Emergence

Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history.

thumb|17th-century representation of consciousness by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

thumb|Adriaen van Ostade, "Analysis" (1666)

Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. The aphorism "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", is often given as a summary of this proposal. The concept of holism can inform the methodology for a broad array of scientific fields and lifestyle practices. When applications of holism are said to reveal properties of a whole system beyond those of its parts, these qualities are referred to as emergent properties of that system. Holism in all contexts is often placed in opposition to reductionism, a d

interdisciplinary field about the study of systems

aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society

thumb|René Descartes, in De homine (1662), claimed that non-human animals could be explained reductively as automata; meaning essentially as more mechanically complex versions of this [[Digesting Duck.]]

thumb|The formation of complex symmetrical and fractal patterns in [[snowflakes exemplifies emergence in a physical system.]] thumb|A termite "cathedral" mound produced by a termites|termite colony offers a classic example of emergence in nature.

hierarchy of complex biological structures and systems that define life using a reductionistic approach

thumb|A mound built by Nasutitermes triodiae|cathedral termites thumb|A coral colony

thumb|A 'second wave' connectionist (ANN) model with a hidden layer Connectionism is an approach to the study of human mental processes and cognition that utilizes mathematical models known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks.

interdisciplinary field

theory in modern physics that describes gravity as an entropic force

term describing the central role chemistry plays in the relationships between scientific disciplines

Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism.

OpenCog is a project that aims to build an open source artificial intelligence framework. OpenCog Prime is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system.

book by Friedrich von Hayek

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to

Sciences other than fundamental physics

hierarchical organization of multiple governments

concept of modern physics theories that they should, under some circumstances, approximate the predictions of classical physics

hypothesis that, in the course of evolution, some entirely new properties, such as mind and consciousness, appear at certain critical points

model in which space-time curvature and its dynamics emerge as a mean field approximation of underlying microscopic degrees of freedom

branch of epidemiology

social theory

thumb|250px|right|Biocomplexity spiral Biocomplexity is the study of complex structures and behaviors that arise from nonlinear interactions of active biological agents, which may range in scale from molecules to cells to organisms. Almost every biological system exhibits complexity - emergent properties where the ensemble possesses capabilities that its individual agents lack. Classical examples of biocomplexity include the behavior of molecular motors during DNA transcription, genetic and metabolic networks within cells, the interacting filaments of the cytoskeleton, which allow the cell to