emergence takes a moment to set up for the uninitiated, so let’s try this in two phases. First, a simple, formal definition: The appearance of novel properties, patterns or behaviors at a “higher level” of organization that are not obviously present and cannot be easily predicted from the properties of the individual parts of […]