User:SeanMGonzalez/sandbox

=Summary= Emergism is a philosophy developed by Sean Moore Gonzalez that holds these basic principles:
 * 1) Observable properties emerge through sharing information
 * 2) all things emerge from sharing of information
 * 3) true objectivity is to share no information
 * 4) no two things can share and receive exactly the same information (uniqueness).

=Uniqueness= Uniqueness derives from the thought experiments in designing a world of homogenous objects and that world's ability to evolve into our real world.

In the trivial case, all things are equal (homogenous) everything already has the same information as everything else, so nothing ever changes and our world can never evolve. Introducing an axiomatic need to send and receive information (signals), let's play a thought experiment: think of a uniform medium in which information can be shared between fully equal objects within that medium. Let's assign to those objects three axiomatic behaviours:
 * 1) a need to send signals
 * 2) the ability to receive signals
 * 3) that signals take time to affect objects and change objects

Now try to imagine a scenario in which all objects receive the same signals, at the same rates, from everywhere else in our experimental universe. We can imagine objects' geometry as a circle or sphere, or other perfect geometrical shape, and if all objects begin by simultaneously sending the same signals at the same rate, then everything continues to be equal. As soon as there is any deviation from this tranquil state, objects become unique as they receive signals (information) at different rates than other things, and thereby change at different rates, becoming unique.

=Free Will= Traditionally "Free Will" is defined as "The ability to choose between different possible courses of action". In Emergism, "Free Will" is a property we assign to cover our inability to develop models that fully characterize observable behaviours. In other words, "Free Will" is a way of saying, "Despite our best efforts, some things exhibit behaviours no one could have predicted, therefore it must have Free Will."

Vs Determinism
This begs a discussion about determinism, but there is a key difference between Emergism and Determinism: In Emergism everything is unique and nothing can be fully reduced to simple laws. It is precisely because the observable behaviours of things can never be fully predicted by a more simple set of laws that the most accurate model of any given thing is that thing itself. Further, because objectivity means no information is exchanged, we can not inspect ourselves or anything else without exchanging information and changing what we're investigating. While we can never fully understand a thing, develop a model and predict all its behaviours, we are still unique and how we react to the world will always be unique, and so the term "Free Will" still has meaning in Emergism as it refers to all our uniqueness.