Discovered, Not Designed (by Sean McClure) - Part 1
Traditional engineering has been about deterministic inputs and deterministic outputs. The causal chain has been largely reliable. We call this “design” in a slightly broader terminology:
The organic is usually more complex than the inorganic, and the way they come to be is also a different process:
Emergence doesn’t look anything like traditional engineering:
Traditional engineering depends on “complexity avoidance” to make things reliable; with this we try to achieve control and precision. But “reverse engineering” emergent objects to a deterministic plan is not possible.
The result of emergence looks totally different from its “component pieces”:
Complex systems are needed to solve hard problems; a hard problem is not necessarily difficult, but the approach to solve it must be different:
