Abstract
Philosophy of mind has investigated the emergent behavior of complex systems for more than a century. However, terms such as “weak” or “strong” emergence are hardly applicable to intelligent technical systems. Organic Computing has the goal to utilize concepts such as emergence and self-organization to build complex technical systems. At first glance this seems to be a contradiction, but: These systems must be reliable and trustworthy! In order to measure, to control, and even to design emergence, a new notion or definition of emergence is needed. This article first describes the definition of emergence as used in philosophy of mind because this definition is often misunderstood or misinterpreted. Then, some very recent approaches for definitions of emergence in more or less technical contexts are discussed from the viewpoint of Organic Computing. The article concludes with some new thoughts that may help to come to a unifying notion of emergence in intelligent technical systems.
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Müller-Schloer, C., Sick, B. (2006). Emergence in Organic Computing Systems: Discussion of a Controversial Concept. In: Yang, L.T., Jin, H., Ma, J., Ungerer, T. (eds) Autonomic and Trusted Computing. ATC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4158. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11839569_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11839569_1
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